pecunium

So, the "what would you like to do with me," post led to a question.

How did I come by my cooking skills, formal training, or self-teaching.

The answer is self-teaching.

It's probably come up before, in bits and pieces, but what learned of cookery I learned, mostly, from books.

And painful practice.

"On food and cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" by Harold McGee is probably where my real journey began.

Before that I was an adequate slapper together of a small handful of family recipes. I could also follow a recipe. I'd made a cake from scratch (not so successful) and had mixed results with paté a choux for eclairs.

Afterwards... I was trying all sorts of things.

Why? Because I'd been shown the manual. Go to a restaurant, and like the meal? "I can do that and then I'd look at a recipe for it (or something similar), and try to figure out what wasn't there; to match what I'd liked (the gulyas leves at Paprikas Fono (now, sadly defunct) in Ghiradelli Square, had more lemon zest, and something else... Ah! that's the secret, the paprika has to be toasted in oil; then you sauté some of the potatoes in it.

Bread was easy, and brutal. A simple loaf was nothing. But the crumb was flat, lacking in flavor.

My mother had a recipe for dill-bread. Then it disappeared. I tried for 3 years to figure out what was missing. I figured it out, mostly, when I realised it needed milk. Last year I finally realised it needed scalded milk.

I bought more how-to books. The Time-Life Good Cook series. Tom Colicchio's "Think like a chef, The Bread Bible, a copy of Escoffier, and Larousse.

When I read a description of a meal (say the orange-gingee chicken in Early Autumn by Robert Parker) I gave it a try.

I ate a lot of mistakes.

I do a lot of "classical" western cooking, because I like it.

But I also like mexican, and greek, and chinese, and japanese, and thai, and indian (which reminds me, I need to call Bajun, and get his mothers recipe for curry... Nepalese... mmmmm!) and, and, and.

When I have money, I take people to dinner.

I agree with Nero Wolfe, no one should be hungry. I don't have a Fritz Brenner to make hospitality trivial, so I get to play at it myself. When I made lobscouse I'd never had it, but I knew what I wanted it to taste like, and I played with how many juniper berries I added (a lot more than they asked for).

That may be the secret of my cookery... I can, in the way Ansel Adams saw pictures before he made them, taste what things ought to be, and can deconstruct how they came to be when someone else has done the cooking.

If anyone ever wants to cook with me, just ask me over. I'll bring the knives.