Good cooking.

[rivka]

Yesterday 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]

Comments

everything leads me to a book recommendation...

[diony.livejournal.com]

I must now recommend the book But Can She Bake A Cherry Pie? by Mary Drake McFeely, which discusses the history of exactly this sort of thing -- the way American food culture has changed over the last century & how that has shaped people's expectations of what makes for good cooking.

Re: everything leads me to a book recommendation...

[cliosfolly.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, what kind of sources does she use? I've thought for a while that it'd be interesting to see a survey of grocery store inserts in newspapers, just for the changes in the types of foods it's expected people would be interested in--and then a couple of weeks ago, I ran into an online article by a nutritionist (for a conference, if I recall correctly) assessing typical menus and the nutritional values of the foods therin by researching old food advertisements and so forth.