Last week was a sad one for cooks, readers and happy eaters, as we lost not only the inimitable Julia Child, but also the peerless chef Leslie Revsin, the first woman to work in the kitchens of the Waldorf-Astoria, and a pioneering chef-owner of her own restaurant in the West Village. The world is a dimmer, less cheerful place for the loss of them, and in need of serious good news. And there it was, just at the moment we needed it, in the form of this beautiful, evocative essay from receptionista, in which she announces that her sister has been accepted to culinary school. Thus is the torch passed to another generation, and I, for one, couldn’t be happier. Congratulations, Molly Virginia. You keep us all posted, now, y’hear?
Receptionista’s words make me wish I could extend the Great Trek West into a never-ending road trip so that I could join her and Molly Virginia and their mom at table—don’t you love how I just invite myself to meals?—and, if they would let me, work elbow-to-elbow with them in the kitchen. In general I’m a solitary cook; sometimes Lloyd will help me with prep, but since our kitchen is so badly laid out, it isn’t conducive to group cooking. My parents’ house, though, is another story. When I go to visit my parents, my mom and I cook together, and at our best moments it feels like dancing. We take turns working as each other’s sous-chef, keeping an eye on the pots, turning on the oven light to see how the roast is progressing, or the gingerbread or the roast tomatoes, and in doing so we continue an adventure we began when I was three, the point at which I could be trusted to stand on a chair next to Mom and not flail out, needing to touch everything. I learned early that if I didn’t reach into hot pots or bowls with moving beaters, eventually the pot would cool down, or the beaters would be unplugged, and I would be allowed to touch and taste everything we were making.
In the parent lottery, I got supremely lucky. My dad and stepdad are both excellent cooks; my mom is also an excellent cook and a dream baker besides. She let me try my hand at pressing spritz cookies and kneading bread dough; most of what I produced looked like a mangled nightmare, but she let me keep producing those mangled nightmares until I got the hang of it. My stepdad taught me how to cut up a chicken when I was 12, and, like Mom, he patiently let me screw up a lot of chickens before I got the hang of it. My parents, bless them, ate burned stews, flavorless Maryland chicken, chicken-rice soup with enough rosemary to choke a wild pig, birthday cakes made with jars of honey and with the texture and weight of doorstops, because they had both been there; once upon a time, they had to learn how to cook, too, and they knew that on the other end of that awful food lay food that was better, then good, then better than good.
You don’t, of course, need parents or grandparents or aunties to teach you to cook. I know plenty of splendid cooks who grew up with non-cooking parents, not knowing how to make toast, but who had the desire to learn, and the willingness to use a cookbook just long enough to teach them the basics, and the confidence to put the cookbook away when they were comfortable with their stoves, their pots and their ingredients. I also know that if you did not have cooking parents or grandparents, it can be daunting to crack open a cookbook, or read an interview with some smart young chef, and read about how they learned to make confit or bake madeleines or seed currants for bar-le-duc preserves before they were out of diapers. You don’t need some childhood pedigree to learn how to cook. You just have to have the desire. I think of a line by my ultimate food hero, the late Laurie Colwin, that I’ve always loved: she said that cooking was like falling in love. You don’t have to be particularly beautiful or glamorous or rich; you just have to be interested in it. She was the perfect embodiment of this ethos: she would cook for her friends, who found the whole idea of regular home-cooked meals a bit silly or antipathetic or, at best, romantic but impractical for our harried modern lives; then they would take one bit of her baked chicken, her creamed spinach with jalapeno peppers or her ginger cake, and they would sigh, oh, this is wonderful, I can’t believe how good this tastes, and she would reply this is a meal put together by someone who can barely add two and two. You don’t have to go to MIT to make a scratch cake, and they would look at her with astonishment.
One thing that will not help you, in my opinion—and I realize I’m sticking my neck out here—is home ec, or Domestic Science for my English pals. Now, if you had a home ec teacher in middle school or high school that was just a wonder, who opened up the wonderful world of cooking for you, please do e me with your story, because I want to hear it. I want to hear that home ec is a good avenue for people who didn’t learn to cook at home. Unfortunately, my home ec experience was dismal, and the stories I have heard from friends don’t vary much from mine. My fifth-grade home ec teacher was a sweet-natured, sweet-faced woman who seemed to want us to have a good time in the kitchen, but in sixth grade I changed schools, to a middle school where the home ec teachers seemed to take such a grim pleasure in sucking the life out of cooking and sewing that I almost wonder if they got a sexual charge out of it, out of taking something that could be so satisfying, such a challenge and a puzzle and a pleasure to figure out, and leaving a drab, airless space in its wake. I spent four years in home ec, making pan after pan of Rice Krispie treats, Chex Mix, Egg Beaters and other food-company-drafted, sugary, prefab crap snackysmores. By the time I got to eighth grade, we were allowed to take a crack at bread. I asked if I could make challah, having just learned it the week before at home, and I’m still wondering what put my teacher in enough of a good mood to give me permission to do it. The next week, we were back to making Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bomb Bars, or whatever the hell Big Cereal Company called them.
The worst part of home ec for me was that we were never given explanations for why things happened, or why we were supposed to do things a certain way. Our teachers would measure flour by spooning it into the cup, then levelling it off with a knife. My mom measured flour by dipping the cup into the flour and levelling it off with a knife. When I asked my teacher why I shouldn’t measure by dipping and sweeping, like Mom, she answered, “Because this [the spooning method] is the right way to do it.” This is not an answer. An answer would be something like “Flour weights by volume can vary a lot depending on how you get your flour into the cup. If you sift it into the cup, a cup of flour weighs four ounces. If you spoon it in, a cup of flour weighs 4 1/2 ounces. If you dip and sweep, it weighs 5 ounces. If you dip and pack, it can weigh up to 6 ounces, and that 2-ounce difference can make the difference between your cake being just right and being too dry, or not having enough flour to give it structure. Our recipes are written assuming a 4 1/2-ounce cup of flour.” A less satisfying, but still better answer would be “Because this is the way we learned to do it at Home Ec College, and this is how we pass that knowledge on to you.” But “because this is the correct way, full stop”, that’s no answer for an inquisitive and curious cook.
Here’s another example, one that I put in practice almost every day. When you separate eggs, be sure you have three bowls. One is for yolks, one is for whites, and one is for individual whites. Break the egg, drop it into your cupped fingers, let the white slide through your fingers into the “individual” white bowl, drop the yolk into the yolk bowl, pour the white into the “collective” white bowl, repeat. I do this not because this is the “right” way, but because it’s the practical way: If you accidentally break a yolk into the white you’re trying to separate out, then you won’t contaminate the entire bowl of whites with a speck of yolk, which will impede the whipping of air into your egg whites. Likewise, I learned this week, while making brownies, the same brownie recipe I’ve been making since I was 8 (and the first thing I ever baked without parental supervision), that it really is a good idea to break your eggs into a bowl individually, and then pour each egg into the mixing bowl. Doing this is a pain in the neck, a palaver, requiring another bowl to wash at the end of it all, but if you omit this step, you run the risk of cracking your fourth egg into the bowl and noticing that the yolk has exploded into milky formlessness; you gently sniff the eggshell from which that last egg came, and you discover that you have just contaminated your whole bowl of eggs with one bad one, and you’ll have to throw the lot away. Fortunately, if you’re lucky you’ll have four more eggs, and they’ll all be fine, and you can resume brownie-baking, which you then feed to your grateful friends and lovers, who will ask you if it’s really that easy to make these scrummy brownies. You can smile like the Mona Lisa, both at the warm glow you get from feeding the people you love well, and at the little kitchen science lesson you received earlier. Here endeth the lesson.