The only time my dad came in the kitchen was to ask when dinner was
ready. True to his generation he literally couldn't boil water. My
mother and grandmother taught me to cook.
Long
before there were neighborhood farmers' markets, my mom liked to stop
at roadside stands to buy fresh tomatoes, corn, and strawberries. She
followed recipes but also liked to experiment. She enjoyed having my
sister and myself in the kitchen with her because she believed that
cooking was fun.
I regarded it as a parental duty to teach my sons as my mom taught me.
When
Franklin was six years old I gave him a step stool so he could reach
the cutting board, a bunch of parsley, and a knife. He did an excellent
job mincing the parsley. The only problem we had was when his mom saw
that I had outfitted him with a very sharp 8" chef's knife.
She
disapproved mightily. But no blood was spilled that day, and Franklin
has grown up to be a very good cook, so has his younger brother. Having
taught them both a few kitchen skills, they are off and running.
The only time my dad came in the kitchen was to ask when dinner was
ready. True to his generation he literally couldn't boil water. My
mother and grandmother taught me to cook.
Long
before there were neighborhood farmers' markets, my mom liked to stop
at roadside stands to buy fresh tomatoes, corn, and strawberries. She
followed recipes but also liked to experiment. She enjoyed having my
sister and myself in the kitchen with her because she believed that
cooking was fun.
I regarded it as a parental duty to teach my sons as my mom taught me.
When
Franklin was six years old I gave him a step stool so he could reach
the cutting board, a bunch of parsley, and a knife. He did an excellent
job mincing the parsley. The only problem we had was when his mom saw
that I had outfitted him with a very sharp 8" chef's knife.
She
disapproved mightily. But no blood was spilled that day, and Franklin
has grown up to be a very good cook, so has his younger brother. Having
taught them both a few kitchen skills, they are off and running.
Recently a reader of the blog and a friend, Connie Ciampanelli,
sent a remembrance of her mom. Connie picked up her mom's enthusiasm
for cooking, even as, over time, she discovered farmers' markets and a
different style of cooking.
Mom was a cook of the fifties, we had mostly canned vegetables. Once she brought home an extremely exotic item: Del Monte canned zucchini with tomato sauce. We were enthralled. Yuk. Major, major yuk!
I
remember clearly going to the neighborhood store and seeing these big
purple vegetables and wondering what the hell they were. I know now.
Eggplant. Eggplant? What's eggplant? I don't see any eggs. Wow, I do digress...
Mom
went back to work when my youngest brother started school, so I would
have been about thirteen or fourteen. As the oldest girl, I was
bequeathed the responsibility of cooking weeknight suppers (we were
working class folks, it wasn't called dinner) for the seven of us. Here
is a capsule of Mom's instructions:
"Peel (here insert
vegetable: potatoes, carrots, green beans, themselves a rarity) cut
into quarters, cover with water, bring to a boil and cook for one
hour." Everything was cooked for one hour, yes, let's cook the
nutrients right out of those babies.
EVERY
supper had potatoes, never rice, Pasta was spaghetti and meatballs once
a week. On Wednesdays. Dad liked his routine. Anything more exotic was
not ignored but unheard of. We had meat with baked potatoes, mashed
potatoes, boiled potatoes. Dad would settle for nothing else.
Scalloped? Au Gratin? Nah, too fancy. Rice? That's for sissies. God,
when I think of the way we ate! But the salvation is that it was all
done with love.
These days, how we learn to cook and
who teaches us has become more than just a personal issue. The current
health care debate includes an argument that medical costs are
increasing at an alarming rate partly because of how we eat and how
much we rely on ready-made and fast foods.
Michael Pollan has a thoughtful essay,"Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch," in the New York Times Magazine,
where he talks about the effect of mass marketing on the way we cook
and feed ourselves. The net effect, he says, is that today Americans
infrequently cook "from scratch" and usually regard cooking as a chore,
something to be dealt with as quickly as possible.
Statistically,
he explains, when people cook their own food, obesity levels decline.
The question is, how to encourage people to get back into the kitchen?
Looking
back at how I learned to cook, like Connie, I was lucky that my mother
taught me to enjoy cooking. In the kitchen the other day I wanted to
show Michael, our youngest son, how to roast a chicken breast with
parsley. He looked at me mystified. "Why do you think you need to show
me? Franklin and I are your sons. We know already."
By osmosis or example, if we're lucky, our kids pick up on our love of cooking. That's a very good thing.
David Latt is an Emmy-award winning television producer who turns to cooking to alleviate stress. He shares his experiences with food and his favorite recipes on his blog Men Who Like To Cook.