Cooking

Some people say that traditional cooking skills are dying out, that the younger generation has forgotten to make even the basics: a simple gravy, custard, or short crust pastry—what in the heck is short crust pastry is probably the collective camcorder stabilizer thought bubble, most will have trouble with any kind pastry, period. Perhaps women’s liberation is to blame, or not. Once women figured out that their place isn’t necessarily in the kitchen and acting pretty much as indentured slaves to the menfolk and home economics was abolished, there went most of our cooking skills. Watching Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations the other day, I think the snarky New Yorker had a good microdermabrasion point. Instead of abolishing home economics altogether—I suppose because it was deemed sexist—they could have widened the scope instead and included the boys. Males have to eat too you know! Plus, some of the best chefs in the world—actually, and it hurts to say this because it feels like a betrayal of my gender—or rather, most of them, are males; so obviously, the hard money lenders sc talent is strong from that side. Is it important that everyone knows how to cook? I think so. Can everyone do it? Yes. Can everyone do it well? No. If it’s just a matter of survival and nourishment, anyone can boil anything or put a piece of meat to the flame. That’s simple enough. Making a satisfying meal or transforming simple ingredients into something delicious, that takes talent and skill; and sometimes, it is even a gift. As humans who will eat and drink our tankless water heaters weight several times over in meat, grain, and all other kinds of food items, the least we can do is know how to prepare them when we encounter them in the kitchen. To learn how not to waste a portion by overcooking or to extend it so that we can share with others—we never really know with these things, with all these apocalyptic TV shows, who knows, that modest dinner just might be our last feast. What could be more metal detectors useful to us and easier to learn (we get to practice the skills at least once a day or once a week or something; we all have to eat, we have to take a turn at the cooking at some point) than basic cooking skills? Even if you’re not interested in laying out 5-course meals or some fancy dinners, at least you can say that you can feed yourself, and maybe a guest or two, a decent roast chicken, a proper omelette, and that you can tell when a steak is grilled and to what doneness, and the easiest of them all, throw everything into a pot and make a stew. It seems though that our skills have rusted even worse than that. All these years or decades of eating out, ordering-in, or ready made supermarket meals have reduced us to people who cannot read kitchen measurements, have no knife skills—where chopping an onion or any other vegetable might pose a serious hazard, and cannot shop for produce. It is a sad, sad, state indeed. Hopefully, all this interest in food (although it is, admittedly, in eating it) will slowly bring us all slowly back into the kitchen. Of course, it is always going to be easier to buy the food someone else prepared. And, naturally, no one wants to slave all day to prepare meals; but, every so often, when the mood strikes you, or when you crave something that you just have to have, maybe this time, it’s something you can whip up yourself, because you can.