What do you know about cooking, and where did you learn it? Do you know the RIGHT way to bake a cake from scratch? How about fixing pot roast or, for that matter, what do you know about making gravy? Brown gravy? Cream gravy? And biscuits . . . or piecrusts?
I would bet a princely sum that most of what you do in the kitchen—well, that is, if you do anything in the kitchen at all (and that’s another story for another day)—rests squarely on the shoulders of your mother and/or grandmother, and/or aunt, or whoever was in charge of the food fixin’ as you were growing up. Somewhere deep, deep in our lizard brains we tend to believe that what we experienced in the kitchen as children is absolutely the RIGHT way to do things in the kitchen as adults.
But how do we know?
I don’t recall either my mother or grandmother having a cookbook. The Joy of Cooking wasn’t even published until many years after my mother began housekeeping—an effort which, by the way, included (at the age of 20 or so) running a mess hall in a tent for my dad’s construction crew as they built the Big Oak Flat road from Sonora to Yosemite. I know she owned cookbooks later in her life, but when she began to cook, her information had to have come from her mother.
How do we know she was right?
Well, the proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
In our little town of 500 (if you counted pregnant women twice), a woman’s skill in the kitchen, as well as her social standing in the community, was determined primarily by 1) how quickly her casseroles and desserts disappeared at community potlucks; and 2) how many other women asked for her recipes.
Many of us learned any prep skills we may have from hanging around the kitchen while food prep was underway. Or else we were given small prep jobs to do that would hasten the learning process. For whatever reason, most of us found ourselves in the kitchen at a pretty early age. Most of us didn’t know we were learning to cook. It was an osmosis kind of thing. Learning by doing, asking questions, observing. I’ll bet a goodly number of you still feel most confident preparing things you learned as a child.
Just what did you learn from that adult in the kitchen?
I realize things are way different today. A lot of cooking takes place between the freezer and the microwave, or between the phone and pizza delivery. Back in my growing up years (World War II plus five years on each end), not only did the cooking mostly consist of doing it from scratch, it also included producing most of our food ourselves. We always had a garden. My mother always “put up” peaches and ‘cots and pears and whatever other fruit and veggies were available within driving distance or from our own garden. We always had small livestock: chickens, rabbits, and sometimes ducks. But I never learned to butcher and cut up a chicken. If it isn’t pre-packaged from the store, I don’t deal with it. Much to my mother’s dismay, I just never get over the eeeeeeuuuwwww part!
I do remember this, however. When cake mixes first came on the market after WW II, my mother commented, “Why should I continue to drive a horse and buggy when a car is available?” I still liked her ‘from scratch’ one-egg-cake the best, however. I swear, someone could call from the corner gas station to say they were coming to visit, and she could have that cake in the oven, ready to serve by the time they got to the house.
I’ve pretty much lost any skill I ever had in the kitchen. It’s one of those use-it-or-lose-it things. When you don’t do it regularly, you lose the eye for quantities or the feel of the batter or dough. I have the same reasons, or excuses if you insist, that most mothers and/or fathers have. We work outside the home so we don’t have time to prep a meal. We’re tired when we come home. We have evening obligations (choir performances, parent meetings, your kid’s homework, your homework, etc.) and by the time I got through having those obstacles in my life, I was living alone . . . and sometimes a bowl of cereal would do just fine, thank you.
My daughter likes to insist that she never learned to cook properly because we pretty much lived in Holiday Inns between her fifth and tenth years. The most she learned from that experience was how to read a menu—oh, and because the placemats at some of the inns featured a map of the states along with their capitals, she was also prepared for fifth-grade geography.
Don’t tell anyone, but she has actually developed some pretty good culinary skills as an adult, plus she was smart enough to marry a man who is more than adequate in the kitchen.
Maybe that’s the very best kind of ‘take out’ anyway.
Come on, ‘fess up. What’s the favorite dish you learned to fix as a kid?
