As the wife of a private chef and cooking teacher, a role I frequently play is that of hostess.

There are three questions Francisco’s clients never fail to ask me after he’s presented a plate and headed back to the kitchen:

1) Can I have another mojito (or fresh watermelon martini, or whatever the drink of the day is)?

2) Can I take him home with me?

3) Can I get the recipe?

The answers, in order, are “Definitely”; “No, but you can come back anytime”; and “Um… there is no recipe.”

True, we own a relatively impressive collection of cookbooks–D’Artagnan’s Glorious Game Cookbook, The Culinary Institute of America’s The Professional Chef, and any number of volumes dedicated to explicating the virtues of a specific ingredient– an entire cookbook on prawns and two dictionary sized tomes about desserts. There are cookbooks I’ve made by hand, cutting out recipes I’ve wanted to make for years–chocolate profiteroles, anyone?–but have somehow never gotten around to. There’s a year old collection of Saveur magazines. There are other food-focused books, too: M.F.K Fisher’s The Art of Eating, of course, and Toussant-Samant’s History of Food. There are even novels and memoirs in which food plays a role so vital it could rightly be considered a character: Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate (in English and Spanish), Isabel Allende’s Aphrodite, and, more recently, two books I’m reviewing, Kim Sunee’s Trail of Crumbs and Sarah Roahen’s Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table.

But the cookbooks are among the most pristine, unused books in our personal library. Francisco cooks mostly from feeling, whether it’s for family or for clients. Guided, first, by what’s fresh, and second, by what he wakes up and feels is the right meal for the day and for the people for whom he’ll be cooking, it’s about as close as we get in our household to a sublime spiritual experience in which some higher power seems to communicate its will and channel that through him. Sometimes, a day’s dinner will start the night before. Sitting at the computer, writing, I’ll hear the familiar sound of dry beans being poured into the clay pot, a sound not unlike light coins–dimes, maybe–accumulating in the slot machine tray when you hit pay dirt. The beans will soak in water overnight, accompanied by a bay leaf or two, and will bubble on low the next day until the steam blisters their skins, revealing their meaty richness. Sometimes, an idea for a dinner will come in a dream. Sometimes, with cooking class clients, the ideas develop as Francisco walks through a market with the guests, learning their likes and their dislikes, sensing how adventurous they are, how far their palate can be pushed.  

His measurements are exact, but not in the way of measuring cups and spoons. His techniques, some of them, are invented as he goes along and can’t be replicated at home, if for no other reason than they don’t require fancy tools.  Just intuition and imagination, and while you have both, just as we all do, yours is yours and his is his. Neither can be written down on an index card and kept in a recipe box. Even his inspiration today isn’t the same as his inspiration tomorrow. I’ve been trying to get him to craft the perfect hamburger again–which he made for us two years ago and which we ate on an exquisite summer evening on the balcony of our apartment in Puerto Rico–but it’s never the same.  

Which is fine. Perfect, really. In cooking class, he doesn’t teach people what to cook, or even how. He teaches them about themselves. He teaches them to be present to the way an unfamiliar spice meets the tongue for the first time. He teaches them how not to be afraid of the kitchen, how not to view cooking as a chore. How not to get wrapped up and paralyzed by what goes with what, but to focus instead on what goes with you. How food reaches deep into us and evokes memories and desires so primitive that we can’t help–as one man did at our table–to lick our knives as if no one was watching or, as another woman did, to run our fingers around the edge of the bowl when the last spoon of black beans is gone.