How'd your penchant for cooking evolve?

Betty Crocker’s Cook Book for Boys and Girls

I had this cookbook growing up (being born at the terminus of the boomer generation - 1964). My mom ran across it cleaning out a cabinet and gave it to my kids this past Christmas. And today I ran across this article on the new Gourmet website.

On the trail of a favorite childhood cookbook—and the kid testers who made the recipes come to life.

At no point did I question whether I was up to the challenge of making a successful Cheese Dream or Jolly Breakfast Ring, and for this lack of anxiety I credit the panel of 12 children whose headshot illustrations appear in the front of the book: “Meet Our Home Testers,” it says.

They look like prim Eisenhower-era kids, and they have wholesome names to match: Donna, Peter, Lucy, Elizabeth, Chris, Randee, Ricky, Becky, Linda, Bette Anne, Eric, and Eileen. The hairstyles are equally conventional: pageboys and bobs for the girls, Beaver Cleaver cuts for the boys.

Anybody else make Raggedy Ann Cake or Bunny Salad, back in the day? Hey, we all have to start somewhere, right? Right? So where'd your interest in all things culinary develop?

From the wonderful smells coming from my mom's kitchen. She worked all day, I was in school most of the day and at the skating rink at night for lessons, so she/we cooked on the weekends. Mostly casseroles - but they were heavenly. My aunt was also an excellent cook, different from my mom - more on the gourmet side. She had a huge garden and I loved her salads. She made a stew from Julia Child's cookbook, and I remember being so amazed because everything was cut to the same size. I marveled at how she could do that. I don't recall eating a lot of meat as a child. We lived on the coast so had lots of crab, clams, fish. Chicken came from my grandparents farm, as did rabbit. Grandmother was from Portugal and her cooking reflected that. I really did not get a grip on cooking until I got married and had my own kitchen to experiment in. I poured through cookbooks and followed most recipes to detail. I started creating my own after the kids came along.
It has been a fun journey. Now I enjoy trying all sorts of ingredients in cooking and especially love fusion foods.

I know this sounds terribly corny, but when I was a little girl, I wanted to do all the things in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. You know, bake my own bread, churn my own butter, bake pies, that sort of thing. I feel like we've achieved the essence of those early childhood ambitions. We bake all our own bread, cakes and cookies, Pete makes all our yoghurt, and last year we started making our own pasta. I don't think it saves us any money, but there is something deeply rewarding about being, or at least pretending to be, "self-sufficient". I was so happy last year when Bob Ross showed me how to make butter from cream in the blender..

The bee looks impressed. Hey, I would be, too.

When I was a kid and had decided to give up meat, poultry, and fish, my mother told me, "If you're going to eat differently than the rest of us, you're going to have to start learning to cook for yourself." OK, cool, I was a chubby little glutton, so I gladly learned. And now I'm a chubby big glutton.

edit: Maybe it's an alien, not a bee. Hard to tell.

[Robin Garr]

So where'd your interest in all things culinary develop?

Hard to answer, Scott ... it's almost lost in the happy haze of longago time.

I guess I've always been a "foodie" in the sense that, although my mother was not an adventurous cook, my parents did dine out a lot, and from time to time - especially when traveling - they would take the kids along and built in us the understanding that dining out was fun, an adventure, and a situation in which everyone behaved properly, even eight-year-olds. My mother must have been an early feminist, she didn't want us growing up locked in traditional gender roles, so my brother and I had to know how to cook, and my sister had to know how to fix a broken door hinge. And vice versa.

Upshot, by the time I headed out on my own, I knew at least the rudiments of cooking and had an ingrained sense that food and cooking was fun. This led naturally to part-time restaurant jobs in and around college, and while I never dreamed of making it a career, I did at least get a little hands-on experience in the front and back of the house.

Maybe it was a coincidence and maybe it wasn't that most of my girlfriends, SOs, and now my dear bride were also foodies, and being a young adult when the foodie movement began to peak in the '70s and '80s, I was right there in the thick of it as a consumer and cook. And maybe most significant, as a news reporter who grabbed every possible chance to write about restaurants, food and wine and ended up parlaying that into the wine-and-dining beat as a big part of my job at a local newspaper.

So, where did it start? Probably with my Mom "letting" me help hammer the beaten biscuits at Derby time, I guess.

Robin, what is an SO ?

Thanks, Celia

As a young teenager I found that I really need to sleep until noon on Saturday mornings. In a last ditch attempt to get me out of bed at (to her) a decent hour, my mother informed that if I perisisted in sleeping late I'd have to cook my own breakfast. So persisted, and started cooking my own breakfast. I just branched out from there.

Celia, "SO" is the PC way of saying "girlfriend."

My grandmother was a wonderful Southern cook, she did everything by handfuls and intuition, no written recipes. Beautiful food though. My mother was discouraged by her mother's good cooking and was also into other stuff, so really didn't try. We had Spam with spinach out of a can, or overcooked liver with overcooked Brussels Sprouts.

I always enjoyed good food, and when I was in college I was introduced to wine by my girlfriend whose father was a VP at an oil company and who had studied at the Sorbonne. Around the time I got married, we had friends who had the Julia Child "Mastering" Cookbooks (I was married in 1970) and got us started with the good stuff. We more or less cooked our way though Volumes One and Two (the cholesterol was a little insane but back then I didn't realize I had a problem) and this gave us food with which we could enjoy my growing collection of good Bordeaux and Burgundy.

After the 1990 vintage I began to discover Italian wines and found some Italian cookbooks, notably by Bugialli. This was a wonderful trail of discovery, which led to a fabulous trip to Italy in 2000. Over the last few years, when I re-visit French recipes I see them through the lense of the similar Italian dishes, which is very interesting. Some people believe that French haute cuisine is based on Tuscan cooking (through Medici as queen of France). Certainly the "fourchette" was an Italian idea...

My wife also contributes her share. She is the locally famous pastry and dessert chef, people always ask her to make dessert, and sigh when they taste it. But she does Chinese dishes as easily as good old American / Vermont stand-bys. She told me just the other day that she really enjoys my cooking (I had made a mustard coated rib roast that was to die for) and I told her I really liked her cooking too...

Frank

I figured out it was a good way to impress the ladies I was interested in.

Nothing like bringing someone home and making her spaghetti carbonara after a night in the bars.

Learned how to cook after I started to learn about wines. This old man didn't start to learn about wines until about 9 years ago. Good wines just demand good food. And vice-versa.

The bee looks impressed. Hey, I would be, too.

Stuart, I worry about you. That is clearly a space man next to the Rocket Salad, not a bee. This was the 1950s after all.

(Maybe being from New Mexico, I just recognize space aliens better than the average person.....)

My parents were both professors and held long office hours in the late afternoons, and we have quite a large family. By the time we were 8 or so we were taking turns doing all manner of household chores, including cooking dinner. Otherwise we would never have eaten before 8, and dinner was on the table precisely at 6 p.m. every night.

My city grandmother, who had always worked outside the home, had a great love affair with prepared foods... frozen Pepperidge Farm cakes, Tang, Entemann's baked goods, instant mashed potatoes. My country grandmother, who had never worked outside the home after she married, raised nearly all her food, foraged for a lot of the rest, canned everything for the winter, made the best chocolate cookies and black raspberry pies, and never bought a loaf of bread or a jar of preserves in her very long life.

My parents tried to straddle the line in between. We always had a huge garden, in which we all got our own section to raise whatever vegetables we wanted, and we did a lot of canning and otherwise put food by, but we also used jarred spaghetti sauce from the store when expedient and nearly always used purchased bread produts.

A mixed culinary heritage.

Celia, "SO" is the PC way of saying "girlfriend."

D'uh, oh yes, Significant Other, thanks Stuart, I drew a mental blank there for a while. But if SO is PC for "girlfriend", what is PC for "boyfriend" ? SOL ? Stud On Leash ?

I used to like to hang around the kitchen when I was a kid and watch the ladies cook because I got to lick batter bowls and eat scraps etc. The genetic dispostion toward cooking just always seemed to be there. A little later on in life, I joined the Boy Scouts and, since I did not like to eat raw chicken while camping in -20º F weather, I decided to make Cooking my first merit badge. Several years later, I left civilization and went to college in Austin, Texas. Back in the '70's there was no good veal parm to be had in the capital of the Lone Star State so my need to cook increased. Soon I found cooking to be a chick magnet and was libidinously motivated to cook. I suckered my first wife, a German lady, into marriage with a meal of fried chicken, corn on the cob, and apple sauce ... all done on two electric hot plates in a 6'x6' mansard room. A decade later, she left me for an insurance salesman from Leipzig and neglected to take our two children, aged 9 and 6, with her. Mr. Moms improve their cooking quickly. This new lifestyle entailed a stylistic change in my cuisine, but it did help my technique and gave me a certain Rachel-Raydiance. The second wife was a picky eater. I should have known better. She left me somewhere near Salinas for a job in New Jersey. But now, with the school of hard knackwursts behind me, I am back to libidinously motivated cooking. My current beloved was lured into my trap with eggplant parm and lentil soup. Who knows where it'll go from here?

[Robin Garr]

Robin, what is an SO ?

Adding to what Stuart said, it's an abbreviation for "significant other" and can be genderless (although not for me! )

Interesting that the majority of the male respondents have relied on cooking as a sort of courtship display! And thinking about it, I've used it to that end, as well.

None of my family had any highly developed skills in the kitchen, just good, sometimes adequate, home cooking. I also remember spending hours at my Grandma's house playing with all those great wood-handled wire utensils (a few of which I'm still using in my kitchen now) and as many pots and pans as she'd allow. And, much like you, Robin, when the family did go out to eat it was an event and I was always pretty adventurous.

My mom enrolled me in The Petite Chefs cooking school at Famous Barr when I was about 10. I've still got the handout for Susie Wong Carrots floating around in my recipe collection and their French Onion Soup recipe is my fallback. Even back then though, I remember hoping I'd get stuck on the elevator with one of the other Petite Chefs I thought was cute. Somethings never change.

I learned how to cook more than the rudiments after I moved away from home in '65 and became a teacher near Philadelphia. TV dinners were okay for a while (I ate a lot of Swanson's Franks and Beans for 39 cents) and, on occasion, I'd mutilate a steak.

But when I got married, Edith continued working in NYC and I got into the habit of making her lunch every day. Then I ordered the first volume (Provincial French) of the Time-Life series of international cooking and that's where my cooking really took off. And I still own the whole set.

Today, Albuquerque is much more cosmopolitan than when I first moved here and you can find just about any kind of ingredient from anywhere in the world. That also makes cooking fun.

The bee looks impressed. Hey, I would be, too.

I'm with you, Stuart. I wish my rocket salad would look like that.

As the oldest child of divorced parents, whose mother had to work. Guess who the cooking fell to as time passed? Then, we all discovered that I was better at it than my mother was. So, I got a lot of encouragement. When I graduated from high school in 1966, as a gift my grandmother gave me my own, personal copy of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook. The rest, as they say, is HERSTORY!

%^)

As the oldest, my Mom always asked for my help in the kitchen ... also as the oldest, my Dad let me start the grill and flip the meat ... I know - pretty simple ... then when I got married, my wife worked in a bank and as a farmer I got home earlier than she ... did a lot of the prep work to give her a hand ... then came the dreaded divorce and I was on my own for 2 1/2 years between spouses ... had to cook myself ... and the job I had forced me to cook almost a week's worth of meals on Sundays as during the season it was to work by 5 am and not home until nearly bedtime ... by the time I remarried, I was hooked ...

Clink !

%^)

Scott, this is a fun question. Thanks for asking--it's really interesting reading! You guys who learned to cook to impress the "babes" crack me up. My husband impressed me early on with his Linguine and white clam sauce, but since he put a ring on my finger has left all the cooking (including outdoor grilling to me). Actually, he still has command over the Big Green Egg and used it expertly last night to make his famous ribs for visiting family members, but I digress....

I'm the youngest of five kids. By the time I was 9 or 10, my Mom was frankly tired of cooking. I was always her little helper, and along the way she taught me some important basics like always browning the meat since that's where the flavor comes from, and how to make good gravy. My Dad was the expert at breakfast, taught me to not flip the pancakes until the bubbles formed on top, and to make sure the bread gets good and soaked with the egg mixture so the French toast would be good and "custard-y." I remember asking my Mom at around 10 years old if I could make an entire dinner on my own. She readily accepted my offer. I remember it like it was yesterday and it was pork chop night. Probably inspired by that annoying commercial for "Shake and Bake" ("and I helped!"), I found some in the cabinet. I improvised from the instructions on the box to add some Italian bread crumbs and garlic powder. I had first dipped into an egg wash, then the crumbs and pan fried them in a shallow amount of vegetable oil. I think I made Kraft Mac and Cheese and some frozen broccoli to go with it, and of course some jarred apple sauce. Well, the dinner was a wild success. My Dad especially heaped on the compliments and that felt really good. Since then, I've loved to cook. Probably like many of you, my cooking has evolved over the years (that might make for another fun thread...) In my early twenties, I was a "Martha-wanna-be." Very fussy, spent hours making a single dessert, everything had to be just so. 20 years later, my style is much more relaxed but I still love cooking more than any other "hobby," especially when it's for people who seem to appreciate it and who like to eat!!

That is clearly a space man next to the Rocket Salad, not a bee. This was the 1950s after all.

But were you impressed? Or is it all barrel distortion?

It is usually barrel distortion.