Newsflash! Seismic shift! Ego shattering revelation!
After more than four decades of putting food in front of my family, I’ve discovered I am not a cook.
It’s kinda a big letdown.
I wasn’t raised on fancy food. Was anyone who was a kid in the 1960s? Round steaks and meatloaf, spaghetti and stew, canned green beans and corn and peaches and pears. My mom could bake everything and did: homemade cinnamon bread, homemade noodles, gooey rolls and fruit topped coffee cakes. From my granny: round loaves of brown bread studded with raisins and baked in fruit cans. From my grandma: oatmeal cookies with caramel icing. She could also pan fry chicken, a task I undertook to learn despite my father’s admonition that only women of a certain girth could be expected to do that successfully. I wasn’t fazed because none of the women in our family met that criteria and all fried chicken. Carrying on tradition, I would faithfully fry a big mess of chicken parts the night before we would leave on family vacation so we could picnic out of the cooler for lunches along the way.
Sure, my mom used recipes: her Joy of Cooking and Betty Crocker cookbooks were well-thumbed. But after awhile, I doubt she needed to look back at the recipe for teriyaki marinade or Spanish rice or raisin bars. Aside from steak on special occasions and grilled burgers and barbeque chicken in the summer, our dinner table was set for sustenance, not style.
Me too.
So our kids grew up on pasta with hamburger and homegrown spaghetti sauce. They choked down the big chunks of tomatoes in the chili though they weren’t thrilled about it. We ate homemade pizza and baked chicken, pot roast with potatoes and sweet corn from our freezer. We ate a lot of eggs. But I was creative every once in a while: from the recipe insert in the St. Joe paper, I would make one really tasty recipe for pasta called “Amatriciana” every once in a while.....
…..no, not that one….I had to look up what ‘bucatini’ is... My recipe called for bacon rather than pancetta and I’m certain I used Kraft-Parmesan-out-of-a-can instead of Pecorino Romano! But! It was a recipe! I followed it, and it tasted different and took more time and effort than my usual throw in a pound of this, a jar of that, a handful of salt and oregano, and put the cheese on the table. Cooking in those days focused on bulk, not art, and any dish that could wait on the stove on low without becoming totally inedible was a keeper. Double bonus if supper could be created from what was in the freezer and the pantry when the HyVee was miles away and people were hungry.
This extended preamble is intended to illustrate that I am in full realization of the rudimentary level of my cooking skills. But that self awareness was no match for the schooling, nay...revelation, that I received at the gas burners of the New Orleans Cooking School. Here, we learned culture: that Creole and Cajun are like light and dark, city and country. That the best French bread is stale within hours. That the “file’” in gumbo is sassafras and should be used to taste with care.
When it comes to ‘the roux you do’, we grew faint of heart as the flour and lard darkened and needed constant reassurance that our skillet would survive. This glorious hue, achieved after forty plus minutes of stirring with a roux spoon, was the result…
Looking at this link will show you the color progression. I will say that Chef Kati did not suggest oil; we began with about a pound of lard.
Cooking up the sausage required another leap of faith. Again, the bottom of the pan became ominously black, but we were told not to worry: that all that crunchy stuff was essential for full flavor. And, sure enough, when the ‘holy trinity’ of celery, pepper and onion was finished ‘sweating’ , like magic, the bottom of the pan was as clean as a mirror. Notice how casually I throw around terms like ‘sweating’ and ‘holy trinity’? Before my stint at the Cooking School, sweating was for humans and the Trinity was not constrained to vegetables.
Time to taste. “Needs salt!”, was the unabashed opinion of one cook. We did, and added a shot of Crab Boil for good measure….
Finally, we shook in a little Joe’s Stuff, the all purpose seasoning of the New Orleans Cooking School, tasted again, shrugged our shoulders, and handed our dish off to the chef for his professional opinion….
And...and...after all that chemistry, all that culture, and all that care, the chef simply dumps Joe’s into the pot willy-nilly...just like I would??? We all gasp….then taste...and declare our gumbo the best.
Was it fun to follow the rules...to execute rather than wing it? To know why? To create as we replicated? To honor tradition and culture? Yes..this was cooking food that I would pay money to eat like I would buy tickets to the theater...performance food. While the method undoubtedly determined the excellent results, I wondered how many Cajun mamas stirred the roux for hours to ensure the perfect color and maximum flavor and how many looked at the clock and said, Mon Dieu! Papa’ll be a bear if this isn’t on the table when he walks through that door……
….as she pours a bunch of Joe’s into the pot and gives it a quick stir…..
Today, I looked up a recipe for Sunday dinner. I put on my apron before I wiped onion and garlic and chicken juice on my jeans. Putting on the Cooking School apron made me feel all official. I had my chicken and mushrooms, my angel hair pasta and cheeses. I’d bought a jar of Ragu, but, under the influence of the Cooking School apron, halfway through the process, I decided to go home made all the way. Hmmm….well I didn’t have the three Romas, but no matter, I did have a can of fire roasted tomatoes. And...yeah, I didn’t have a lick of half & half, so I cut the flour a bit and added all the tomato juice in the can. That’s a picture from the website. It looks almost exactly like mine.
I tried to follow the recipe….
My husband still added salt.
I think it would be even better with shrimp.
Must be the apron…...
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