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 07:46 am (UTC)Your post has inspired me to think back to those people I've considered to be good cooks, and what made them such. The only constant throughout the entire set is that they could produce, reliably, food that people wanted to eat. To some extent this meant that they had a good grasp of the people they were cooking for. So, for example, the New Orleans french pastry chef who joined the Marine Corps understood that there were some recipes he just shouldn't prepare for a battalion of Marines, while there were other things he could do that would be very welcome when compared to the usual fare produced by the assembly line military cooking style.
That man was probably the best cook I've ever known, come to think of it. He'd grown up cooking for a large extended family, gone to cooking school, and worked in a couple of different New Orleans resturants. He had a great talent for knowing what he could do with whatever he had, and for matching his product to the people he was cooking for. He could actually begin with c-ration canned beef and make a decent blackened beef stew that had enough creole zip to it that you could forget it had begun as c-rats. His only rule, and it was absolute, was that if anybody told him he had to follow the recipe cards he'd stop cooking and wash dishes.