Cooking Lessons

Cooking is the sort of thing that is passed down in families, and rarely takes on anything as formal as cooking lessons. We cook the way our moms (or dads) cooked, and this goes way beyond technique, and a penchant for always using the same pan to roast the turkey. The way we cook has a style, a personal flair (if you will indulge me), from the seasonings we’re accustomed to, to the type of foods we think go together. If we; the family cooks practice in front of an audience they learn by seeing what we do, and their palates are shaped by the spices we use when we’re just throwing something together, rather than what we do when we’re cooking some serious food.

All of us have certain flavors from our childhoods that elicit all sorts of feelings and memories. My mom once made a meatloaf seasoned with basil and oregano, it was really good, and unlike meatloaves we’d had before “It tastes like pizza” we exclaimed in unison, everyone loved it and it became our meatloaf. The meatloaf against which all others would be measured. There were things we ate, and things we didn’t eat, and those were determined by the people who bought and prepared the food. There were six of us, and it was tough to find an entire meal that everyone liked. My younger sister and my father were the most choosy, but we all had our lists.

What always amazed me was that my mom never seem to remember who liked, or disliked what. My dad liked odd things, things he had grown up with, like bananas and sour cream, or herring, things my very Jewish grandmother prepared in her kosher home. He didn’t like cooked carrots, though he’d eat them raw, he didn’t like beets either, he also loved some things that as I got older and got to be a bit snobby I ridiculed him for eating, like Cool Whip, and that ersatz parmesan  ‘cheese’ in the green can. Once I went to Dean & Deluca and bought him a chunk of the real stuff, which he tried, then went back to his green can… oh dad.

My daughter has spent her life watching me cook, and though she helps and cooks alongside me with varying degrees of enthusiasm, apparently she has learned quite a bit. At camp this summer her group prepared one meal a day themselves, and she came home with tales of the incompetence of her peers. “They don’t even know how to hold a knife” she wailed. “It was awful watching them”.  She was quite proud of her own skills, and  I was happy to see her new confidence. Instead of comparing herself to me (as I’ve pointed out numerous times, I have been cooking for about 40 plus years) she was able to measure her skills against people her age, and she could see her own abilities.

In my lifetime global food has gone form being something only those who traveled widely, or lived in a large metropolitan area could experience to something you can find (albeit a mediocre version) in many malls, and chain restaurants. Food Network has exposed all of us to new and unusual ingredients, and Amazon has made lots of those strange ingredients a click away even for people living far from an ethnic or even Whole Foods Market. This means that many of us have learned how to cook differently from our parents. But I bet every single one of us, no matter how sophisticated your preferences, or how highly evolved your culinary skills, sometimes longs for that Italian meatloaf, cup custard, or whatever your mom or dad, or grandmother made that tastes like home.

What are the foods that evoke warm memories of childhood for you?