There Is a Film Running in My Brain

By Ralf

For me, curiosity can begin with a smell, a beautifully made object or one clever piece of engineering. Then the picture starts forming in my head — and after that, it can be very difficult to leave the idea alone.

I have really done this. I am standing at the supermarket cashier, I see a recipe in a book and think, Oh, that looks nice. Then I look at the ingredients. I don’t have this. I don’t have that. So I put my shopping in the car, go back into the supermarket and buy the rest.

This is completely normal for me. Perhaps the cashier thinks differently.

When an idea catches me, my brain begins working. I can already see the meal. I can taste it before I have cooked it. There is a film running in my brain and, once this film has started, you should not suddenly change the programme.

Especially with food.

First Comes the Smell.

Very often, curiosity starts with a smell. I remember Lisbon in 1994. My wife and I were walking somewhere away from the beautiful tourist streets when suddenly I had this smell in my nose.

Piri-piri chicken.

I knew the smell because Portuguese people back home made this kind of chicken. My wife was not so sure, but I said, no, I must look. We followed the smell and found a simple restaurant with chickens cooking over charcoal.

That was it.

We sat outside. I ordered piri-piri chicken with French fries and a Portuguese beer. I ate everything. Then the man from the restaurant came and asked if everything was okay.

Yes, everything was okay.

I wanted another chicken.

He looked at me and thought I wanted it to take away.

“No, no. To eat here.”

For this man, I think the world was going down.

We stayed a long time. There was food, beer, a Portuguese spirit and not much desire from me to continue sightseeing. I told my wife we could simply stay in this restaurant for the rest of the holiday. The next morning, friends told us we had been sitting in a bad area of Lisbon.

Maybe.

But the chicken was fantastic.

That is how smell works with me. At a festival, at a harbour event, somewhere in another town, if there is a good smell in my nose, I cannot just walk past and say, Ah, interesting.

I have to try it. Minimum.

Once the Film Starts.

And once the idea is there, I am not very good with a cooling-off period. When somebody tells me, “We are going there and we will eat this,” my brain prepares everything. The table is there. The food is there. The drink is there. I can already see it. If somebody changes the plan shortly before we arrive, I have a problem.

Mit Essen spielt man nicht, und nicht mit mir.

You don’t play with food. And especially not with me.

It sounds very serious. It is serious. But it is also this fantasy in my head. I don’t have a little note saying, Maybe we eat there later. No. The complete film is already running.

Fifty Knives and Counting.

The same thing happens with objects.

Last week I thought I had about 45 kitchen knives. Then I counted them.

There are 50.

This is important information.

In the beginning, knives are practical. You need a small one for peeling potatoes. You need a long knife for cutting roast beef into thin slices. You need a cook’s knife for herbs, a flexible knife for filleting fish, another one for Spanish ham or gravlax, another for taking meat from the bone.

So there are knives you need.

And then there are the knives you want.

This is where life becomes more interesting.

I like a well-made knife. I like the steel, the shape, the way it sits in the hand, the reason somebody designed it exactly like this. I see a good knife and think, Oh. I need it.

Maybe “need” is not always technically correct.

But we should not become too bureaucratic about these things.

And there is still no Porsche knife.

This is my big problem.

A Pencil Is Not Just a Pencil.

It is the same with pens. The Mayor said, “A pencil is a pencil.”

No.

Wait a moment.

I like good writing instruments. Montblanc, Faber-Castell, beautiful pens and pencils from Switzerland. With a Montblanc, it is fantastic simply to hold it in your hand. There is workmanship in it. Detail. A serial number. It feels like something made to be kept.

For me, writing with a good pen is almost a philosophy. I like when it glides across the paper. I like a broad, soft line. I hate a pen that scratches.

And there is the small pleasure of choosing one. If I am going somewhere, I can think: what do I take today? Orange? Yellow? Faber-Castell? The Swiss one?

Other people perhaps do this with shoes or handbags.

I do it with pens.

That is why usefulness is not the whole story. A normal pen can write. A normal knife can cut. But sometimes I like something simply because it is beautifully made.

I have the same feeling about an old Porsche 911 Targa from around 1972. I like it because it is special and because I could work on it. In my head, it has something of the Montblanc about it.

It has character.

The Table I Didn’t Know I Needed.

Curiosity can attack anywhere. Recently I was at a triathlon with my wife. I was near the place where people received their start numbers and suddenly I saw a table.

Normally, you do not go to a triathlon because you need a table.

But this was a fantastic table.

Aluminium. About three metres long and sixty centimetres wide. You could pull it apart and fold everything together. I looked at it and immediately thought about my outdoor kitchen.

So of course I had to find out where it came from.

I asked one person. She sent me to another. He told me about a supplier near Hamburg.

Now I had the information.

Then I told my wife, “I need this table.”

Ten minutes earlier, there was no table problem in my life.

Then I saw the table.

Now there is a table problem.

Curiosity Is Contagious.

Other people can start this process too. I have a friend who loves tools. If I look inside his tool cupboard, I can become very dangerous. I see one thing and think, Oh, this is good. Then the next thing is good too. We can pull each other upwards towards the newer tool, the better tool, the thing we did not know we needed five minutes earlier.

It happens with barbecue. Somebody gives me meat with a special herb mixture and it tastes fantastic. Immediately I want to know what it is and where it comes from. At one barbecue event, a man had created his own spice. He mentioned there might soon be a problem getting it from the same distributor.

I heard only one important message:

Buy it now.

The Mayor asked whether perhaps there are two Ralfs. One is the spontaneous one who says, “Interesting!” The second is the engineer standing behind him with a clipboard, asking for specifications before anything happens.

No.

There is only the first one.

Sorry.

I Don’t Need Hanoi.

The Mayor tried one last experiment. Suppose I taste one extraordinary Vietnamese dish. How far can food pull me? A restaurant? A cookbook? A cooking class? Or does Ralf eventually stand in Hanoi saying, “I came because of the soup”?

I don’t need Hanoi.

I already had my version of this story with Thai food.

Years ago, I was at a birthday where Thai food had been prepared. There was one dish I wanted to try, and a Thai woman warned me: no, no, this is not for German men.

My wife also told me not to eat it.

Naturally, this did not improve the chances that I would leave it alone.

I said I would only smell it.

Then I tried a little.

For one moment I thought, Where is the problem?

Then there was a bomb in my body.

People were calling for milk.

But this was not the end of my curiosity. It was the beginning.

Afterwards I spoke to the woman who was cooking and said I wanted to come into her kitchen and learn something about Thai food. So one Saturday evening we cooked together.

I did not fly to Thailand. It is too long a flight for me, and I don’t like this.

I went into a kitchen.

That was enough.

The Story Has Already Started.

Maybe this is what following an unexpected idea means for me. I don’t need every idea to become a huge adventure. I need to get closer to it. Smell it. Taste it. Pick it up. Ask where it came from. Find out how it works.

And sometimes, of course, buy the table.

Because once the film is running in my brain, the story has already started.