The Sun
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Cooking badge offered a lesson for life

By CARL HEINTZE

The other day, for no good reason, I got to thinking about when I qualified for my Boy Scout merit badge in cooking.

I'm not sure what one has to do to qualify for a cooking merit badge these days, but back then, one had to cook over an open fire, no mean feat since the campfire varies considerably in heat. Anyway, I decided that as part of my qualification I would cook what was called a "hunter's stew."

It really wasn't a hunter's stew because I didn't have to go hunting for the ingredients, at least no further than the grocery store where I bought some stew meat, some potatoes, some onions and carrots. Fortunately for me, not far from my school was the examiner for the merit badge, Mr. Bickford, the town banker.

He lived near a creek in the middle of town on what I always thought of as a palatial estate. It may not have been palatial, but it was at least a couple acres with trees and an area where it was safe to build a fire.

So early one morning under Mr. Bickford's guidance I built a fire, made a tripod out of sticks and suspended my stew in an iron pot I had borrowed from my mother. There the stew simmered all day over a low fire, fed in part by me, zipping over to the Bickford house from school at recess and at noon, and, in part, by Mr. Bickford.

By the time school was out, the stew was done. I have to say it was one of the best stews I've ever tasted, even if I cooked it myself. The meat and vegetables had simmered so long that they had become tender and had blended their flavors. It even seemed to me to have a smoky taste from the fire, though that was probably my imagination.

I can still taste it after all these years.

But thinking about it made me ponder how little we simmer anything anymore. Stews either come frozen and get defrosted in the microwave, or they get made in the microwave very briefly after the meat has been browned on the stovetop. Slow cooking is a thing of the past.

Not only do we want everything instanteously cooked, we want to gobble it down. Eating is necessary, but it's not necessarily a pleasure.

Oh, I know the microwave can do it just as well, and I don't make hunter's stew any more, even on the stovetop in a Dutch oven, but I keep thinking I ought to, just as I think I ought to take more time with a lot of things I do--or don't do.

I ought to take time to sit on the porch (even though we really don't have front porches anymore). I ought to call those people I've been meaning to call and just haven't gotten around to. Indeed, I ought to go pay them a visit.

But people just don't drop in on one another anymore. Unannounced visitors are unwelcome visitors. They cut into the routines we've set for ourselves; we're afraid to upset the social apple cart. Life has become as jumbled as the jagged images in TV commercials. We're not out to savor the slowly simmered stew of life so much as we are to get one another's attention, just as the constant restless movement of the TV commercials wants your eye, not your heart.

It's no coincidence that there's a section in some newspapers called "Getting Ahead." Who would read it if it were titled "Getting Along"?

I could go on, but you get the idea. Somewhere around the middle of the 20th century, it seems to me, we Americans forgot how to live. We've gotten so interested in living well that we have forgotten how to live with grace. It's all very well to increase the Gross National Product every year and to make life ever more upscale, but not if we can't pause along the way to savor it.

Like my hunter's stew of old, flavor comes with slowness, not with speed. Racing through living our lives may produce quantity, but not much quality.

Stopping to smell the roses may bring on an allergy, but it also adds a pleasant spice to an otherwise hectic end of the century. So try cooking your daily stew more slowly. I'm trying to. It's worth the wait.

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This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, June 17, 1998.
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