Lately, I’ve been thinking about all the actions, shapes, and gestures that constitute baking, like scooping and stirring, kneading and rolling, pouring and folding, pinching and shaping, to name just a few.
More specifically, I have been thinking about the concept of proprioception that I discovered through my Pilates teacher training. Proprioception is a form of awareness that allows you to sense where your body is positioned in space and to make subtle adjustments in shape, force, and effort without looking, and I’ve been interested in how this might relate to the bodily and perceptual actions involved in baking.
Most of us have some ability to propriocept, though we don’t all experience it the same way or with the same level of awareness or practice. It can also change with age or in the presence of an illness, trauma, or injury.
I happened upon this quote, bookmarked on my Are*na attributed to the researcher Stamatia Portanova, that I am borrowing here as a way of tracing a loose thread:
“...each bodily gesture unit is always an assemblage of microgestures. Immeasurable multiplicities or molecular packs of micromovements (rather than a whole body) appear in infinitesimal numbers that generate reciprocal relations of becoming rather than binary relations between states.”
Baking is a whole-body engagement. When I bake, I anticipate the full body fatigue and that dull, familiar lower back pain from standing, shifting, weighing, leaning, reaching, bending, and lifting.
And then there is the assemblage of microgestures: wiping your hands on a dishtowel, swiping your hair, scratching your nose, licking a spoon, the constant clearing and negotiation of space across a busy counter, stacking and balancing dishes large to small, cups and spoons, into a makeshift water fountain in the kitchen sink. Which is to say, a constantly shifting, temporary gathering of tiny, “molecular” movements involving muscles, nerves, and tissues.
Proprioception is what allows you to sense these micro-adjustments and continuously recalibrate in response.
Pesche dolci (sweet peaches) are a popular Italian confection made of two soft cookies sandwiched with pastry cream, then dipped in spirits and finished to resemble a peach.
Traditionally, they are soaked in alchermes liqueur, which is infused with cinnamon, clove, nutmeg and vanilla, and which receives its red colour from cochineal insects. But my own memory of eating them involves the strong scent of rum.
Making pesche dolci is as much a lesson in proprioception as it is in pastry.
So when we were making our crema pasticcera, we took turns parking our stance, and squaring our hips to distribute weight evenly between our feet to sustain the demand of whisking fast circles over medium heat. As time passed, we fell into a side conversation about which direction felt more natural, clockwise or counterclockwise. Feeling the spiral in your wrist, Nico suggested a figure eight, or infinity, as an alternative technique.
We scan the custard for lumps, feeling the whirlpool slow under controlled heat, the yolks gently cooking, soft steam rising with a light vanilla and lemon scent.
The final act was to remove the pastry cream from the heat and pass the thick mixture through a sieve into a bowl, using a wide spatula for it to set and cool.
As for the cookies, we moistened our hands and fingers in a small bowl of water, and felt the tacky dough cling and release as we rolled approximately 48 spheres. Their slight stickiness pulls against our palms and fingertips before gluing onto the parchment with a soft, weighted plop. Bake time: ten minutes.
Waiting and listening (for the timer).
Peeking and hovering, piping and squeezing and then gluing and pinching.
In pinching the two cookie spheres together, there was a noticeable risk of slipping. We paused, sensing that the pastry needed more time to set and wondered if it might have been slightly undercooked.
The dipping in Martino Rosso and granulated sugar followed in quick succession.
A continuous field of pressure changes, finger articulations, and wrist rotations were happening all at once. My first dip in the tinted alcohol was too eager, and I could sense that lingering in the soak just a few microseconds longer would compromise the integrity and texture of the peach. With a series of subtle adjustments, tiny shifts in timing and force, I found a pace that, in turn, set the rhythm for Nico as he rolled each peach in sugar.
Earlier, I had parted each mint stem to tear away the smaller leaves used to complete our peaches. Traces of the oils lingered on my fingers. When bitten into, the herb offers a brief and surprising cool burst that cuts through the sweetness of the peach.
In a way, baking becomes less a sequence of tasks and more an engagement with small, seemingly incidental micromovements that shape the rhythm and outcome of the work. By softening the boundaries between here and there, this and that, art and life, things unfold as a fully immersive, relational event: a process of sensing and responding to an ongoing negotiation between body and material, body and space.
So lovely!