“Any young woman who can read, can cook.” — Grandma Galloway (my mother’s mother)
As a family of four children and two parents, living on a doctor’s salary, dining out regularly was not a wise budgeting option. Beyond the financial incentive to cook our own meals, meals were family time. Financial and family rationales for cooking still apply today. As we turn, in our own homes, to cookbooks, and other sources of recipes, our mother’s recitation of her mother’s wisdom echoes in our memory.
While we know this wisdom from our maternal grandmother, it goes back to the dawn of this nation. The first deliberately, distinctly American cookbook was written as a self-help book for young women. American Cookery published in 1796, within the first decade of these United States, was written “by Amelia Simmons, an American Orphan.” The lengthy subtitle ends with the promise that this book is “adapted to this country, and all grades of life.”
Spring forward to the 1970s, and the Brown family was in and out of the kitchen, with food prepared in accordance with several cookbooks, mostly the familiar red-checkered Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. In addition, there was an ever-growing recipe box, filling with index cards, first in Mother’s hand, and then in my eldest sister’s hand.
On leaving home, I found myself, for the first time, eating cafeteria food daily. I complained incessantly to my table-mates, through the first term. Then we were freed to take a full meal plan, or a minimal plan, turning to our own skills in the resident kitchens of our dorms. I went shopping, busted out my carefully selected kitchen tools, and the proof wafted to my classmates: my grumbling at table was not empty talk. It turns out that any young man who can read, can cook.
Beyond homespun food, beyond the enabling of the self-made woman, cookbooks came to mean that “any young woman who can read, can be a gourmet cook. This was the innovation of Julia Child, an American chef, trained in France.
She began with a sincere passion for good food and the pleasures of cooking, studying in France in the ’50s with chef/friend Simone Beck. With the help of Louisette Bertolle, another dedicated food lover, they created a cooking school called L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes and later, in 1961, completed their groundbreaking cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Her book and the popular television show that followed made the mysteries of fancy French cuisine approachable, introducing gourmet ingredients, demonstrating culinary techniques, and most importantly, encouraging everyday “home chefs” to practice cooking as art, not to dread it as a chore.
Julia Child not only demystified, what was then considered, the most refined cuisine, she also added a how-to cooking show, on PBS. From 1963, Americans, who did not have someone to demonstrate cooking, could turn to the television screen and watch the written instructions of a cookbook recipe play out before them.
The dawn of the internet, brought cooking instructions, for cuisine from every corner of the globe, to anyone who could figure out how to access it. There was plenty of home recipe sharing, which, over time, shifted from amateur blogs to Pinterest. Blogs that were really good survived, and even thrived. I enjoyed the photography and storytelling around recipes by a young French woman, whose blog is still Chocolate & Zucchini. The title in the tab is: “Chocolate & Zucchini | Simple Recipes from my Paris Kitchen.”
Then again, I get a hankering for rustic German fare when I think back to my lieutenancy, and how do you make that Korean dish? Lots of choices present themselves, from tie-ins to professional publishers, to home-business or hobby blogs. With the availability of blogging software, and the incredibly dropping price of quality optics, skill and dedication distinguish websites.
Speaking of Korean food, a recent search turned up an example that integrates the wisdom of “any one who can read, can cook” with a global audience, expecting not just words and pictures, but a short video: “Cooking Korean food with Maangchi: Korean cooking, recipes, videos, and blog.” With unfamiliar cuisine, the observant person may be stymied by the basic problem of getting ingredients, hence the specialty grocery store walkthrough:
This video brings us to the furthest evolution away from the written recipe, the video recipe, in which you watch the ingredients being added and each step taken to prepare the dish. So, anyone who can pay attention long enough to watch a short video, can cook!
Steak Frite Bites
With a thin piece of steak wrapped around a handful of french fries, steak frites just became finger food.
RECIPE: https://t.co/ZJKit1uwKZ pic.twitter.com/q9ucB7o7KE— Tastemade (@tastemade) October 20, 2018
So, what’s cookin’?
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