Good cooking.
Jan. 30th, 2003 08:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaYesterday I bought some black-tipped shark filets for dinner. I'd never cooked shark before, so I poked around some food sites to see how other people cook it. I wound up marinating the filets for a couple of hours (in lime juice, beer, oil, garlic, cumin, parsley, salt, pepper, and dijon mustard) and then broiling them. We had couscous and sauteed zucchini on the side. It was good.
As I was cooking, I thought about my mother. She would never have bought shark filets - "I wouldn't have any idea what to do with them." Throughout my childhood, she made very simple meals of the type she'd learned about in home ec class in high school: baked chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and spinach. Pork chops, rice, and peas. Apple pie. Chocolate cake. She's branched out some in recent years, mostly using recipes my sister and I have given her, but the foundation of her cooking is plain food.
I've always thought of my mother as a good cook. Her baked chicken is good baked chicken, well-cooked but not dry, with crisp golden skin. Her mashed potatoes don't come from a mix, and they don't have lumps. Her piecrusts don't come from a package. Sometimes she made food I didn't like, when I was growing up, but she never made meals that didn't "turn out."
As I've gotten more involved with cooking, though, I start wondering what the definition of "a good cook" really is. I think of myself as a decent cook - I make a lot of different dishes, and most of them taste good. But not everything I make is a success. I use a lot of recipes - I tend to think of good cooks as being more inventive than that, or as cooking from general principles rather than from specific instructions. I sometimes fall back, lazily, on prepared foods - Zatarian's red beans and rice, for example, from a boxed mix. I think of good cooks as making their beans and rice from scratch. I don't use a lot of fancy techniques.
Am I a better cook than my mother, because I do more with sauces and marinades and seasonings? Is grilled fish with tropical fruit salsa inherently better food than baked chicken? Is creativity a requirement, or is the only requirement that food taste good?
I'm curious to know what other people think.
[Poll #97174]
As I was cooking, I thought about my mother. She would never have bought shark filets - "I wouldn't have any idea what to do with them." Throughout my childhood, she made very simple meals of the type she'd learned about in home ec class in high school: baked chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and spinach. Pork chops, rice, and peas. Apple pie. Chocolate cake. She's branched out some in recent years, mostly using recipes my sister and I have given her, but the foundation of her cooking is plain food.
I've always thought of my mother as a good cook. Her baked chicken is good baked chicken, well-cooked but not dry, with crisp golden skin. Her mashed potatoes don't come from a mix, and they don't have lumps. Her piecrusts don't come from a package. Sometimes she made food I didn't like, when I was growing up, but she never made meals that didn't "turn out."
As I've gotten more involved with cooking, though, I start wondering what the definition of "a good cook" really is. I think of myself as a decent cook - I make a lot of different dishes, and most of them taste good. But not everything I make is a success. I use a lot of recipes - I tend to think of good cooks as being more inventive than that, or as cooking from general principles rather than from specific instructions. I sometimes fall back, lazily, on prepared foods - Zatarian's red beans and rice, for example, from a boxed mix. I think of good cooks as making their beans and rice from scratch. I don't use a lot of fancy techniques.
Am I a better cook than my mother, because I do more with sauces and marinades and seasonings? Is grilled fish with tropical fruit salsa inherently better food than baked chicken? Is creativity a requirement, or is the only requirement that food taste good?
I'm curious to know what other people think.
[Poll #97174]
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no subject
Date: 2003-01-30 07:05 am (UTC)The only thing I can think of that all good cooks *must* do is "consistently make food that tastes good and meets their audiences' needs and desires", but I can't answer yes to "never have failures in the kitchen" because even top chefs sometimes encounter disaster. I would suggest that dealing with less-than-total failure in the kitchen is one mark of a good cook (e.g., if the chocolate pudding hardens into a solid ball of rubber, that's probably a total failure, but if it fails to thicken and ends up as a sauce, that's dealing with l-t-t failure).
It wouldn't lower my regard for a cook to learn s/he uses recipes (especially when baking, which is closer to chemistry than it is to standard cooking, IMO, or when trying a new dish), although I suspect most good cooks end up using most recipes as guidelines rather than Holy Writ.
While I agreed that made-from-scratch foods usually taste better, I won't quibble with home cooks who use prepared foods as time- or energy-savers, and I won't call them not-good cooks (assuming the results taste good and meet their audience's needs). I do expect restaurant chefs to work from scratch, since that's their full-time job.
Or maybe I'm just indecisive.
good cooks
Date: 2003-01-30 11:52 am (UTC)must not have failures in the kitchen.
this is the part of the poll with which i most disagree. :) i believe that anyone who is good at something will have failures, and i think believing in the perfect record is more likely to make a person scared to expand their envelope -- and to become and stay good under the above definition, i think that's needed, even if just to a small degree after years of experience.
no subject
Date: 2003-01-30 12:24 pm (UTC)The only box I could check was "make food that tastes good." All the rest is just taste and technique.
no subject
Date: 2003-01-30 12:30 pm (UTC)When it's two days before payday and you simply can't afford a grocery run, a good cook can rummage through whatever's left in the pantry, fridge and freezer and turn it into something not only edible but tasty that will feed however many people need to be fed.
no subject
Date: 2003-01-30 01:16 pm (UTC)