January 7, 2003

By Paul Reidinger

MY MOTHER LEARNED to cook from her mother, a late-Victorian puritan woman who shunned ornamentation and flourish but nonetheless managed to produce tasty and rather grand food of the sort we still read about today in the pages of Dickens and, perhaps, Scott Fitzgerald in a rare Midwestern moment. Her menus consisted of roasts, winter soups, breads, and braised leafy greens from the garden my grandfather tended behind their big prairie-style house; these were the foods that sustained body and spirit in a part of the country that was – and still is, despite the depredations of global warming – jokingly described as having two seasons, winter and July, except it wasn't really a joke. Grandmother's dishes were good for us, as we were often shatteringly reminded, but we ate and enjoyed them all the same, though sometimes with deep apprehension. Once I watched her adding minced scallions to hamburger meat and was aghast – that wasn't the way they did it at McDonald's! – but her adulteration proved, in the end, to be flavorful. And, I'm sure, healthful.

I wish I could say I learned to cook from my mother as she learned from hers, but that would be stretching a point. I often watched my mother cook, but my attitude in those moments was the radically impatient one of the hungry child. When will the cookies/the roast/the casserole be ready? When are we going to eat? I'm hungry! I am sure that my insistent piping, like that of a small bird irritatingly perched on a windowsill, amounted to a kind of torture for her. Hungry children have no sense of the time or effort it takes to cook something; they are hungry now, and they nag their mother until something happens.

But ... children, hungry and otherwise (if there is an otherwise, since even well-fed children are chronically famished), are also absorbent, and wherever they are and whatever they are doing, they are soaking in the grown-up scene without meaning to. I watched my mother make cookie dough and spaghetti sauce and Yorkshire pudding; I saw her roast turkeys and standing rib roasts; I studied her as she whipped up a simple frosting – softened butter mixed with powdered sugar and maybe a drop or two of vanilla – for us to spread on graham crackers. Years into my adulthood, that little recipe returned one day to my consciousness, and when I made my own version of the frosting and spread it on a graham cracker, I found it was quite as satisfying as it had been when I was seven.

So if I didn't exactly learn how to cook from my mother, I did learn a lot about food. I absorbed her biases against white bread, for instance, and soda (it will rot your teeth); I came to understand that a meal is something to be sat down to and appreciated – that it is a central and meaningful event, not merely a pit stop on the race course of a day. But not until I was far away and on my own, beyond even the protection of the university food service, did it finally occur to me that meals actually had to be prepared by somebody, and that, in my own life, the somebody was going to have to be me.

A college friend confided to me, when we'd become graduate students, that he went out for every meal. I was stunned. The cost! The bother! The upper-class waifdom of it. By then, of course, I was learning to cook; I was a nascent recluse, and being able to cook meant not having to leave the house to forage. And I had been lucky: Right out of college, I'd worked for a man who knew how to cook, and just as I had watched my mother years before, I'd watched him and been impressed by how simple it could be, really, to make good, honest food. From memory I summoned dishes my mother made. I watched cooking shows on public television and was reminded that it is much easier to watch someone make food than it is to follow a recipe – a revelation to my otherwise literary mind. I boiled chickens; I developed a pasta with Canadian bacon and broccoli and grated cheese.

All this was, you might say, the cooking school of life, with a curriculum as erratic and rich as life itself. If the point of formal education is mainly to give people the tools to educate themselves – self-education being the only true education, and a lifelong endeavor – then the point of organized culinary education must be, in some measure, the impartment of confidence that one can sally forth after class and actually make that timballo (with the semolina crust) or brine that pork tenderloin.

There is, of course, professional culinary education. If you follow the course of study at the California Culinary Academy or City College of San Francisco, you are likely to find yourself working in a restaurant when you finish. At that level, culinary education is like virtually every other form of higher education in America: an exercise in job training. I am aghast nowadays (quite as aghast as I was at the scallions in the hamburger) when young people tell me they have majored in marketing or advertising at college, as if that constitutes education – an enhancement in living – and not merely being honed into a cog for installation on some great wheel of moneymaking.

If we ever made a distinction, in this society, between living and making money, we have long since forgotten it. We live now, most of us, to make money; our sense of ourselves – our self-worth – is bound to the question of money. Hence the shift in the emphasis of education – a trend whose gathering was noted by philosopher and educator William James a century ago (the book to read is A Stroll with William James, by Jacques Barzun) – from civilizing people to making them useful to industry. We live today at what we can only hope is the crest of that trend, in a society that is rich and productive but not civilized, or even civil.

Luckily, the news is not all bad. The arts of living persist in our financial planning-obsessed time, just as literacy and knowledge persisted in the medieval monasteries of Europe. Learning how to cook, or cook better, will never be for most of us an issue of profession or career, and amen to that. We will do it because, as my friend and neighbor Jane Brady, a veteran of many cooking classes, puts it, some of us "like to feed people," because feeding people is among the most social and sociable of acts. We will do it because, even if we do not become virtuosos in the kitchen, we will better be able to appreciate those who are and what they make and serve for our enjoyment. We will do it because eating well is living well, and living well is, as the old saying goes, the best revenge. We will do it because being able to cook means freedom from the tyrannies of take-out food and fast food and industrially produced convenience food in its countless colorful, ingeniously advertised boxes on supermarket shelves – tyrannies of trans fats and weird additives; tyrannies dependent, like all tyrannies, on ignorance and apathy.

Any class about food, then – any cooking class or baking class or gardening class or wine-appreciation class – is some buffer against the loss of knowledge. You do not have to remember anything specific from any specific class to obtain the greatest benefit such classes confer: a general heightening of interest in the subject. A few years ago I participated in a media baking class at Sur la Table; it was led by, I believe, Emily Lucchetti (longtime pastry chef at Stars, now at Farallon), and, duly arranged in teams, we made some kind of spice cake. I don't remember the details of the cake (other than that it wasn't difficult to make), but I do remember that my teammate was Flo Braker (whose fame as a baker stretched far beyond the horizons of my awareness), and I remember emerging from the class as indifferent to spice cake as I'd been when we started but thinking that I must go home and make brioche, which I hadn't made in a while.

And even if most of the specifics of this or that class fall away into the compost heap of the mind, sometimes a detail or technique does manage to become part of the repertoire. Jane reports that a tart dough she learned to make from Paule Caillet, who holds small cooking classes in her Paris home, is the one "I now use to the exclusion of any other." (I too have such a tart-dough recipe, though I didn't learn it from Paule Caillet but from Molly O'Neill via the pages of the New York Times Magazine. It is basically a cup of all-purpose flour, a pinch of salt, a pinch of powdered sugar, all whirred together in the food processor; then three-quarters of a stick of sweet butter, chilled, cut into chunks, and dropped piece by piece through the feed tube with the machine running until the incipient dough has acquired the texture of coarse cornmeal; then ice water dribbled down the feed tube, machine running, until the dough congeals into a ball. A bulletproof method.)