The cook's personality type--what's yours?

My mother, who liked to entertain and was known as a good cook, never succeeded in teaching me her craft. Heaven knows she tried.

When I was 14 she was working Mondays through Wednesdays, and she asked me to prepare supper those evenings. The day before, she would write out a menu, assemble the recipes or write out instructions, gather the ingredients, show me what pans to use...

I hated it.

Even so, I thought I did a pretty good job. She, however, loved to tell her friends about the time I put cinnamon in the beans. You just don't put cinnamon in beans, even if the combination is delicious.

When I was 15, my mother decided it was safer to eat dinner three nights a week in the cafeteria at the college where she worked. The food was terrible, but predictable.

Over the years, I taught myself to cook. My food was not like my mother's, but she enjoyed eating it. She couldn't help herself, though--every time she had dinner with us, she would shake her head in amazement and say, "I never thought you'd be able to cook a meal like this!"

I thought of my mother when I took the cooking personality quiz in yesterday's New York Times. No question: she was 'methodical' and I'm 'innovative.' 'Healthy' would be our area of agreement--good nutrition is an important aspect of cooking, but never at the expense of good flavor. Ripe blackberries, good; wheat germ in mashed potatoes, bad.

Tara Parker-Pope's article accompanying the food quiz, "Who's Cooking? (For Health, It Matters)", sheds further light on the five cooking personalities she identifies.

If you'd like to see how your Myers-Briggs (MBTI) type affects your cooking style, there's no better explanation than Bonnie L. Marsh's legendary pumpkin soup recipe. You will surely recognize your style in one of her four alternate sets of directions.

Holy Epiphanius, pray for us

Years ago while looking up something in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2nd edition, I discovered a saint who sounded strangely familiar--Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis (ca 315 - 403). I liked the closing words of the description so much that I copied them on an index card.

And then the index card went astray, and Oxford published an updated edition of the Dictionary, and some misguided editor left out the charming lines. I was bereft.

Until today when, going through a stack of old books at Mr Neff's office, I saw a dusty copy of the Oxford Dictionary. Yes! It was the 2nd edition! The words were there! And here they are. If you know anyone like this, now you'll know that he or she comes from a long and saintly tradition.

His unbending rigidity,
his want of judgement,
and his complete inability to understand any who differed from him
were reflected in his writings
no less than in his life.

Feast day, 12 May.

Midlife sensory banquet

On our recent trip to see relatives in Arizona, I was frequently reminded of the different ways people take in information. According to the MBTI, people tend to be Sensors or Intuitives. Sensors gather information through their five senses. They are alert, observant, curious, often detail oriented. They are not likely to trip and fall over the coffee table simply because their housemate rearranged the living room—they go through life with their eyes open, living in the moment.

Intuitives, by contrast, seem to spend more time in the romantic past or imagined future than in the present. The visible world is, for them, a launching pad for theories, inventions, schemes, interpretations, ideas, brainstorms, patterns, theologies, impressions, connotations, imagination, dreams, possibilities . . . and with all of that buzzing in their brains, no wonder they occasionally forget to come in out of the rain.

If the human person is a combination of earth and spirit, the Sensor is likely to pay more attention to earth, the Intuitive to spirit. My husband and I and both our daughters lean toward spirit, while most of our relatives are solidly earth-based. We listened in awe last week as they talked extremely knowledgeably about minerals, gems, fossils, photovoltaic cells, cacti, reservoirs, beer making, jewelry design, energy conservation, rare birds, rock polishers, and on and on. These people see what’s in front of them, understand it, and know what to do with it.

As one relative, recently married into the tribe, said (referring to several cousins who are artisans and inventors): “Creativity runs in the family.” Then, turning to David, she asked, “Are you creative?”

I was startled. As a person with Intuitive leanings, I tend to think of creativity as relating to ethereal pursuits. A novelist is creative, as is an artist. David, a journalist and a musician, is creative in several areas. But unlike his creative cousins, he doesn’t often make things that can be seen, held, and manipulated, so a Sensor may not immediately see his creativity. Similarly, an Intuitive may not immediately see the creativity of the person who enjoys finding rocks, splitting them, and polishing their inner surfaces to reveal layers of sparkling color.

Sensors and Intuitives open up and enrich each other’s experience. This is especially true after age 40 or so, when Sensors get more interested in possibilities and Intuitives begin noticing the physical world. My metamorphosis began when, 20 years ago, an interior designer pointed out the flame stitch on a chair’s upholstery. Before then, I noticed whether a chair was red or blue, and I could tell the difference between leather and cloth or solid and floral. The flame stitch, however, was a revelation. Suddenly I began seeing it everywhere. I fell in love with it. I even started noticing other differences in texture and design.

The sensory banquet soon expanded to include food as well as upholstery. The girl who hated to cook started turning into the woman who enjoyed experimenting with taste and color combinations at the table. Every time my aged mother would come to dinner, she would look at her plate and say, “I can’t believe it. I never thought you’d be able to do this.”

Eventually I started noticing things my Sensor friends had known all their lives: for instance, that a dog is a much better companion if you train it and bathe it, or that a house can look really good if you put things away when you’re done using them.

Being an Intuitive, I’m not really sure what Sensors start discovering at midlife. I’m sure they have every bit as much fun as we Intuitives do. Maybe even more, since we keep can’t help thinking about the Next Big Thing, whereas they know how to savor the moment. All of us, though, can find joy in the improbable recipe for the human person. We are earth, and we are spirit, each ingredient equally vital to our humanity.

MBTI--a little background

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) was extremely popular in the 80s, when the younger Boomers were trying to decide what to do and whom (or if) to marry and the older Boomers were afraid that, having passed the dreaded age of 30, they might actually turn 40 and have a midlife meltdown. Boomer that I am, I got very interested in this taxonomy of personality type, wrote One of a Kind (a book about it for parents), and led workshops for publishers.

The MBTI looks at three aspects of personality: what energizes us, how we gather information, and how we make decisions. In addition, it looks at whether we prefer gathering information or acting on it. Put these four factors together, and you get more than the sum of the parts—you get a fairly detailed and often uncannily accurate description of sixteen different kinds of people.

Of course, there aren’t really sixteen kinds of people, there are only two: those who love personality tests and those who think they are bogus. Well, maybe there are three types, if you include mine: those who love personality tests and think they are bogus if believed too implicitly or taken too far.

Still, such tests can help a lot of us sharpen our powers of observation. It’s easy to think everyone is either just like us or exactly opposite from us, without realizing that there’s a whole zoo of fascinating people out there who are simply other than us. A friend of mine, a highly prolific novelist, once told me she uses the MBTI to help create believable characters. It helps her maintain variety in her cast of characters, and it keeps her from unwittingly making an individual do something that a person with his or her personality simply wouldn’t do.