Spice

Sometimes cake is a pleasure to consume, light on your tongue and pleasing to the senses. But sometimes it’s dense, tough, and unappetising. 

And when you have a mouthful of bland, leaden food, there is nothing else to do except keep chewing until it’s gone – or spit it out.

Even if you’re the kind of person who tends to keep chewing out of determination, there comes a time when you’ve choked down so much flavourlessness, that the endlessly chalky texture finally gets stuck in your craw. You spit it out, maybe onto your plate or maybe into your hand, and you take a good look at it.  

It’s a solid mass, gluey and unyielding, quite unlike the cake you thought you were eating. And no matter how much of it you’ve swallowed, there always seems to be more of it left on your plate. 

You look around and see the people around you passing around a different set of plates, handing them back and forth to each other, piled with tasty tidbits. They are oblivious to the Sisyphean dish that you chew through mechanically each day.

   

So, now you have a choice. Do you pick up your fork and prepare yourself for another bite of ashen disappointment? Do you watch the colourful dance of plates being passed around you with your mouth watering without saying anything? Or do you sit there, staring at the half-chewed lump feeling hungry and forlorn? 

No, if you are in the least bit industrious, you make a plan. 

You think very carefully about what ingredients you have. You write them all down on a piece of paper. Then you start to think about how you might be able to combine them in tasty and appealing ways. Maybe you try a couple of recipes, and realise that you need some new skills in order to assemble something that will really satisfy people.

And so you start to work on a new dish, you test recipes in your limited spare time, you grow your ideas. Perhaps you invite a few trusted friends to have a taste, pass around a few small plates of your own. They comment that you’ve put something special, something unique into it. It’s a secret ingredient that no-one’s thought of using, something warm and spicy, like a hint of ginger.

‘It’s good,’ they say.  Their eyes light up and they start talking about their own recipe ideas. Before long, you realise that not only can you cook, and cook well, but that others too will be nourished by this dish you’re preparing.

Finally, after weeks of quiet toil, you emerge from the kitchen, holding your cake, ready to cut it up and pass it around. But the room has gone quiet. People are staring at you.

They are not smiling. They look at your cake suspiciously. ‘Did you make that?’

A few of them accept a taste. They eat it all and lick their fingers. But then they say, ‘Sure, anyone could cook a cake like that, if they had the same ingredients.’ The next sentence hangs in the air, unsaid: Where did you get those ingredients from, anyway?

‘I looked at what I already had,’ you say, ‘and I worked out how to make it by myself. It didn’t take long.’ But the mood of the room has turned against you. The cake is so good that no one can fathom that it was a simple thing made from simple supplies. Funnily, no one remembers that they had lots of cake but never passed you even a slice of it. Instead, they seem to resent your time in the kitchen, as if your quiet industry has somehow robbed their own future cakes in some fundamental way. Your magnificent cake has become evidence of this unstated transgression. 

You believed your cake to be worth sharing, so this reaction stings. You start to wonder, briefly, if they are right. Maybe you should leave the cake-baking and the recipe-writing to the official cooks and food stylists. Maybe you should stick with the cold, congealed mass on your original plate.

But then your gaze slides to the remaining slices of your cake. 

It is such good cake.

It is good because the making of it, as well as the tasting of it, nourishes you. It is good because the sharing of it has caused other people to experiment, to discover their own dishes and to share those recipes, nourishing many. And it is good because it demands no extra ingredients, except one.

It is the mystery ingredient, the element that only you thought to include. It’s the thing that imparts the cake’s sublime flavour.  And it costs nothing to use.

What is it? 

Imagination. 

And so you resolve to keep baking, no matter what.*

* Moral of the story?  Never, ever forget the cake.