On Cooking... in Public

This started as a response to a note from Timmy, and it started growing into a post. So here it is.

Call it a sin, but I don't know what to do with "fresh" food.

• Timmy™ 6 hours ago

It's not a sin. It's probably the legacy of having parents of the generation where TV dinners were considered progress, making cookies meant cutting open a sleeve of dough, and pizza always arrived in boxes. Only the old people had vegetable gardens and did things like boiling bones for soup and baking pies with the bacon grease they saved in a coffee can.

My mother had me late in life so I basically skipped a generation. She's 87 years old and was growing up during the end of the Great Depression and through the years of WWII. In the 50s, she was poor as a church mouse, raising her contribution to the Baby Boom on a truck driver's salary and then later as a widow on a GI pension in public housing. She cooked from scratch not because she was a snob, but because it was what she knew and it was the cheapest way to feed a big family on a small paycheck.

That said...my mother was not a great cook. She was an "Irish Cook". You know why all the great restaurants are French or Italian (and never Irish)? This is why: Irish people boil cheap vegetables and cheap cuts of meat and call it a meal. Now, I admit that corned beef and cabbage is quite tasty and my mother was actually pretty good at soups and stews, which are supposed to simmer unattended for a long time. Everything else she overcooked. Turkeys were sacrificed to fears of salmonella and everything else was...worms? (I may be channeling "A Christmas Story" with that one.) The point was, there was a great fear of undercooked foods. A gorgeous piece of meat in her kitchen turned into a hard, dry, gray-ish puck. Safe to eat...you just didn't really want to eat it.

I never even knew I liked steak until I had it done right, medium-rare, still tender and juicy.

At some point I realized that cooking was a skill, like almost everything in life is, and that I could learn it. I pestered the Italian in-laws for cooking lessons. I read recipes and watched cooking shows. I stopped buying expensive, jars of gourmet sauces and started making gourmet sauces (most of which are dead simple!) I splurged on a knife sharpener and started to enjoy cutting veggies with sharp knives. When everybody was dancing at a party, I was sitting in the corner with Babcie, talking about Polish food.

Babcie, now there was a woman who could cook. She never learned to read or write, but she could, just with knowing basic recipes and using visual proportions as a guide, cook for 2 or 200.

Over time I realized that our most treasured recipes were created out of necessity and availability. People had to eat, and you made do with what was available. That "make do" mentality appeals to me so much more than recipes that require long lists of exotic ingredients, painstakingly assembled beforehand. Lots of people can make an edible meal out of good cuts of meat, ample spices and tender veggies. It takes someone like Babcie to make a meal out of some dried sausage and fermented cabbage.

I feel very connected to my role as a caregiver when I cook. I truly want to make wholesome foods that people want to eat. It's one of the ways I express love.