Shiny, Snappy, Temperance
Transformation by way of redistribution.
"Cookery is not chemistry. It is an art. It requires instinct and taste rather than exact measurements." — Marcel Boulestin
My husband and I watch quite a bit of cooking content at home. Whether it’s America’s Test Kitchen, any of the hundreds of Gordon Ramsay shows, quirky Claire Saffitz’s YouTube channel, or the plethora of videos produced by New York Times Cooking, all of these content creators share an interesting disdain for one technique usually tethered to the world of desserts: tempering.
Used for chocolate, custards, ice creams, or any number of sauces, tempering is a cooking technique employed to stabilize ingredients by carefully heating and cooling them down. The act of tempering is what gives chocolate that super shiny surface while also imbuing that clean, satisfying snap. Think of a bar of chocolate—how mirror-like it can be and how gratifying it is to snap off one (or, let’s be real, more than one!) piece and pop it into your mouth.
XIV. Temperance. Clockwise from top left: The Carnival at the End of the World, The Golden Art Nouveau Tarot, Tarot Morandi, Golden Tarot, Somnia Tarot.
Now, while this may be a stretch, I do see a lot of overlap between this cooking technique and card number 14 of the same name. While Temperance is indeed a card of balance and equilibrium, there’s a bit more nuance that can be layered onto it. In sequence, this card appears after Death, an extreme of sorts that urges us to consider what we would like to keep alive in our lives, incorporating it into our day-to-day. Following this realization, we understand the need for stability to be woven into our everyday.
But the true beauty of this card lies in its ability to make us question what we can do after learning from the extremes. In essence, we have tempered our lives to not only become shinier but also more resilient to the temptations of where we were, who we used to be, and what we were prepared to release.
Temperance created with the help of artificial intelligence.
Temperance grants us the gift of recalibration. While Justice takes a more siphoned approach, addressing any distress or change in life with the bifurcated “lanes” of our head and our heart, Temperance blends those two lanes into one. As humans, there is only so much of us, and it’s impossible to be everywhere at once. Similar to the first law of thermodynamics (**nerd alert**), energy cannot be created or destroyed but merely converted from one form to another, and that same law goes for us. More simply, we experience transformation by way of redistribution (or temperance)
This month, let’s ask ourselves: how can we apply the principles of Temperance to our own lives? In the realm of cooking, we can see how tempering transforms chocolate into a glossy, satisfying treat. Similarly, in the journey of life, embracing Temperance allows us to reshape and refine ourselves, while also remaining resistant to any “snaps” along the way.