On Food Porn (safe for the hungry)
Jan. 28th, 2005 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumI 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2005-01-29 08:09 am (UTC)I don't really get that.
This is just my opinion. :p There is a reason we call such posts food porn. For people who appreciate culinary skills, which you seem to have a remarkable instinct for, it's a connection of sort. The descriptions of the simple ingredients, which I think are the key to the whole puzzle myself, starts the brain to thinking how that tastes, the freshness , the scents, the very sensation of the food that you're describing, tickles a pleasure region in the brain.
My ex bf had NO palate. He wasn't into new foods, new experiences frightened him period. Makes me wonder honestly how I ever got involved with him but that's a whole other post! :p My point is this - there are some people that get stimulated by new restaurants, new recipes, new oral pleasures from the kitchen. I'm one of them.
It's nice to read about someone who takes such pleasure in their cooking, for it is, for me, an act of love.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-29 09:35 am (UTC)The first, well that comes from some attention to the ingredients. The second is trickier. It requires some detail, but not that much (no need to say I heated the pan to the point toasted sesame oil starts to scorch and cool it with an infusion of peanut [which would be one way to know when a wok was ready for veggies, but it could give an off flavor to the oil. I digress).
I would have to say, given all the food writing I've read, my food porn style comes from a writer of detective stories. Robert B. Parker. I have a couple of dishes I reconstructed from sketches he's dones of meals Spenser cooks. It is because of him I elected, some years ago, to essay cumberland sauce.
TK
no subject
Date: 2005-01-29 10:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-29 10:50 am (UTC)K.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-29 04:04 pm (UTC)I ought to review some of the places near here (esp. now as I am home more often). There are a few which I can, without reservation, recommend to one and all, and should.
TK
no subject
Date: 2005-02-07 12:20 am (UTC)I can ad lib, but if I'm working with something truly spectacular or foriegn to me, I tend to be a little more careful... ;)