How to Cook Rice

I eat rice every day. My family eats rice with vegetables and chicken. I can cook rice. The rice in my country is long and white.

In my country, we often eat a dish called nasi goreng. It is rice cooked with onions, garlic, soy sauce, and a little chilli. First, you cook some rice and let it cool. Then you fry onions and garlic in a pan with a little oil. After that, you add the rice and stir for a few minutes. We often eat it with a fried egg on top. My grandmother makes the best one, and she never measures anything.

When I was twenty, I worked in a small café for a few months. On my first day, the owner — a quiet woman in her sixties — watched me make a cup of tea for a customer. She did not say anything at the time. After the customer left, she came over and said, 'Make me one.'

I did. She tasted it and put it down. 'You did three things wrong,' she said. 'You used water that had boiled twice. You poured it into the cup before the leaves. You served it before it was ready.'

She taught me, in about two minutes, how to make tea properly. Fresh water. Always boiling, never reheated. Leaves first, then water. Wait three minutes. Pour through a strainer.

I had thought I knew how to make tea. I had been making it every day since I was twelve. What she taught me was that doing something every day is not the same as doing it well. I have, since that day, taken simple things much more seriously than I used to.

I have, for many years, been making my bed every morning in roughly the same way. Take the bottom sheet first; pull it tight at all four corners. Lay the duvet down evenly, with about the same amount of overhang on each side. Place the pillows neatly at the head. Smooth the surface once with the flat of your hand. The whole thing takes about ninety seconds.

This is not, by any standard, a notable skill. It is something almost any adult can do. But I have noticed, over the years, that the people who do it well — who produce a bed that, once made, looks like a bed in a hotel — are doing something I cannot quite see. They are using the same materials as everyone else. They are taking the same amount of time. The result is just visibly better.

What I have come to think is that bed-making, like a lot of small daily skills, contains a kind of micro-attention that most of us have not developed and would not, on inspection, be able to name. The expert is making twenty very small decisions about tension, position, and angle, in a sequence so practised they look like one decision. The rest of us are making the same bed, but not the same way.

Make your bed, then. Watch what your hands do. The skill, when you look for it, is almost always there to find.

I have been writing in English, my second language, for about twenty years. I want to say at the start that I am not the right person to write this essay. The right person would be someone for whom English is the first thing the mouth produces — for whom the question of how to write a clear sentence is not an interesting question, but simply how one writes. I am not that person. I am someone who learned the practice as an adult, from a different first language, and who has spent twenty years gradually understanding why writers I learned from took particular sentences with the seriousness they did.

With that disclaimer in place, here is what I can usefully say.

Write a draft. Set it aside for a day. Read it aloud to yourself. Notice the sentences your voice stumbles on. Replace them with shorter ones. Read it again. Notice the abstract words; replace them, where possible, with concrete ones. Cut every adjective that is not earning its keep. Read the whole piece aloud one final time, listening for the moments where the rhythm collapses. Fix those. Stop.

This is a recipe of sorts. It is also, I have to say, a misleading representation of what the practice actually is. A native writer of English does not, on most occasions, follow these steps. They have absorbed something I have spent twenty years trying to acquire by deliberate attention — a sense of the sentence as a physical object, a feeling for which words sit naturally next to which others, an instinct for the moment when the prose has gone slightly wrong before any visible mistake has been made. I have, slowly, developed a version of this. It is not the version that native writers have. It is closer to what they have than it was when I started.

What I have built, over the years, is not really a skill in writing. It is a small piece of attention to the language, painstakingly accumulated, by means that I cannot fully explain to anyone else. Most of what I now know about a sentence I cannot transmit through instruction. I can sometimes show, by example. I cannot reliably teach, by rule.

Write, then, in whatever language is yours to write in. The instructions above will help less than they appear to. The attention they slowly produce, however, is, in the end, almost everything.

I want to write, in this essay, about how to drink tea in the way I have, over many years, learned to drink it. I want, at the same time, to admit that the way I have learned to drink it is not, in any defensible sense, the right way — it is a personal compromise between several traditions, none of which I grew up inside, and which therefore meet, in my kitchen, in a form none of their actual practitioners would, on inspection, fully endorse.

First, the procedure. Heat fresh water — never twice-boiled — to a temperature appropriate to the leaf, which for the green teas I mostly drink means between seventy-five and eighty-five degrees, well below boiling. Place a small quantity of leaves — about two grams for a hundred and fifty millilitres of water — in a small pot or cup. Pour the water on. Wait between thirty seconds and three minutes, depending on the leaf and what you are after. Pour into a small cup. Drink.

This is, as procedures go, fairly precise; it is also a Frankenstein assembly of practices. The temperature ranges and the rapid steeping are borrowed from gong fu cha, the southern Chinese practice in which leaves are steeped many times in small quantities of water. The grams-per-millilitre ratio is a piece of contemporary tea-shop precision that most traditions do not use. The small cup is a habit I picked up from East Asian rather than Indian or Maghrebi tea contexts. The fresh water rule is universal but, in my house, came from my Russian-trained grandmother. The actual leaves, on most days, are Japanese, Chinese, or Taiwanese, depending on what I have managed to get my hands on. I am not, in any honest sense, drinking tea from inside any one tradition. I am drinking the tea of an adult who has read books about several traditions and tried to assemble something workable from them.

I want to be careful about what I claim for this. I am not claiming authenticity. I am almost certainly drinking, by the strict standards of any of the source traditions, slightly wrong tea — too cool here, too brief there, the wrong cup, the wrong water-to-leaf ratio for the particular leaf in question. A practitioner from any of the traditions I have borrowed from could, in five minutes, identify my errors. I am also aware that the very project of 'assembling a personal practice' from multiple cultures is itself a posture available primarily to people in privileged international positions, and that traditional practitioners have not, on the whole, been doing this; they have been drinking the tea of their place.

What I notice, after about fifteen years of this, is that something of value has nevertheless accumulated. I have learned to taste differences I previously could not taste. I have learned to detect, by smell, when water has been boiling for too long. I have learned to recognise, in myself, the moment when I am rushing tea I should not be rushing. None of this places me inside a tradition. It places me, more accurately, in a small constructed practice of my own making, which gestures toward several traditions without belonging to any.

I do not have a clean way to think about this. The most honest position I have arrived at is that the practice I have built is real but limited — useful to me, defensible as personal taste, but not authoritative in any direction. I would not, having said this, recommend it to anyone else as their tea practice. I would suggest, more usefully, that they find the tradition that fits the place they live or come from, and follow it.

Make the tea, then, in whatever way the people you trust make it. The procedure I have described will work, and will not be wrong. It will also not be, in any rigorous sense, right. The water, while you are deciding, will boil whether or not we have settled the matter.