The young women of my nephew’s generation (he’s 22) seem to
take great pride in the fact that they can’t cook or as they say, “can’t boil
water.”
Why is that I wonder?
Did their mothers not teach them how to cook
or about the immense feeling of satisfaction when you make a meal or bread or a
cake or anything else from scratch?
Did
they not pass on the sense of pride one feels when given a compliment on how
good something they’ve made tastes?
Or
perhaps their mothers never learned to cook themselves.
It would be hard to pass on the art of
cooking if one never learned themselves.
Maybe I find the concept of not knowing how to cook so
foreign because I was taught to cook by a mother who very rarely uses anything
out of a box or can. I didn’t have a
store bought cookie until I was a teenager and was at a friend’s house. I’m only in my late 30’s so it’s not like
store bought cookies were some new innovation.
I was four years old the first time I made cookies with my
mother. I remember kneeling on a dining
room chair, helping my mom stir together the dry ingredients of a recipe,
learning to crack an egg. (She was smart
enough to have me crack them in a separate bowl or else we would have eaten a
lot of shell pieces with our cookies.)
She taught me how to use measuring cups and spoons by giving me my own
bowl in which to measure flour, sugar, baking powder into. Over the years we made all different kinds of
cookies from chocolate chip, to peanut butter, to ginger snaps to oatmeal and
more. As I grew older, I graduated from
doing more watching than cooking to being responsible for mixing the dry
ingredients together, to mixing them with the wet ingredients, to being able to
take the hot pan from the oven (this was a big deal to a 12 year old), to
finally making the entire recipe by myself for the first time.
Unfortunately, now-a-days making cookies means buying a
package from the refrigerated section of the grocery store and either breaking
the pre-cut dough into pieces or slicing a log of dough into circles and
tossing them in the oven.
Baking cookies with my mother throughout the years are some
of my fondest memories and maybe the reason why, as an adult, one of my
favorite things to bake are cookies.
When I do hear someone say they don’t know how to cook, I
want to tell them they can learn. If you
can read and follow directions, you can learn how to cook. Get a cookbook that looks interesting, read
through the recipes, and choose one to try.
This is how I made Coq Au Vin for the first time. Yes, I know how to cook but I’d never made it
before and didn’t know anyone who had.
The first time, the chicken came out a little dry. The second time, the chicken stuck to the
bottom of the pan, but the third time, the third time, it came out great. You can
learn to cook. It just takes patience
and practice.
And start with something easy. Like cookies.
(This first appeared in October 2011. My apologies for the reposting.)
