New Cooking Trend?
Dumbing it down it seems is de rigeur these days. Why is that?
Now here’s a somewhat disturbing trend- cookbook recipes are getting longer and more detailed because most people really don’t know the basics of how to cook anymore! Dumbing it down it seems, is very in. Susan Sampson, Food Editor and Writer for The Toronto Star recently published a fascinating piece about this phenomenon- one that I’ll admit I’d really never given much thought to before now.
Those of us who grew up with a Joy of Cooking around the house, or any other number of solid, rudimentary cooking tomes that demystify the French-laced culinary verbiage already know what blanch, sauté, and julienne mean. It seems a lot of my peers however, have no clue whatsoever. Blame it on complex chef books with unattainable recipes? Nah, I doubt it- if these folks don’t even know what blanch means, they’re hardly going to try making chicken forcemeat to sit neatly in agar-agar aspic surrounded by black truffle oil, are they.
Sampson offers some reasons as to why this is our reality today and these include: “Readers want to get it right – now – because cooking is a commitment,” she says. There’s no time it seems to experiment anymore, and since time is ticking, even the most inexperienced cook wants to execute a dinner-party menu NOW worthy of a standing ovation. I think her next possible reason might be more on the money; Sampson says, “A large contingent prefers to open packages and cans, or takeout containers, after rushing home. That erodes a sense of how home-cooked food should taste and look.” She even recounts the story of one woman who wrote a cookbook editor complaining that a deluxe chocolate cake recipe she followed just didn’t taste “right.” After some investigation, it seemed the complainant had never tasted anything other than pre-packaged cake mix. Now that’s truly frightful!
I’m not suggesting everyone out there can’t cook, hasn’t tasted home made cake or isn’t interested in learning how to do it from scratch- but I do know that in North America, most of us work way too much and take as many short cuts as possible. Come on- we’re all guilty here and there save for the die-hard purists. I’ll admit to using organic chicken stock and frozen berries. The point is, despite the onslaught of food porn magazines, Food Television and easy to follow cookbooks, most people are doing more watching or reading than actual cooking. It’s like my dad would say, “if you stop practicing, you get rusty” and that goes with just about any skill in life, including cooking.
So what’s the solution? In our information-blitzed age it seems the Pod-Cast is the next big wave- watch the cook make the meal and follow along, at your own pace. When he/she says sauté, you watch the motion, replicate and repeat until you’ve got it down to a fine art. Some might scoff at this, but I figure if a Pod-Cast is what it takes to get more people preparing their own food rather than relying on a quick delivery of any assorted junk food, them I’m all for it! It won’t hurt that some of these rookies might even learn what a chiffonade looks like too.
