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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Date: 2005-01-30 05:30 am (UTC)It wasn't until she started hanging out with our group that she got into eating all sorts of ethnic foods and branching out. We would have potlucks almost every week, and we knew she had no experience with food when we sent her out to get spinach and she came back with chicory. heh.
Eight years later? She'll eat almost anything and she's learned to cook and isn't half bad at it, either. She's very proud of herself. She's still not rabid about it or watches much food porn, but she tries.