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 09:08 am (UTC)I mostly work from recipes but I think one difference between a Good Cook and a learner is knowing when you can go "off-road." A learner or a poor cook doesn't know that radically altering the salt in a recipe might destroy things, but that radically altering some other seasonings might produce an interesting effect, f/ex.
My mother and grandmother are both skilled at cooking (I'm forever calling my mom for some kind of basic technique question) but my mother is Bland City and my grandmother is The Land of Boiled Vegetables (which is not surprising, given that my family is from Indiana and both are products of the pre- and post-war system of Home Economics education). So they are both masters of techniques that I have yet to learn (pie crust comes to mind) but at the same time I often prefer my food to theirs (witness this Thanksgiving when I wound up making half the meal because my great aunt's turkey is lovely but her side dishes are a little too 1940 for me).
I also think a good cook knows their ingredients - what things are "soulmates" with what (viz.