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

[redbird]

There aren't a lot of "must" and "must not" answers I'm happy with. I like my gas stove, but I'm not prepared to say that someone who lives in a suburb without gas lines can't be a good cook--that's just silly. White bread, well, what does that mean? Pick the right kind, and it makes good grilled cheese sandwiches. (For that matter, a baguette is white bread in the sense of bread, not sourdough, made from refined wheat flour.)

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

Um. I can't really answer your poll, Rivka, because I think there are many different types of "good cooks" -- your mother sounds like one (good plain cook), you're another (good creative cook), Emeril Lagasse is another (good restaurant cook). I'm sure there are other kinds of good cooks (people who can develop interesting meals for restricted diets might be one such category).

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.

[cattitude.livejournal.com]

Well, I put in precisely one check mark. There's very little a good cook must or must not do.

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.

[wiredferret.livejournal.com]

I am the cook of the three children. My mom was always encouraging about that.

We divided neatly down lines. I tried stuff I saw in cooking magazines and Joy of Cooking, and she was a Betty Crocker cook. There are still some 'plain' foods that I don't do as well as my mother, like pie crust. But one of my Christmas presents for years has been a blank check to buy ingredients for Christmas dinner. One year was the full Victorian shindig, with a goose and everything. Or the year we had buffulo filet with a bleu cheese rondelle. Last year was going to be Scandinavian smorgasboard, if dad hadn't distracted us by being in the hospital. Weird, exotic cooking. But you could always count on my mom to have some reasonably tasty, nutritious meal to serve to us when we came home, and some really divine stuff she'd perfected over the years. Her sons-in-law are devotees of her bread.

We're both good cooks. And now Sil is a good cook, and has been doing most of the cookery in our house for the last year.

Feed people. It makes them feel happy and loved. That's my rule.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

You are a good cook, by any reasonable definition. So, I suspect, is your mother.

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.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I put in no check marks, and I think the system didn't register it.

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. . .

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

sharks and i have a deal. i don't eat them, and vice versa.

(yes, i am one of those pesky people who while at dim sum wants to know exactly what it is she's eating... ;)

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

It sounds like both you and your mother are good cooks with specialties in different areas. She does (for want of a better phrase) Standard American and you do Schencken Big Club experimental stuff. You and she each seem happy with the results of your styles; that seems sufficient.f

Good? Gourmet? Adventurous?

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Like Bill, I think there are different categories of "good". One of my recent additions to my self-definition has been "the ability to cope with unusual situations". I've been cooking in a lot of unfamiliar kitchens, without my entire batterie de cuisine. Some of the results have been better than others. It's gotten me to appreciate the gadgets I've grown to depend on, and also made me appreciate my beloved knife even more.

My current definition is something like, "should be able to deal with disasters, and should know enough dishes (whether by use of recipes or improvisation or memory) to satisfy the need-for-variety of the cook's primary audience."

I remember us having more than a few discussions about food. And your mentioning things about cake and frosting from-scratch, as opposed to boxed mix. I talked about that later with my mother, who claims now that I'm a better cook than she is. I like the compliment from her, but I wonder, am I really? Or am I just more adventurous and pretentious? I think it counts that she's able to whip out a tasty meal quickly. I'm still working on that.

[elusis.livejournal.com]

Interesting discussion. I think I'm a "good cook" because I try new stuff all the time, but the husband privately has his doubts, I think, because sometimes what I make doesn't turn out the way he likes it (f/ex, when I do a chicken, white bean, and broccoli dish over pasta, I leave the broccoli "too crisp" for him and with too much stem on).

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. crossfire_'s discussion on food_porn a while back, how to best accent the pure flavor of a food versus how to incorporate it into something else. And I think a good cook considers nutrition as well.

[geminigirl]

There are many different kinds of "good cooks"-people who cook for a family cook differently than cooking for one or two, and different certainly than a banquet chef. A working mom and a stay at home mom may both cook for a family but cook very different things. A good cook will turn out good tasting and usually visually appealing meals. A good cook will consider budget, food preferences and allergies, flavor matching, time and a host of other factors. A good cook doesn't necessarily need to be an adventurous cook. A solid repetoire of dishes is important.

Simple foods are important...sometimes there's nothing more satisfying than comfort foods, most of which are simple. And mac and cheese out of a box is comfort food. But there's nothing wrong with using packaged foods-sometimes as a base for other things and sometimes on their own. We lead busy lives and it makes sense sometimes. We don't live in a place where all the things we want are available year round...frozen corn is great in the winter for example, when fresh corn isn't available, or when what is available is of a less than stellar quality.

I make beans and rice as a post-gym snack sometimes. Sure, I punch the packaged mix up with some green chilis and maybe some corn, but why not use the packaged mix. Beans are a nuisance with all the soaking and rinsing and so on. Sometimes there's the "I want it NOW" factor.

My Mom is a good cook...not an adventurous one. She makes simple, tasty foods. Her chicken soup is incredible. She knows what works well in her kitchen, for her food tastes (and my father, and when we were growing up, for the children.) I bring home many leftovers from my Mom when I visit. I'm slightly more adventurous. I've created a couple of yummy things that Mom has now added-a chicken and tomato and spinach dish that goes over pasta, a sort of variation on white clam sauce...Mom was always tolerant of my kitchen experiments, and many of them came out okay. Some better than others.

We all have kitchen failures. That's how we figure out what works and what doesn't.

A good cook meets the needs of the audience in a satisfying way. That's what it boils down to. And I'm sure that you are a good cook.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

Wow! Food sure makes people loquacious. I have the reputation among most of my friends as being a good cook. I never thought much of this, after all, it wasn't creative like Stacey's clothing designs or Elise's jewelry and it's so simple. I mean, all you have to do is follow the recipe. But apparently this isn't true. For example, we have this family applesauce cake recipe. It's probably my favorite cake in the world. When my mother makes it or when I make it, it's truly wonderful. When my sister makes it, it -- isn't. Yet she's using the same techniques and recipe. I think the difference is we like to cook and she doesn't.

I don't get to cook nearly enough any more. I'm married to a wonderful man who has really really bizarre food issues. He's way happier with a fast food hamburger than something I'd consider interesting. I can't wait to get a house again and get settled so I can start having other people over to cook for.

MKK

[aiglet.livejournal.com]

(Mostly what they said, but I want to say it too. ;P)

I think that a "good" cook produces things that *they* want to eat. I mean, what's the point of cooking if you're constantly making things that you don't enjoy eating? It helps if you can have people to eat with who share your tastes in food, though -- it's the difference between food as art and food as offering.

Everyone has failures in the kitchen -- I think it's only in New York where you can take such a thing and charge $40/plate for it and have it be declared a smashing success. The first time my mother made a turkey for Thanksgiving (now, mind you, she was raised as the second-youngest of four daughters in a traditionally midwestern home, so she'd been taught the rudiments of cooking), it said "clean turkey." So she washed it. With dishsoap.

I rarely cook without a recipie. Of course, I don't follow the recipies I have exactly to the letter, either.

I think the mark of a good cook is that they *care* about the food they're serving, and about the people they're serving it to (that might be an or, rather than an and, now that I think of it). People who care try harder, and get better results.

[porcinea.livejournal.com]

See, I'd call that an experimental cook, rather than a good one. So I have one rule for good cook: makes tasty food. Doesn't mean always; good cooks definitely have kitchen failures. And then they order Chinese.

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.

good cooks

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i am mostly with janet, especially regarding the definition of "good cook". except i think that good cooks also can use prepared items in their cooking -- they just do more with them than heat them up.

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.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Nope, yep, me too.

The only box I could check was "make food that tastes good." All the rest is just taste and technique.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Of course, the minute I hit "post comment," I thought of another quality common to and possibly desirable for good cooks:

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.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I like that one.

[cliosfolly.livejournal.com]

It's been fascinating reading everyone's responses! The only thing that I particularly have to add, in terms of generational differences in cooking, is to consider what kind of a cooking atmosphere your mother would have been exposed to which would left her disinclined to purchase shark if presented with the option.

It might not necessarily be that she, personally, would have been disinclined to experiment with shark, but rather, how much awareness was there amongst the majority of folks learning to cook 40-60 or so years ago that there were alternatives to meat-and-potatoes menus? I remember watchng a documentary about Julia Child once which suggested that one of the things which made her so successful was that she introduced mainstream America to the range of things that one could cook, doing so step by step: one of her first shows, if I recall correctly, was about making mashed potatoes with garlic. Garlic mashed potatoes was presumed to be an dish unusual to the mainstream audience of her viewers.

My guess would be that your mother's cooking preferences (presuming that she grew up in the US and wasn't so affluent that exposure to travel and different quisines and hired and specially trained cooks were common in her household) arise largely from having learned to cook in a generation where there were "staple" foods one produced frequently, looking to other national cuisines for ideas and recipes and techniques was not part of how most folks viewed cooking, there weren't a lot of cookbooks widely available from which to derive ideas, and most grocery stores would not have carried shark (just to use your example), so getting the necessary ingredients to experiment widely might have been difficult. I'd also think that cooking preferences (generalizing freely) were partially reflective of the underlying social assumption of the US as a melting pot where everybody was gradually expected to become just like everybody else, rather than the "salad bowl" concept currently preferred (just to toss in some topically appropriate metaphors!).

It seems to me that, currently, the average cook is more willing to experiment with different ingredients and recipes, but we have a lot more exposure to the practice of doing this (Food Network, for example), we have more resources at hand to support this (just looking at the presence of a section dedicated to cookbooks at Barnes & Noble), and the grocery stores in most non-small-towns carry a wide enough variety of supplies to enable the experimentation (like your shark filets).

So I'd say that the differences you picked out between your mother as a good cook, and you as a good cook, are more likely differences of culture and exposure (and, these days, where your mother would prefer to spend time and effort: my grandmother--who was a superb cook when I was a child and teenager--is only mediocre currently, because she put effort into cooking to please her family and show them affection; now that they're all gone, it's not worth the effort to experiment with cooking for herself alone, even though she's aware of more cooking possibilities) than the things a good cook must or mustn't do.

[ororo.livejournal.com]

I'm another one who can't answer the poll. Pull up a chair, my reasons are long.

Unusual and esoteric ingredients are lovely when one can afford them, but it doesn't have to be funky to be good food.
Advanced or complicated techniques are purely perspective-driven. I know some folks that think poaching an egg is too complicated. I know some that won't use a microwave while preparing a made-from-scratch dinner. I can break an egg with one hand like Audrey Hepburn does in Sabrina, but that's purely for purposes of showing off.
Use a gas stove It's preferable to me, but a must? I learned to cook on electric as did many others. I wouldn't put a must on it.
Bake from scratchA very ambitious thought. Being single and the only one around to do the washing up, I don't want to get that many dishes dirty. I've also added some ingredients to a box of brownie mix and saw the results disappear.
put effort into the visual presentation of the foodThis is something I like to do, probably because my parents belonged to a gourmet group that included presentation. Recall the veggies on sticks at the Annex? Pretty colors as well as tasty.
invent new recipesI love to do it, but I'm not comfortable with the "must." Some folks aren't adventurous enough to try from scratch, but do great new twists on old recipes.
make complicated dishesAnother perspective issue. While complicated can be fun, food, like many other things, can be ruined by overcomplication.
have more than twelve herbs and/or spices Feeling whimsical, I'll compare this to my thoughts on penis length. While a lot can be nice, it's more important to know what to do with what you got.
make food that tastes good To whom? A little too general. I could make a great chicken tika masala, but that wouldn't do curiousangel much good as Indian is not his favorite cuisine. wcg made a good point about knowing the audience.

I hope you aren't sorry you put up the poll.

not primarily follow recipes My dad always said follow the recipe exactly the very first time, after that, play with it to your heart's content. Much of what I have learned and retained from my father has to do with cooking. With baking, it's pretty important to stick with recipes or one might end up with Adventures in Leavening.
not serve prepared or packaged foods I won't serve packaged and call it my own, but if I do something to jazz it up, I have no problem with that. I do prefer scratch over packaged, mostly. I prefer my macaroni and cheese from a box. Call me weird.
not serve anything that could be an illustration in a 1955 home ec textbook Oh cool, I can bring sex in to compare again. As someone of a more kinky persuasion than I once said, "Sometimes you want the fancy spices and sometimes you just want a good steak."
not use frozen vegetables perhaps if that had the corrollary "when fresh were readily available." I prefer fresh, but there are times when frozen can work, especially if it's an ingredient to a larger dish. Plus while cooking, they may add needed liquid to the mix as they cook.
not use canned foodNot even cream of mushroom soup? Broth? Can't fathom doing without it.
not use white breadOne of the best turkey stuffing recipes I've had is made from Wonder Bread cubes. I don't consider it a stable, but it has its uses.
not avoid spices For some reason, I'm thinking of sex toys. Nothing to be afraid of, but to be used in the appropriate time and place.
not measure thingsI often don't, but in some cases it's disastrous if you don't. Reference my comment about leavening above.
not have failures in the kitchen Failures are learning experiences. I for one, would rather fail spectacularly than come up with something mediocre.


Damn, that was fun. :)

Along with being able to make a meal out of whatever's around, I think another important skill in good cooking is learning when to substitute an ingredient and when not to. A degree of showmanship is fun, but certainly not necessary.

and I really enjoyed the bourbon chicken you made when I visited you last.

*hugs*

[ororo.livejournal.com]

Sorry about the bold. I must have missed a / in there somewhere.

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.

[diony.livejournal.com]

I've considered this quite a bit recently. I think my boyfriend is quite a good cook and I am a pleasantly mediocre cook, but the only difference between our cooking is that he has a good memory for what ingredient combinations lead to what flavours. Thus he can taste something, determine that it needs to be richer, and know what to add that will maker it richer without overwhelming the other flavours. That sort of thing. I can't do it, yet, and he has no idea why he can, but it makes for very good food.

[mamatiger.livejournal.com]

(Just a note to start, I didn't like the "must/must not"
division because it frequently felt like "wrong question" --
I could have answered questions more easily with a "can/
cannot" format.)


>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.


Yeah, that. I think of Rivka as a good cook because she Knows
What She's Doing With Food. Also, she knows what she's doing
with many different *kinds* of food, which means she can much more
easily fake it with things she doesn't entirely know about. I think
of good cooks has *having* lots of spices and such on hand, because
I think of them as enjoying making a wide variety of meals that
all those spices are needed for, but I don't think *every* meal
requires a Minimum Spice Level[tm] before it qualifies as Good.

(I have no idea what spices or herbs do what, to what. I have to
follow recipes because I have no idea what to do with the stuff
otherwise -- how much to use, how long to cook etc etc). I am not
a Good Cook, but I can rise to the level of Competent Plain Cook,
if I work at it.)(I only burn myself, not the food. :P)(Well except
for letting the beans scorch...)

But just because I think that "having lots of knowlege/experience/
ingredients on hand" = "good cook", that doesn't mean I think they'd
have to test their skills to the utmost with every meal or something.
(And god forbid they not ever be allowed to fail! I mean, shit happens,
you know?)

If the people who eat the food say "Hey, that's GOOD!" then you
can't be a *bad* cook, can you?

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.

subsitance, good cook, chef

[starstraf.livejournal.com]

I think there is a whole range
I am a subsitance kitchen person - I can follow a recipie and usually get what it is supposed to be if I try really hard, but for me it is like doing a really hard chemistry exam and I do not enjoy it. I can add extra toppings to frozen pizza and do basics like mac and chesse from a box. If left alone in a kitchen I will be able to feed myself and not die of starvation.

A Good cook is someone that can on a regular basis turn things from the grocery store into a variety of food that their family will eat (ie tastes good) and pays some attention to nutritional value. A good cook should be able to do this within the family budget. A good cook might only prepare basic foods or only follow recipies. Cooking might be a chore for them but it is not 'hard work'

A chef is someone that gets rejuvinated from time in the kitchen (Sort of like an extrovert around people). Will experiment and come up with their own things. Will probally care more about presentation, sauses and such then a good cook.

IDEALLY there is both a good cook and a chef in each house - sometimes these are the same person (Pooch) sometimes they are differnt.