Different Drum: It’s not about recipes, but creativity and love
Over the years, I have on occasion been accused of being a good cook. That has always struck me as incredibly funny because whether or not I could cook, let alone cook well, was neither here nor there to me for the longest time. Cooking didn’t fall anywhere on my list of priorities. I always had better things to learn or do.
When I was growing up, my mother was the one in our family who did the cooking. All of it. That’s how she wanted it. Except that she didn’t really enjoy cooking for the family. She was heavily recipe-dependent and unless she had everything for which a recipe called, she would not attempt to make it. Nothing ruined her day more than lacking an ingredient or in a large enough quantity to complete a recipe. No substitutions allowed.
I didn’t get to watch my mom cook a whole lot because early on she deputized me as her chief ingredient-fetcher. No meal was complete unless it involved me digging through cupboards, standing on my head in the freezer, sprinting to the out-of-the-way upstairs “junk room” (pantry), making a trip to the basement, or perhaps to the garden in search of something she needed. It was a great system for someone. Just not me.
My mother regularly had me make all her pie crusts because she found that cooking task especially vexing. I didn’t mind. It came easily to me, as well as provided a time-out from the step-n-fetch-it role I so detested. She also drafted me (or any of my three sisters who were foolish enough to wander into the kitchen while she was cooking) to stir whatever she had in a mixing bowl or on the stove top. I swear, I’ll sue her estate if I end up with carpal tunnel in my stirring wrist!
Her grunt work taken care of, you’d think my mom would have been a happier cook. But she wasn’t. She was too obsessed with and distressed over following “The Rules” — meaning the dictates of the recipe or the cookbook she was reading. Her inability to see them merely as guidelines caused her undo culinary angst. To summarize Mom’s insecurities, it was as if Irma Rombauer, Betty Crocker, Julia Child and James Beard sat in judgement every night at dinnertime. Joyless cooking.
Complicating the situation for my mother was that her mother-in-law, who lived across the road, could make something out of nothing; and her own mother, who lived but a mile away, frequently tried out new recipes and was forever coming up with variations on regular fare. It was only after I lived on my own that I realized how much of my grandmothers’ approaches had seeped into my psyche through watching them cook. Praise the Lord!
However, at the time I left home, the only things I knew how to cook were my Grandma Kate’s version of spaghetti with meat sauce, oyster stew (no idea why I retained that one) and Scotcharoos as a dessert. I’d also mastered our family’s tricky Christmas tradition recipe for five-pound fudge, which requires much diligence and a candy thermometer. One miss-step and you have to scrap the whole batch of expensive ingredients.
As those weren’t exactly family meal staples, I started reading recipes, talking to other people about what they cooked and experimenting on my own family. When I ate something I liked, I’d ask the preparer of it for the recipe. Even more valuable than the colleges I attended were the fantastic cooks and chefs I met waitressing my way through – always happy to share their thoughts, techniques and recipes. So, as impossible as it seems, my free cooking education occurred in the pre-Internet dark ages when TV cooking shows were scarce and the Foodie Cult not yet formed.
I’ve personally discovered, culinary surveys have proven and modern cooking shows reinforce that good cooking isn’t just about the rules, the recipes and/or the ingredients. It’s about resourcefulness, imagination and experimentation. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. In today’s kitchen, creativity reigns.
But perhaps the best cooking tip was that shared by my chef friend, Jon Hower, who maintains, “There’s no substitute for cooking with love.”
— Kristy Smith’s Different Drum humor columns are archived at her blog: diffdrum.wordpress.com.
This article originally appeared on Coldwater Daily Reporter: Different Drum: It’s not about recipes, but creativity and love
