Time is one of the most important factors in cooking. Cooking, marinating or resting requires a certain amount of time during the preparation of a dish, the chef must know how to adapt to the seasons and he needs time to think about the meal he offers his guests.
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Sung by Aznavour, time is an incompressible ingredient in our lives, and even less so in a coke. For the latter, it is an essential element, as Thierry Marx confirms:
“Time is one of the cornerstones of cooking. As early as the 13th century, the monk Dôgen (Zen master author of the booklet ‘Instructions for the Cook’ Editor’s Note) affirmed that cooking is the mastery of gesture (cutting), the mastery of fire (cooking) and the mastery of time (the time to make and seasonality). My job has never been able to ‘get away’ with this: Knowing how to do things, quickly and well, so that the customer is satisfied.”
Without a doubt in our society zapping and off roll the value of time is lost. And as our star chef reminds us, we must differentiate this value by what the Greeks called it in antiquity Chronos (the daily time after which we run), Kairos (time to make a decision) and Aion (the long time of maturation and reflection). “All of this requires verticality to be at the right time at the right time.”
The great weather specialist in France is the physicist Etienne Klein: “Time is the victim of a kind of blinding polysemy! The word sometimes means duration, sometimes change, sometimes speed, sometimes freedom, sometimes availability. When we say: ‘I don’t have time’in reality we do not have the availability or freedom to perform an action, time has nothing to do with it. If you ask me what time it is, I will be very embarrassed, but I can say that its basic characteristic is that it is a thing of a mysterious nature that we cannot travel within.”
According to chef Thierry Marx, it is appropriate to distinguish between different concepts in cooking: “The duration, of course, when we’re in the kitchen, but also seasonally in the long term.” For him, it is important to become eaters again, plan his cooking, respect the seasons, be less overconsumer and find another temporary.
