On Food Porn (safe for the hungry)

I like writing about cooking, because I like reading about cooking.

I've been able to cook, at least a little bit, since I was about five. My mother was a lab tech (mostly phlebotomy) for a hospital, in a small town, and was on call every third day (which tells you how big the town was. She says she was able to cross the town, in a snowstorm, carrying a four year old, and with me walking, in 20 minutes. The next day she asked for directions to the hospital, "Go to the new stop-light, turn right and go half a block."

"How do I know the new stop light?" [this was a mostly rural area, one might have a "new" stop light, aged to a fare-thee-well]

(looking up at the light under which they were standing) "It's t'other one.")

So, lest my sister and I go hungry (or need to wake the neighbor upstairs) I was taught to make soup, from cans. I don't really recall this, but I don't really recall ever thinking the stove was a mystery either.

I also, so I'm told, showed an early fondess for good food. In my weaning my mother decided a pot roast (one of my grandmother's stellar items of cookery, she was mid-western bland, in the main, save for a few things, a goulash, and stuffed cabbage being the two I recall... leftovers from her grandmother's youth in Prague) was tender enough to give me. The next day Gerber was seen to have lost a customer, as I refused to swallow the tinned beef. I couldn't keep it out of my mouth, but I, so it seems, could; and did, refuse to swallow it.

The first real cooking I remember learning was french toast (which is really German Toast; the name was changed in WW1 when sauerkraut became liberty cabbage). At the age of, roughly, 14 I was in charge of cooking dinner, which chore I kept until I was about 18, and my mother was no longer working, outside the family bookstore.

Which is why, I suppose, I find it interesting that there are people who don't cook. It's as strange to me as people who don't read.

I know people like to read about food. I like to read about food. I have linear feet of books about food (not so many pure cook books, though I have a few). Books on butchery, on pasta, On Food and Cooking, on bread, meats, ingredients, history, cheese, fermenting, beer, wine, you name it.

I am not, in my opinion, all that great a food writer. I detail, with callous disregard of non-cooks, things I've made. I don't have wonderful stories about the pasta dish I was taught to make in a small restaurant in the Tyrol; because I've not done such (but when I made the pasta, it was at least that yellow... I had eggs from cage-free chickens who get to scratch... the recipe is simple, all the moisture [save for a few drops of olive oil] is from egg yolks).

Which is why I am amused at the offers to let me come and cook. To me, it's not a big deal. I understand the urge to eat other people's cooking. It's why I root around for restaurants (and if I spend two weeks in a city, it's a certainty that I'll have found someplace worth reccomending).

But I post the bare bones of a meal (you could makes something like it from my description) and people swoon.

I don't really get that.