how to cook
The cafe I work in serves their pies, quiches and fritattas with a little side salad. Sometimes it’s a simple green salad with a little vineagrette, but usually we give customers a couple of scoops of our salad-of-the-day. Today we had two choices, and one of my customers asked for a taste of each. After lunch I caught her writing the list of ingredients on a napkin. She admitted that she’s not a particularly adventurous cook but the flavour combination in the salad had inspired her to have a go. Then she said she never knows what herbs go with things, and that she needs to find a book that lists all the uses for different herbs (she grows them in her garden, but doesn’t know how to cook them.) I asked her if she had a copy of Stephanie Alexander’s ‘The Cook’s Companion’ and she said she hadn’t heard of it. Stephanie devotes a chapter to every ingredient (just shy of 120 in her first edition) and helpfully lists all the other things that each ingredient goes well with.
The Cooks Companion (2nd Ed. 2004)
I have the 1st Ed, 1996.
She said she has recipe books, but only cooks the things she knows how to cook – over and over again – and doesn’t try new things because she lacks the confidence to give it a go. We are a cooking school as well as a Cafe so of course I told her about our classes, and she said “oh, I thought it was just for kids!”
It’s interesting, in this day and age of celebrity chefs and Masterchef and foodie magazines with extensive How To sections – and cooking blogs! – that there are still people out there for whom cooking is a bit of a mystery. But I think they just need to be shown how to do it. Not by watching a chef on television – because they make everything look really easy, and they do it too quickly, and in Nigella’s case the camera is usually focused on her cleavage and not the pot – and not by reading a recipe in a book or a magazine. You need somebody standing beside you, showing you how to do each thing, how to judge cooking times and what to do if you make a mistake and how you can take little shortcuts in the kitchen that will save you time and energy… In short, you need to grow up in a house where somebody is a decent cook and you need to help them in the kitchen as much as possible.
My mum is a great cook, and although I didn’t do a lot of cooking in her kitchen (I stirred things, or put the leg of lamb in the oven when she asked me to) I must have learned a few things along the way because when I moved out of home I was able to follow a recipe and not chop any limbs off while dicing onions. Learning to cook a whole meal, with meat and vegetables that came out of different pots and took varying lengths of time to prepare, was a slow process and I can recall a few meals where the meat was overdone or the mashed potatoes particularly lumpy. But I had enough confidence to give most things a go and over the years I’ve only had a couple of epic failures. One in particular, involving smoked salmon and a jar of artichoke hearts. But I laughed it off and made a mental note not to try that again.
Our cooking classes are for people of all skill levels but I would be surprised if the woman I chatted with today signed herself up for any of them; I don’t think she’d believe she could do it. Isn’t that a shame?
Here’s what she jotted down on her napkin, or thereabouts:
Green Salad:
Broccolini (cut into 5cm lengths)
Green beans
Asparagus
Sun dried tomatoes
Pine nuts
Seeded mustard
I suggested she steam the vegetables or plunge them into a pot of boiling water for a minute, then immediately rinse under cold water to stop them cooking and preserve the green. She’d never heard of that way of cooking vegetables, she’s always just boiled them until they’re soft. And she’d never cooked broccolini – “it’s one of those things that I always see at the supermarket and wonder what on earth people use it for.”
Sometimes I feel like I’ve got so much more to learn in the kitchen, and other days I realise I’m doing alright.
Over to you…