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 07:24 am (UTC)I was raised very similarly. My mom mostly made things she'd learned from her mom. She added a new dish once or twice a year. She was a good cook, in that what she cooked almost always tasted good (except for Turkey Yuck -- her childrens' name for it, not hers), but she cooked what she thought of as plain food.
Comes a day, after we've (we = her kids) all moved out and set up households, when some of us are home. Peter, child number four of four, volunteers to cook dinner. He makes an Indian feast, complete with homemade piazi, and it's good.
The conversation turns to cooking. Donald is making things with beans and hot peppers down in New Mexico. I'm exploring the farmers' market in New York. Peter's doing traditional Indian cookery and grinding his own spices. Nancy's teaching her circle how to whip cream (They didn't know that. In Wisconsin, the diary state. They were using Kool Whip.)
My mother wonders aloud how she, a plain home cook, managed to raise a such pack of adventurous foodies - all those odd spices! And we look at each other, and we all *know* the answer to that one, and I don't think any one of us managed to put across the answer. It really is her fault that we're all doing (to her mind) strange things with food, and we all know it, and we fail to explain it to her.
Here's the bottom of it: What I learned from my mom is that food is good.
That's really the root of all my later experimentation, foodieness, and so on. Food is good. Dinner time is not going to involve pretending to like things out of politeness. There may be occasional disappointments, and certainly Turkey Soup tastes better than Macaroni and Cheese - there is good and better, but it's always worth turning up for dinner. Oh, and food is worth putting some effort into preparing, at least some of the time - she taught me that, too.
Is my mom a better cook than I am? Well, yeah; she's had much more practice. I'm just more adventurous.
no subject
Date: 2003-01-30 07:47 am (UTC)I don't think a good cook must always, or even usually, make food that tastes good -- a good cook may be always experimenting with flavors that are really interesting, but just don't work out. . .
no subject
Date: 2003-01-30 11:28 am (UTC)Oh, and I clicked 'does not avoid spices' 'cause, hey, salt is a spice. You can't cook without *any* spices at all, and turn out what I consider to be tasty food, so there you are. Spices need not be excessive.