(raising hand)
Posted on 07/10/2005 9:37:53 PM PDT by Crackingham
Even as "food culture" blossoms in countless cookbooks and chef shows, many adults simply don't know cooking basics. Experts blame it on a transmission breakdown. While parents traditionally shared cooking tips with their kids, the passage of kitchen wisdom has become rarer among time-pressed modern families.
On a weekend when other kitchen classrooms at the Culinary Institute of America are packed with adults preparing paella and green mango salad, Chef Greg Zifchak is teaching Chicken Roasting 101.
Fifteen students in Zifchak's "Cook's Skill Development" class mimic his graceful stuffing, trussing and slicing with uneven results. Onions are chopped tentatively and tied-up drumsticks flop around. One student holds a green sprig up and asks "Is this thyme?"
"My mother was a working woman, a career woman," said 38-year-old Beth Nolcox, one of the students. "There wasn't that transfer of skills or recipes."
Call it the lost-in-the-kitchen generation - as families began eating together less often, a sizable number of people grew up never learning to brown ground beef slowly or to add butter to minestrone to heighten flavor.
John Nihoff, a professor of gastronomy at the culinary institute who studies food culture, said that as society became more work-oriented in the '60s, not only was Mom more likely to work outside the home, but workdays for both parents got longer.
With Mom and Dad both out of the house more, families cooked less and relied more on store-bought food. The old tradition of Mom passing on cooking skills suffered, Nihoff said. He notes that Americans now spend $121 billion a year on "home meal replacements" - partially- or fully-cooked dinners eaten at home that are bought in restaurants or supermarkets.
Many parents figure: Why roast a chicken when they're already rotating on the spit at the supermarket?
But even in families that prepared home-cooked dinners, younger adults say the after-school focus was more on tending to homework than to cooking.
"I knew how to boil water, but my mother never said, `This is what you have to do.' So I just kind of picked up everything myself," said Laura Boggs, a 22-year-old Albany resident. She took cooking lessons last summer from a "foodie" friend in return for teaching him to play guitar.
"I never touched a food processor before then," she said.
Chef Zifchak comes across adults with kitchen knowledge gaps all the time. He said none of the students in his recent skills class handled knives correctly. And he noticed students seemed overly impressed when he demonstrated how to saute fish.
"It was like, 'Oh my God, he makes it looks too easy,'" he said, "and all I did was heat up oil and put a piece of fish in the pan."
Ma taught me how to cook from a young age. While I can't say I approach her abilities in the kitchen, I must say that at least I can cook, unlike like many of my freinds, who either microwave or go out to eat, the latter of which is bad for the wallet.
I baked my first pie, lemon merengue, at age 7. My dad was a fantastic cook, and from what people tell me, I'm not too bad myself. I tried to get my oldest kids in the kitchen to learn the basics, but they couldn't be bothered.
I can't cook. I can make toast and cereal, and that's about it.
(raising hand)
And home economics classes have disappeared from the public schools.
I collected some great (and simple) recipes in home ec class that I use 25 years later.
I don't think it's always about family training though. My grandmother was a fantastic cook, my own mother, a stay at home mom could burn water, she was that bad and she tortured us with truly bad daily meals until I learned to cook to protect us all.
It is embarrassing and sad that people these days can't cook.
I cook for myself on a regular basis, and when I'm with family - I'm usually in charge of some part of the dinner table. And I'm a guy.
There are girls who don't know how to cook, and they consider it "liberating" to not have this knowledge, and therefore they must depend on restaurants and fast food to provide them with cooked meals.
Is there any wonder that the kids are estranged and distant from families, and that we are said to be raising generations of loners.. Bullshit.. we have a boomer generation that are narcissistic and soulless.. the sooner this phony generation dies off the better this world will be..
They brag to me and others, that there is no set meal time in their home, and if the kids or spouse is hungry they know where the freezer or the phone is ..Forget the health ramifications, or the fact that a family that eats together will raise a family that is 85% more likely graduate from college, earn an above average income or ever be arrested..
The kitchen table is the simplest way the save a child from a life of disappointment, and loveless interactions ..
The real shame is that these sorry parents will blame it on their own children (they are picky eaters, or they are never hungry when everyone else is).. Down deep they know that is a lie, they see their kids and marriage's sliding away without remorse.. SICK BASTARDS!
Don't get me started!!!
It doesn't stop with cooking! The knowledge of basic living skills is lower than ever before.
My mom and granny taught me how to cook at a very young age, too. The blessings of being FBI!!! ;-)
So true. I am lucky that I had an Italian mother (warm and loving, good cook) but NOT an Italian father. ;-)
Please tell me that isn't your kitchen counter.
Haha! My Dad is FBI, and the sweetest most understated guy there is. He's my role model. So they are not all terrors! ;-)
Haha! My Dad is FBI, and the sweetest most understated guy there is. He's my role model. So they are not all terrors! ;-)
I first learned to cook at about 13. I had an early morning paper route and Mom didn’t feel like getting up 4:00 AM. I didn’t feel like walking the route and delivering over a hundred papers in driving Yankee snowstorms without breakfast.
After the paper gig I still preferred fixing my own breakfast. After graduation I had to be at work by 5:00 AM – so knowing how to fix breakfast was again a handy skill. After my return from my second tour in Vietnam I lived off post. Unlike many I did not pick up the first available woman just to have someone to cook for me. I learned how to follow a recipe – it isn’t hard. I began to cook near gourmet meals as a way to impress women I was interested in. It works. By the time I married my late wife I was pretty good in the kitchen. When she was working and I was back in school I did the cooking. After she stopped working I did the cooking if she needed a break or we had company coming to dinner.
A display of tasteless body fuel.
Photo snagged from internet for illustrative purposes only.
My kitchen counter consists only of the finest Formica.™
The thought occurs that MREs are probably tastier.
I preferred the old LRRP rations.
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