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" Most people are hungry, therefore they eat. I am hungry, therefore I cook. Since my senior year in college, when I moved into an apartment with a bunch of friends, I have cooked almost every day of my life. Cooking is, to me, the perfect fusion of generosity and selfishness, indeed the resolution of generosity and selfishness, the answer to my torn nature. I don&amp;#039;t love to cook \u2014 I cook. It&amp;#039;s what I do, and by this time, it&amp;#039;s who I am. There is something, however, I have never done as a cook. I have never baked. I have cooked thousands of meals big and small, but I have never cooked a cookie. I have never roasted a cake, or a pie. I have absented myself from the pleasures of baking bread, perhaps because baking bread is always presented in terms of pleasure \u2014 because people who bake bread never fail to get all poetic about its satisfactions (&amp;quot;the smell of baking bread in the morning&amp;quot;), and I don&amp;#039;t want that kind of pressure. You don&amp;#039;t need a cookbook to cook, but you can&amp;#039;t bake without one, so there&amp;#039;s something sort of sex-manual-y about baking, a doggedness to the rapture that is unhappily reminiscent of the seventies and trying to have sex to a Joni Mitchell album. I mean, sometimes you just want to do it, but you can&amp;#039;t just bake a cake. You have to measure. You have to take as much time as it takes, with no shortcuts. You don&amp;#039;t have to love cooking to cook, but you have to do more than love baking to bake. You have to bake out of love. Which is why I found myself recently in the pastry kitchen of a New York restaurant that turns out something like four hundred desserts \u2014 four hundred expressions of love and pureheartedness \u2014 a day. You see, my daughter loves cookies. I love my daughter. And yet I have never so much as sliced through a sludgy and eternal bar of premade dough so that she could have the experience of eating chocolate-chip cookies &amp;quot;fresh out of the oven.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;m fine with Chips Ahoy!, as long as they come with a glass of milk. Still, I knew that eating homemade chocolate-chip cookies would make my daughter happy, and so I visited the eminent pastry chef at Gramercy Tavern to find out not only how to make them but also why I was averse to making them. I got my answer right away. &amp;quot;There are two kinds of people,&amp;quot; Nancy Olson told me as soon as I showed up in her kitchen. &amp;quot;There are cooks, and there are bakers.&amp;quot; Upstairs, there were cooks barking orders around rings of open flame that might have caused Vulcan to break a sweat; downstairs in Nancy&amp;#039;s kitchen, there was just cozy warmth and flour-perfumed bakers working in silent accord. The cooks, of course, had something in common. So did the bakers. Indeed, when Nancy told me that everybody was either a cook or a baker, she might as well have said that everybody was either a man or a woman. You can cook like a man. But you can&amp;#039;t bake like a man, because men don&amp;#039;t bake. Nancy said that because baking is easy, it&amp;#039;s hard; that because anyone can, a lot of men can&amp;#039;t, or won&amp;#039;t. &amp;quot;Theoretically anybody with a recipe should be able to do it. All you have to do is follow instructions. But if you don&amp;#039;t, it doesn&amp;#039;t work. So you have to enjoy following instructions. You have to enjoy precision.&amp;quot; If cooking represents control, baking represents surrender. I wasn&amp;#039;t going to learn how to make chocolate-chip cookies from Nancy; I was going to learn how to follow the recipe to make chocolate-chip cookies. In fact, no one knows how to make chocolate-chip cookies, not even Nancy, who found a big binder with her recipe for Gramercy Tavern Chocolate-Chip Cookies, opened it on one of her immaculate stainless-steel prep areas, and studied it like a monk with an illuminated manuscript. And that was the main difference between cooking and baking, it seemed to me: Humans have always known how to cook and have been able to pass their knowledge along, but nobody really knows how to bake, and so baking didn&amp;#039;t exist until knowledge could be codified and written down \u2014 it didn&amp;#039;t exist until the dawn of civilization. And that&amp;#039;s what made me wary of it. I never want to feel particularly civilized when I cook, any more than I want to feel civilized when I write; indeed, refinement is the enemy of both.  And yet I baked with Nancy Olson. And I learned a few things about baking: Baking soda is what flattens cookies out, and so Nancy, who likes cookies to have &amp;quot;that nice domed shape,&amp;quot; goes easy on it. Egg yolks are what give cookies that &amp;quot;fatty goodness, that rich gooeyness inside,&amp;quot; and so she adds extra. And when breaking a lot of eggs, even professional bakers get bits of eggshell in the mixing bowl. But here&amp;#039;s what they do to get them out: &amp;quot;Dip the large shell in the bowl. For some reason eggshells attract eggshells, and you can scoop them right out.&amp;quot; But I couldn&amp;#039;t actually do anything with my newfound knowledge when I got home until Nancy sent me the recipe. I was something I haven&amp;#039;t been in a kitchen in a long time \u2014 freaking helpless \u2014 and my helplessness continued even when Nancy started sending me encouraging e-mails and asking if I was having fun yet. Because I wasn&amp;#039;t having fun. I was worried that I was making mistakes, and when my daughter pitched in, I started worrying that she was making mistakes. She&amp;#039;s eight and makes eggs most every morning according to her own whims, dressing them with Japanese rice seasoning and soy sauce. But now when she asked, &amp;quot;Hey, Dad, what would happen if I squeezed some lemon juice in the batter?&amp;quot; I heard myself uttering the soul-crushing reply: &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;d ruin it.&amp;quot; The cookies were what Nancy wanted them to be, dome-shaped, crispy on the outside, moist on the inside, dense without being cakey, and revelatory of new textures with each bite. My daughter and I had succeeded in making the best chocolate-chip cookies either of us had ever eaten, and I think what we were supposed to feel \u2014 the feeling that bakers are entitled to feel \u2014 was pride. But I hadn&amp;#039;t cooked the cookies like a baker or baked the cookies like a cook; no, I had made the cookies like a father, and so what I felt were a father&amp;#039;s emotions, sadness and relief, because I realized that I would never make them again. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/food/how-to/a10800/baking-for-men-0911/>