KOREAN COOKERY
I find many similarities between cooking and music making. I enjoy cooking during my free time and feel especially happy to make food for people I love. Good ingredients are the essential basics for a good chef, just like we pianists need a well-tuned and sensitive piano through which we can express ourselves.
The dish I’m making in the photo is called ‘Bibimbap’, probably the most famous Korean dish. For an authentic Bibimbap, you have to prepare the ingredients separately, focusing on each ingredient’s own taste. It’s quite similar to practising a Bach fugue – you have to practise each voice patiently and accurately, so that they don’t lose their own individuality, but at the end, they can harmonise to celebrate the unique character of the fugue. Likewise, in both music and cookery, timing and proportion is something you learn just by doing it – when I ask my mother how much I need of certain herbs for her recipe, she often replies ‘just enough’. This doesn’t help! When tasting food, you taste the sincerity of the chef and the love he or she put into their creation.