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 09:31 am (UTC)What one needs, to become a good cook is, in the words of Larry Niven, a willingness to eat one's mistakes. Rarely have I made things which were absolutely inedible. Some have been things I'll never do again, but most have been edible.
These days (with a lot of cooking under my belt) I can usually step into the kitchen and be 3/4rs fearless about what's coming to the table, though I do have a couple of stand-by dishes for impromptu meals to impress.
TK
no subject
Date: 2005-01-29 09:38 am (UTC)I believe that, based on what I've read in your LJ, you're probably a better cook than I am. I don't read a lot of cookbooks. I just taste things I like and then come up with weird combos to put together. I have made some amazing things just by luck, but because I"m not good at following directions, and I don't read a lot about food, my experiments can be hazardous. Unless I"m sure of the foods I'm using, I don't experiment on guests. (So modifications on a theme I've already used with success will go for guests, but rarely will I use brand new ideas).
But I started with easy things. I'd buy tomato sauce and try to figure out how to "spice it up" so that I didn't have the same damned, boring meal for the next six weeks because one sauce was on sale. For me, a break through came in from a song on an a capella CD I've got. A trucker's singing about how he's got to get home for his wife's houston hash. He listed the ingredients, so I decided to see what would happen if I used them (slightly modified due to vegetarianism), and I ended up with an amazing dish.
My world imploded. It's never been the same. You can cook without recipes as long as you have an idea! Oh, recipes are amazing. I adore what I've made when I've sat down and followed complex recipes, but I just don't have the patience for all that measuring. Recipe cooking is for when taoist_pagan's home to keep me on track and make sure that I actually use a measuring cup and spoon.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-29 05:52 pm (UTC)Er, I suppose. Anyone can boil water and put pasta in it. Not everyone necessarily has the creativity to look at what is at hand and come up with a dish or two. I fall into that category; I'm usually okay with a recipe at hand, but the few times I've tried improvising, the results have been at best tolerable. I like reading your food porn posts because I can sometimes get a bit of inspiration from them. You may not see it as a big deal, but it's probably more impressive to people like me who haven't developed a particular talent for it.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-30 06:14 pm (UTC)Pick something which has room for variation... if the prep has room for variety all the better. Omlettes and soups are good.
Learn to make a basic one. Then play with it.
Alternate method. Find something with lots of variety, but ample recipes. Make the differing versions. You will come to the point you can riff on the themes (it is like music, some is symphonic (tortes) some is loose and folkey (soups) some is jazz... omelettes.
Some cooks are more prone to one style than another, some are ecclectic and some are just whores for the new.
TK
no subject
Date: 2005-01-30 05:32 am (UTC)