Unsurprisingly, food is a central part of Pixar’s 2007 Ratatouille. With consecutive lockdowns having given me the opportunity to do a lot more cooking, I felt while rewatching the film recently that I was viewing it with a whole new perspective. The climactic scene in which dreaded critic Anton Ego tastes Remy’s ratatouille and is transported back to his humble childhood is of course one which few can forget. The scene is a testament to the power of good food and the nostalgic comfort that simple ingredients can evoke. But another scene stood out to me upon my most recent viewing, one which is very often outshone by the presentation of the titular ratatouille. But while Ego’s epiphany illuminates the universal joy of eating, an earlier scene in which Remy transforms a questionable pot of soup into a culinary triumph highlights the wonders of the inverse side of food: cooking.
As Remy attempts to flee the kitchen of Chef Gusteau’s famed restaurant early in the film, he is appalled by garbage boy Linguine’s disastrous interference with a large pot of soup. Remy’s imagined spirit of Gusteau encourages him to rectify it: “you know how to fix it – this is your chance.” Remy sets to work, adjusting the heat, throwing in a handful of herbs, a few pinches of various spices, and a generous pour of cream. Remy’s work is imprecise, all the more so due to his size, but this is no disadvantage. His imprecision allows him to be free and fluent with his cooking, as he tweaks and adjusts instinctively according to smell. The camera weaves around the pots and pans as Remy waltzes along the shelf adding flavours and aromatics, the viewer feeling as though we can almost smell the kitchen as the little chef resurrects the soup from Linguine’s meddling.
The scene is a masterclass in intuitive cooking. Remy expertly demonstrates how to experiment with the fine tuning of herbs and spices, and play it by ear (or nose?). As someone who grew up doing far more baking than cooking, I found it very difficult to shed my obsession with precise measurement and timing. Since starting to cook far more often, I’ve grown accustomed to the much greater freedom of consulting a guideline recipe, or more often YouTube video, and ad-libbing with my ingredients from there. This scene displays the fluent liberty of cooking, the forgiving nature of quantities, and the freedom of adding a pinch of this and a handful of that as you like. In his adventurous rescue of the soup, Remy demonstrates the joy of cooking by effortlessly working his way around the kitchen shelf, navigating vegetables and stocks and spices with the simple goal of making good food.
Food is a universal experience. This entire film is an ode to our personal relationships with food. It offers something for everyone, be they five (as I was when I saw Ratatouille in the cinema) or 95. But this specific scene speaks to anyone who takes joy in cooking, and makes it clear that good cooking is not perfect precision, but intuitive freedom, and most of all, a passion for food and flavour.
