-PJ
Posted on 08/19/2022 5:07:17 AM PDT by DoodleBob
Apparently, it’s now both regressive and elitist to do your own cooking. Taking a hobbyish pleasure in preparing a roast is not only insulting to the lower classes who can’t access the same tools, but even worse, it’s gender normative. How dare I, a woman, have opinions about protein content in flour or how many times a chicken breast should be flipped when cooked in a saucepan? It’s so housewife of me.
When a mid-sized anonymous Twitter account made the argument on Monday, concluding that the real revolution will not be in home kitchens but in restaurants, the person behind it was promptly rebuked by thousands of Twitter users from every wing of the political mansion.
Only a handful of radicals stood publicly by the tweet author. But note that even as they publicly disavow such an extreme example, an idea that home cooking is an upper-class luxury is still held in practice by many Americans.
That is especially true when it comes to farm-food culture and the backlash against it. The days of farmers’ markets being a leftist thing seem to be over. Homesteaders, homeschoolers, and the very online right (this writer included) have united behind the cause of returning to traditional diets and forms of food preparation, such as buying your meat from a local farm, growing your own vegetables, and even rendering your own fats. This has been bashed for being elitist and impossible, never mind the fact that several of these recommendations are more economical when done well—and much closer to how our grandparents lived just two generations ago, in the Great Depression.
The suggestion, of course, is that middle- and lower-class Americans can’t afford to eat healthfully, which almost always involves eating at home, and shouldn’t be expected to. So let them eat Little Debbies.
This is reflected in politics as well as pop-culture. Think about the last campaign ad you watched. If the candidate was an old-school Republican, after engaging in slow-motion tumbling with his kids on a lush green lawn, the politician likely joined his wife in the kitchen to bake homemade cookies. If she was a Democrat, meanwhile, she probably strolled into a bodega to get something premade. Joe Biden has made much of his presidential brand off ordering at an ice cream shop. These appeals to the common man imply something not just about the voter base each party has historically targeted with such ads, but the assumption present in both: homemade is an aspirational indulgence.
And indeed, as the Wall Street Journal reported Monday, compared to restaurant prices today, home cooking is a luxury. The inflationary gap between restaurants and grocery stores is now the widest it has been since the 1970s, which is why, despite labor shortages, longer wait times, and a 7.6 percent increase in prices, restaurants are faring better than grocery stores. As supermarket prices have increased 13.1 percent, and cooking your own food takes valuable time, more average Americans have found they can save money by paying someone else to do the work.
A friend of mine likes to say that every problem in the modern world can be boiled down to frozen peas. The bag of frozen peas is the epitome of our culture’s approach to food, in which efficiency, rather than health or enjoyment, is the highest good. The luxury of home cooking is not only the cost of the ingredients, which restaurants can buy in bulk and closer to the source, but also the time it takes to cook them. Our modern economy does not afford men, nor most women, the hours that good home cooking requires, since these hours must always come above and beyond those spent for pay. So instead, we eat out, or use shortcuts—frozen peas.
We should note that the people going to restaurants are solidly middle class, and they’re not just eating fast food. The Journal reports that Americans making $75,000 per year and above are choosing Chili’s over casseroles. They are eating cheap alternatives to home cooking, but they still choose a sit-down meal; this is not merely a McDonald’s drive-through phenomenon. Why does that matter? Because it suggests this decision is not about paying the lowest possible price. As long as middle-class Americans can afford to eat their dinner at a table, they will.
What is the matter with eating out more often, anyway? Taverns go back about as far as anything. But even if there weren’t differences in quality between home-cooked food and eating out—and there are—quality-of-life differences develop when the public house becomes your kitchen table. While most of us would laugh at the Twitter proposition that the real revolution is eating at Applebee's, a rejection of the home as the hub of the food economy is indeed a revolutionary idea.
My Irish-German family was much the same.
My German grandpa was a baker by trade.
He made all the wedding cakes when my big sisters got married.
After you liquify them, add vodka, Worcestershire and Tabasco sauce.
Oh, Fun! Mom made Wedding Cakes as a sideline for many, many years. She managed to wear out TWO Kitchen Aid mixers!
My favorite one of hers was one that had a working fountain under the elevated cake. Her brother, who was a fish hobbyist made it for her from fish tank parts, LOL!
Diana, can you please add me to your garden ping list? I have not gardened by myself so this is new. Used to garden, can and freeze with my mom...!!!
Imagine that.
All the times growing up when we ate our mom’s home cooked meals because we couldn’t afford to eat out, didn’t mean we were dirt poor. It actually meant we were the elite.
Who would have thought?
Not to mention, when you cook your own, you know what’s in it and don’t have to worry about what some jerk in the kitchen is adding to your food in the form of his own bodily fluids.
Yep. I use a three way stone with mineral oil.
Now THAT was fancy!
For soups and stews, I add all the veggies fresh.
I pressure can a lot of soup broth and meat, and the turkey broth with meat at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Then when I want fresh soup or stew, I open a can and put it in the pot to heat up. I dice up the veggies fresh and add them based on how long it take them to cook, like carrots and turnips go in first and cook for at least 10 mins, then I add the celery and onions. That way none of the veggies are over or under cooked.
A great tip from the past!
Or woman.
I *LOVE* gravy.
-PJ
I think it is a texture & size together thing. And if tomatoes are cooked too long, their essence goes into the released liquid, leaving mush.
I can handle *stewed* tomatoes in a soup, in small pieces.
I adore fresh tomatoes, oven-stewed in olive oil, baked in a tart, etc,
I make small batches. Play around with the size of the pieces and the degree of doneness. I like them quartered, cooked just until they begin to release liquid and are a bit wrinkled (I don’t skin or seed) and then add the cream sherry (not cooking type; drinking type)and cook for a minute until it combines, taste and add a pinch of brown sugar if needed, then finish with a lump of butter and let that melt off the heat. Seasonings are individual, I add a little salt and pepper.
It’s like spinach, in a way. Growing up, we only had canned spinach. I liked it ok cold with a lot of vinegar, but it wasn’t a favorite and I hated it warm. Fast forward to discovering fresh spinach, barely wilted with a bacon vinaigrette.
it’s that sort of thing, to me.
To thicken the sauce, just stir in a little UltraGel. It works hot or cold and doesn’t separate in the fridge or if reheated.
You’re In! You’ll get a ping tomorrow morning when the new thread starts for the week. We’re glad to help!
‘Our type’ have always been ahead of the curve. That’s why we CAN weather anything Mother Government throws at us! ;)
I loved Little Debbies, especially the safari cakes and dunking sticks, but those days are long gone.
I got my garlic all trimmed and cleaned up.
I am still harvesting onions. The advice online is when half the plants are flopped over, just step on the rest and then harvest the rest of the crop.
However, I REFUSE to make a plant stop growing until it’s good and ready to on its own and wow has it paid off. The size of some of the onions I am now harvesting, that i let continue to grow, is phenomenal!
My butternut squash is doing very well and I have green beans at various stages of growth.
My pepper plants are the tallest I have ever had due to the nice warm weather.
For less than the price of McDonalds for two, I can grill a rib-eye steak and have a baked potato on the side.
Yes, I make a very good split pea soup in my slow cooker! Yum. I've gotten compliments on my chicken cacciatore.
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