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Quote of the Day: What’s Cookin’?
“Any young woman who can read, can cook.” — Grandma Galloway (my mother’s mother)
As a family of four children and two parents, living on a doctor’s salary, dining out regularly was not a wise budgeting option. Beyond the financial incentive to cook our own meals, meals were family time. Financial and family rationales for cooking still apply today. As we turn, in our own homes, to cookbooks, and other sources of recipes, our mother’s recitation of her mother’s wisdom echoes in our memory.
While we know this wisdom from our maternal grandmother, it goes back to the dawn of this nation. The first deliberately, distinctly American cookbook was written as a self-help book for young women. American Cookery published in 1796, within the first decade of these United States, was written “by Amelia Simmons, an American Orphan.” The lengthy subtitle ends with the promise that this book is “adapted to this country, and all grades of life.”
Spring forward to the 1970s, and the Brown family was in and out of the kitchen, with food prepared in accordance with several cookbooks, mostly the familiar red-checkered Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. In addition, there was an ever-growing recipe box, filling with index cards, first in Mother’s hand, and then in my eldest sister’s hand.
On leaving home, I found myself, for the first time, eating cafeteria food daily. I complained incessantly to my table-mates, through the first term. Then we were freed to take a full meal plan, or a minimal plan, turning to our own skills in the resident kitchens of our dorms. I went shopping, busted out my carefully selected kitchen tools, and the proof wafted to my classmates: my grumbling at table was not empty talk. It turns out that any young man who can read, can cook.
Beyond homespun food, beyond the enabling of the self-made woman, cookbooks came to mean that “any young woman who can read, can be a gourmet cook. This was the innovation of Julia Child, an American chef, trained in France.
She began with a sincere passion for good food and the pleasures of cooking, studying in France in the ’50s with chef/friend Simone Beck. With the help of Louisette Bertolle, another dedicated food lover, they created a cooking school called L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes and later, in 1961, completed their groundbreaking cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Her book and the popular television show that followed made the mysteries of fancy French cuisine approachable, introducing gourmet ingredients, demonstrating culinary techniques, and most importantly, encouraging everyday “home chefs” to practice cooking as art, not to dread it as a chore.
Julia Child not only demystified, what was then considered, the most refined cuisine, she also added a how-to cooking show, on PBS. From 1963, Americans, who did not have someone to demonstrate cooking, could turn to the television screen and watch the written instructions of a cookbook recipe play out before them.
The dawn of the internet, brought cooking instructions, for cuisine from every corner of the globe, to anyone who could figure out how to access it. There was plenty of home recipe sharing, which, over time, shifted from amateur blogs to Pinterest. Blogs that were really good survived, and even thrived. I enjoyed the photography and storytelling around recipes by a young French woman, whose blog is still Chocolate & Zucchini. The title in the tab is: “Chocolate & Zucchini | Simple Recipes from my Paris Kitchen.”
Then again, I get a hankering for rustic German fare when I think back to my lieutenancy, and how do you make that Korean dish? Lots of choices present themselves, from tie-ins to professional publishers, to home-business or hobby blogs. With the availability of blogging software, and the incredibly dropping price of quality optics, skill and dedication distinguish websites.
Speaking of Korean food, a recent search turned up an example that integrates the wisdom of “any one who can read, can cook” with a global audience, expecting not just words and pictures, but a short video: “Cooking Korean food with Maangchi: Korean cooking, recipes, videos, and blog.” With unfamiliar cuisine, the observant person may be stymied by the basic problem of getting ingredients, hence the specialty grocery store walkthrough:
This video brings us to the furthest evolution away from the written recipe, the video recipe, in which you watch the ingredients being added and each step taken to prepare the dish. So, anyone who can pay attention long enough to watch a short video, can cook!
Steak Frite Bites
With a thin piece of steak wrapped around a handful of french fries, steak frites just became finger food.
RECIPE: https://t.co/ZJKit1uwKZ pic.twitter.com/q9ucB7o7KE— Tastemade (@tastemade) October 20, 2018
So, what’s cookin’?
Published in Group Writing
“Any young woman who can read, can cook.”
Ha! My mom always said that.
Ray’s Famous Chili recipe comes from the Seattle Classic Cookbook from the 1980s, written by the Seattle Junior League. One of my high school classmates was instrumental in the compiling of that cookbook. And when we got married, Ray and I discovered that we each had a copy of that cookbook. He follows the instructions diligently, and some Ricochet members can tell you how good that chili is.
When I lived in Seattle in the 1970s, there was an apple tree in our back yard, that produced apples every other year. I decided that I wanted to make an apple pie. I got out my Joy of Cooking, followed the directions, and made a very nice apple pie. My mother-in-law raved about that apple pie, and told me that pies were very hard to make, especially the crust. I told her that I had no idea pies were so difficult, and that I had just followed the instructions.
@kelsurprise, We’d like to hear your rebuttal.
Recipes are more like guidelines than actual rules.
Both of my daughters-in-law, bright, college educated women, claim they cannot cook. It drives me up the wall. I have said and said and said, “If you can read, you can cook!” Is it just in my family or is there some sort of trend with today’s young professional women who seem to take pride in announcing they can’t cook?
Except in baking. Baking is a pretty exact science.
Tonight was “Chef John’s Rusty Chicken Thighs”. I used my new grill mats to avoid flareups, and they turned out great.
A couple of nights ago I made Pad Thai and Thai Grilled Pork with Garlic Pepper in my wok.
Yesterday, I hit Walmart, the Asian market, and the butcher for supplies for the week, including a pork belly for an Okinawan dish I want to make and some homemade bacon.
I haven’t been interested in cooking much this summer, so I’m excited to have caught the bug again.
I was looking at recipes for tomato soup, and most of them suggested using a food mill to remove the seeds and peel. While pricing them one Amazon, I realized that the attachment set I got for ny KitchenAid included a food mill already. My wife was very happy, since she thinks I have enough kitchen tools.
Wait till she finds out that I’ve recently learned that those air fryers can be used to dehydrate food. Homemade jerky, here I come!
I was talking to one woman whose daughter-in-law asked what she could bring for Thanksgiving dinner, and she said “Bring a vegetable, that would be nice.” The girl showed up with bunches of fresh spinach still in the plastic bag from the grocery store, assuming her mother-in-law would do something with it.
Yikes! Now, on the other hand, the wonderful husband of my dearly departed youngest sister, earned his way into the family by his cooking. Cheesecake from scratch was his opening gambit, I believe. Salmon, fresh in season from Pike Place Market, grilled with soaked cedar chunks wafting smoke over the salmon? Check. Miscalculated the roast time for Christmas dinner, never fear, he’ll step in to sous vide the meat.
And he’s handy with construction equipment for home improvement.
Parts of the recipe are, but other things? Not so much. But it does take long years of experience to know which is which and what one can add successfully. I’ve been baking and cooking for close onto fifty years, and I can’t remember the last time I followed a recipe without adulteration.
On the other hand, I have a friend who spent years in the restaurant business, who will prepare the Thanksgiving feast I will attend, and who swears by America’s Test Kitchen and one precise, best way. Of course, his other career has been in precision manufacturing and quality control — so the engineering mindset.
That said, if you delve into the 1796 cookbook in the OP, you find instructions for baking and cooking with an open hearth wood fire. So, there is indeed an art, within which skill gained by experience is rewarded.
The options are endless, if non-hygenic.
And I’m a process management consultant. It’s important to know what parts of the process are necessary to the outcome, and what parts are open to creativity.
My ex’s grandmother and her sister were experienced cooks and bakers, and they always differentiated between cooking and baking, saying they’re two different areas of expertise. A great cook isn’t always the one who can make the best pie crust, according to Grandma.
This year, neutral observer and I have eaten out more than the last three years combined (not counting cruises). Not only are we good cooks, we love to cook. Also, cooking is therapy, a great stress relieving activity.
We have more cookbooks in our kitchen than we have shelf space (I’d take a picture, but I don’t feel like cleaning first).
Of my four daughters only one really likes to cook. One says it’s too boring – you have to follow a recipe and she likes to get creative – then makes an inedible mess and gives up. Another one won’t touch raw meat. They all found husbands who really like to cook so at least they aren’t starving. I was at my daughter’s one evening and her endlessly starving 14 year old son wanted her to make him a grilled cheese sandwich. Seriously? A 14 year old who can’t make a grilled cheese sandwich? So I gave both of them what for and showed him how to butter bread and put two pieces of cheese in between, put it on the stove and watch it so it doesn’t turn to charcoal. Yikes! (This was the kid who, in my husband’s Jeep Wrangler, could not figure out how to get the window open because it had a crank handle. Do they have any grey matter at all?)
My son on the other hand got his first job at 15 as a cook at a Perkins restaurant.
I have found that young women also seem to like to announce that they cannot sew either.
Reasonably intelligent people ought to be able to just about any “ordinary” task. Mrs. iWe can (off the top of my head) bake, cook, clean, sew, teach, host, organize, write, dance, manage, wallpaper, sheetrock, tile, grout, parent, and wife. Between us we can do just about anything. The only “normal” skills we really lack between us are mastering spreadsheets, computer network management, mathematics, and video editing.
Learning new things is really about attitude, and sometimes watching a youtube video.
I have a 14 year old who ONLY eats cheese and refined wheat – either as grilled cheese, pasta, etc. That is all he lives on. Yet he grows like a weed, and can lift a 250 pound person.
He makes it himself. My job is to stop hanging out on Ricochet so I can make sure we have pasta in the pantry.
–Lazarus Long (Robert Heinlein)
And to think we used to go off to college with such knowledge of field expedients as ironing board toasted cheese sandwiches.
I’m also old enough to remember when Army work uniforms had lots of buttons, and you were expected to keep them all on, even in the field. So pack your little BDU repair kit.
The proof is in the … crust! That is a definite skill. My father is the pie baker in the family. I have a pie crust recipe I know works, but only rarely venture into pie making.