I am not yet very good at this, but luckily pork chops are easier. The first time I remember making pork chops was with my mother. We used the bacon fat my father kept in the freezer and cooked them in a cast iron frying pan. For a long time, this is how I made pork chops. I didn’t always have bacon fat, but other things worked: olive oil especially, sometimes butter. But it wasn’t quite right; the olive oil was too greasy and the butter too rich.

More than anything pork’s flavor is straightforward. Chicken actually has a great deal of flavor, but it is easily swayed, easily convinced to pick up others. Steak is loud. That is why you can marinate it so many ways and it still screams above the crowd. But pork, pork is at its best when smoked and with maybe two other flavors. It is just too honest for the richness of butter and not light enough for olive oil.

The next recipe I learned was from my grandfather. He liked the chops thinner. He would score the sides with a pairing knife, and then season them with salt and pepper. He used one of his mother’s cast iron pans, but instead of any fat or grease he would use coarse salt, and at a much higher heat.

I really liked that recipe, but it was hard to get the chops I needed. The little grocery stores in Waltham and Sewanee just never had them in stock, and the apartments I lived in were so small they would fill up with smoke and set off the alarm. Often I could either let the alarm scream or let the chops burn. So I went back to the first recipe. I cooked them a little hotter so they weren’t as greasy and still scored the sides, but largely the process was the same.

Then my mother got my father a cast iron ridge grill for his birthday. If there is any evidence against progress it is this: despite all our metallurgy, our chemical non-sticks, our pressure cookers, and our ovens of various heat sources, the best way to cook a slab of meat since the invention of a hot slab of iron, is a hot slab of iron with raised ridges. The iron just captures more heat, and the ridges function a lot like my grandfather’s coarse salt; lifting the meat just enough that the flesh does not burn and does not adhere, but is still as close to the heat as possible.

And so it goes, bacon grease to oil, oil to salt, salt to iron ridges. The underlying recipe never really changed: pork, salt, pepper, heat, and it was always cast iron above the flame. After all, I am in many ways a traditionalist. I cook like my mother and like my grandfather and I trust that slab of iron to do for me what it did for my great grandmother. And yet, my traditions demand a better pork chop and so I cycle: grease to oil, oil to salt, salt to iron.

I know this because for a very long time I did not appreciate it. I have always been fond of gin. At first it tasted like summer to me, because growing up, my parents had gin and tonics when it was warm and they could sit out on the porch. But this is not the true essence of gin and instead I have learned to recognize in it the smell of pine trees. This is why the liquor taste should be so strong—like fresh air, that first sip of strong alcohol pulls us into the present and reminds us that we are in the here and now.

And at first I thought of martinis as only a large glass of booze. I would wave the vermouth over the glass as if the essence of it could somehow travel through the air in to the liquid. A few drops would fall, the texture of the drink would change, I would add bitters, and then would call it a martini. I am afraid to say that there were some negative results from this behavior; the average person is not well prepared to drink a actual glass of largely uncut gin, much less a parade of them.

Since then I have learned that mysticism does not create a good cocktail. I bought a jigger and accepted the fact that a bottle of vermouth does not last six months. Then learned about ratios. There isn’t just a big difference between a martini that is seven or eight parts gin with one part vermouth compared to a martini that is three or four parts gin with one part vermouth; there is a big difference between a martini that is six parts gin and a martini that is four parts gin.

In retrospect, this is not surprising. When I made pizza dough with too much yeast, it rose too fast. I once added too much oregano to my eggs and found them inedible. So why shouldn’t any change in the amount of vermouth have an effect on the resulting martini? There is, after all, a reason why a martini with more gin is dry. Like cold air and dust, gin makes you reach for water and leaves the skin feeling dry.

Vermouth is more moderating. It smells like wine and even dry vermouth has a sweetness to it. Combine the dryness of the gin and the sweetness of the vermouth and you create these undercurrents, like the air at the edge of a storm. They mix and tumble, falling in and out of each other as the bitters tumble between the fronts. Dry martinis, then, are like a high pressure system, lots of cool, dry air that bring good weather and light winds. In comparison a martini with lots of vermouth is a low pressure system. That circling warm, sweet air brings storms and strong winds. All of which speaks to the versatility of the drink. You want rain, you add vermouth. And if you want a cool fall day, I would use a ratio of eight to one.

Part of what is odd about this is that, in many cases, that electric stove is itself powered by natural gas. Electricity is not magic. It is not conjured out of the air but comes from movement. A magnet must move, turning electrons in the surrounding wires, creating a flow of energy, which is itself expressed as heat.

But to move a magnet, we often turn to the oldest of discoveries, fire. In the country I live in we largely burn coal and natural gas, the heat boils water, the water creates steam, the steam turns a turbine, and so a magnet turns and, after a great many steps, my stove heats. And so heat becomes movement, movement becomes electricity, electricity moves and then becomes movement, which finally becomes heat.

I thought about all of this as my chicken burned. To be fair, it was probably not the stove’s fault that my chicken turned out charred; electric stoves require far more patience than gas stoves that are, on the whole, quite eager to please. But it still seemed to me that this was a lot of intermediary steps to further remove me from a gas fire.

But then, even the gas stove has more steps than are immediately visible. I have cooked on an open flame. It is far more work than turning a knob: wood must be gathered, a fire started and then stoked to the point where it is hot enough to do its job, the coals then moved to get a desired heat. But to turn that knob the natural gas must be extracted from the earth: first the bedrock fractured, then those fractures held open as the gas is collected. The collected gas then transported to the gas company who then pipes it into our homes via gas lines. But even this can be further examined, given that burning gas is really burning ancient sunlight, which is itself a product of a massive fusion reactor that was, itself, born of gas.

None of this, of course, much mattered. The chicken was still charred. The knob was still too high and the stove top too hot. I had still been too impatient.