No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice

by Edward Brown

Overview

Discover How to Cook—with Your Senses, Your Hands, and Your Heart

"Making your love manifest, transforming your spirit, good heart, and able hands into food is a great undertaking," writes renowned chef and Zen priest Edward Espe Brown, "one that will nourish you in the doing, in the offering, and in the eating." With No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice, Brown beautifully blends expert cooking advice with thoughtful reflections on meaning, joy, and life itself.

Reading Brown’s witty and engaging collection of essays is like learning to cook—and meditate—with your own personal chef and Zen teacher. Drawing from a lifetime of experience, he invites us into his home and kitchen to explore how cooking and eating can be paths to awakening. Baking, cutting, chopping, and tasting are not seen as rigid techniques, but as opportunities to find joy and satisfaction in the present moment. "Forget the rules and forget what you’ve been told," teaches Brown. "Discover for yourself by tasting, testing, experimenting, and experiencing."

From soil to seed and preparation to plate, No Recipe brings us a collection of timeless teachings on awakening in the sacred space of the kitchen.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781683640547
Publisher:	Sounds True, Incorporated
Publication date:	05/01/2018
Pages:	248
Sales rank:	643,510
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Edward Espe Brown
Edward Espe Brown began cooking and practicing Zen in 1965. He was the first head resident cook at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center from 1967 to 1970. He later worked at the celebrated Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, serving as busboy, waiter, floor manager, wine buyer, cashier, host, and manager. Ordained a priest by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, he has taught meditation retreats and vegetarian cooking classes throughout North America and Europe. He is the author of several bestselling cookbooks, including The Tassajara Bread Book, and the editor of Not Always So, a book of lectures by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. He is the subject of the critically acclaimed 2007 documentary film How to Cook Your Life. He resides in Fairfax, California.

Table of Contents

Before Words xiii

A Meeting of Hearts

Reverential Offerings

Envisioning This Book

Love and Blessings to the Cooks!

1 The Way of the Kitchen: Actualizing Sacred Space 1

I Will Always Be with You 2

Entering Sacred Space 4

Making Sacred Space Manifest 6

Remembering We Have Choice 9

Freedom Beyond Rote and Chore 11

2 You're the Cook 13

You're the Cook 14

Trusting Your Aesthetic 16

How You See Cooking 18

Cooking Is Not Just Cooking 19

Giving Voice to What Is Inside 22

3 Coming to Your Senses 25

Tasting the True Spirit of the Grain 26

To Get Started, You Don't Need to Know 28

Permission Granted 31

Follow Your Nose 33

Round Apple, Smooth Banana, a Poem by Rilke 36

Gifts from Beyond 37

4 Bringing Spirit to Life 41

What Gets Us into the Kitchen? 42

Visiting a Spiritual Center 46

Visiting Another Spiritual Center 49

5 The Work of Being Embodied 51

The Energetics of Zen Work 52

Everybody Loves Raking 56

6 Feeling Your Way Along in the Dark 61

Cooking with Passion 62

Seeing Virtue 67

Pause and Investigate 69

7 Careful Observation of the Obvious 71

Knowing the Differences That Make a Difference 72

The Flavor of Today 75

The Ceremony of Eating Just One Potato Chip 77

8 Seeking the Way 81

Way-Seeking Mind 82

Way-Seeking Spinach 85

To Cut or Not to Cut the Collards 88

Lovely Energy in the Kitchen 90

9 Let Things Come and Abide in Your Heart 93

Receiving Flavors 94

Developing a Palate as a Busboy at Greens 97

At Work with Wines 100

Breaking the Trance of Routine 103

A Salad of Five Flavors 104

10 The Black Dragon Jewel Is Everywhere 113

Is There Anything Good about Working in the Kitchen? 114

The Black Dragon Jewel 117

A Student Asks, "Why Haven't You Enlightened Me Yet?" 119

11 Doing the Work Yourself 121

Reinhabiting Your Body: You Are the Secret Ingredient 122

Zen Master Dogen Marvels: A Mushroom Story 125

At Home, at Work, in Your Body 127

12 Food Choices 129

Choosing Food 130

Finding Out for Yourself 135

Observing What to Eat 136

Cons and Myths 138

13 Eating 143

Not What to Eat, But How 144

The Ceremony of Eating 146

Learning to Eat with Awareness 150

Please Enjoy Your Food 153

Ingredients for Living Fully 157

What We Taste "In-forms" Us 158

14 Do Not See with Ordinary Eyes, Do Not Think with Ordinary Mind 161

Do Not See with Ordinary Eyes, Do Not Think with Ordinary Mind 162

Food Is Precious 164

Agreeing to Love Yourself 168

15 Arousing Joy and Well-Being 171

Men at Work Cooking: A Bachelor Party Dinner 172

16 Handling Leftovers 181

Purifying Our Love 182

Using Leftovers 184

Not Wasting 190

17 Cultivating a Life of Feeling 195

A Cooking Class in Cleveland 198

Using Emotions as an Excuse Not to Cook 200

A Workshop at Tassajara 201

Being Cracked Open 203

Sensing Essence 206

In Service to Something Big 208

You Mean It 213

After Words 215

Full Circle

Bowing In to Sacred Space

Acknowledgments 219

About the Author 225

Editorial Reviews

04/16/2018
Brown (The Tassajara Bread Book), the head cook at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, addresses the spiritual qualities of cooking in this illuminating guide. Brown presents cooking as a refreshing celebration of the mundane—an act he feels is at the heart of understanding the sacred and a valuable means of enlarging one’s spirituality. Reflecting a modern, Western style of Zen Buddhism, Brown’s observations are rich with reminders to pay attention sensually as well as to engage one’s immediate experience and realize the freedom inherent in having choices. There are no recipes here; instead, Brown’s observations and encouragements fill the pages. His exhortation that “you’re the cook!” applies not only in the kitchen, but to all of life, he writes. Readers will learn to recognize and allow their emotions to be part of the cooking process, to make space for experiment and imperfection, and that Zen communities are subject to the same pettiness as any other. This book’s down-to-earth wisdom, generous spirit, and exuberant encouragement simply to cook will appeal to all readers who enjoy cooking, particularly those with an interest in Zen spirituality. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Your 'Zen and the art of cooking' one-stop shop. NO RECIPE is a collection of essays by chef and cookbook author Edward Espe Brown, each of which read like a meditation on food, mindfulness, spirituality, and the art of cooking and eating in a way that is both artful and reverent.” —Bustle

“[An] illuminating guide. Brown presents cooking as a refreshing celebration of the mundane—an act he feels is at the heart of understanding the sacred and a valuable means of enlarging one’s spirituality…[NO RECIPE’s] down-to-earth wisdom, generous spirit, and exuberant encouragement simply to cook will appeal to all readers who enjoy cooking.” —Publishers Weekly

“An ode to spiritual cooking that focuses not on what to cook but how...Brown pulls lessons from his vast experience in the Zen tradition to offer an inspiring take on culinary creation.” —Tricycle

“Profound and insightful...Brown's loving re-creations of cooking will stir a literal as well as metaphorical hunger.” —Library Journal

“In a world full of diets, rigid cooking instructions, and the search for the most perfect ingredients, Edward Espe Brown offers a chance to relax and enjoy the simple act of cooking in tandem with the Divine (as they understand It). The bonus is renewed connection to, and acceptance of, our bodies as a gift from God.” —Retailing Insight (Anna Jedrziewski, reviewer)

“Here, Edward Brown draws on his lifetime of cooking and Zen practice to show us how eating, cooking, and caring for the kitchen are fundamental aspects of life to be deeply valued, and how they can open our world to each of us.” —Deborah Madison, author of Vegetable Literacy and The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

“This is the only cookbook you will ever need. True, it contains no recipes and no directives to cook this way or that. Instead, it invites you into the kitchen to explore your senses, your hands, your heart. Ed Brown is a Zen master artist; food is his medium. Cooks and non-cooks alike will be moved by his soulful meditations on topics as varied as taste-testing a single potato chip, studying a stalk of broccoli until it tells you how it wants to be flavored, how (and whether) to de-stem spinach or tear or cut lettuce, and preparing food for a bachelor party. This book of down-to-earth spiritual teachings has a simple, insistent message: find out for yourself!” —Norman Fischer, poet, Zen priest, and author of What Is Zen? Plain Talk for a Beginner's Mind

“This wonderful book warms your heart! Original, inviting, plainspoken, unpretentious, and deep. Just by reading it you can taste more goodness.” —Jack Kornfield, author of A Path with Heart

“No Recipe manifests the core mystery of cooking. Ed Brown observes that ‘Cookbooks tend to provide the instructions for working with the materials, while working with yourself [and what comes up for you in the kitchen] will largely be up to you.’ Ed’s approach to nourishment will help you melt the boundaries between the act of cooking and the edges of yourself and make the kitchen sacred ground for unfolding and awakening.” —Hosho Peter Coyote, author, actor, and Zen priest

From the Publisher

04/01/2018
Zen teacher and chef Brown (The Tassajara Bread Book) offers profound and insightful claims arising from his daily practice, but the overall mantra seems to be this: "Noticing differences and considering which differences make a difference, we can study what is truly important." What is important to Brown is being responsive, being present, and most of all, joy, or one's awareness resonating with one's being. Cooking and, by extension, eating become the prisms through which Brown engages, encourages, and experiences his awareness. For example, noticing even the simple ingredients that make up a recipe, he marvels at the many hands that it took to bring something like a single onion to his plate. These collected essays embody the fullness of Brown's experience as a baker who practices Zen through work; for him, "work is practice." These essays explore food, emotions, ego, and relationship as encountered in and through cooking. VERDICT Some might lament that there are no recipes included as Brown's loving re-creations of cooking will stir a literal as well as metaphorical hunger in readers.—Sandra Collins, Byzantine Catholic Seminary Lib., Pittsburgh

Library Journal

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