Learning to Cook

Cooking in our house is as natural as breathing.  In fact sometimes I think that I, like my great grandmothers and grandmothers, will somehow continue to cook long after I stop breathing through the children, grandchildren, stories and recipes.  The grandmothers are always with me as I turn the stained, well worn pages of their notebooks and favorite cookbooks, as I serve the delicious food on their favorite serving dishes and tablecloths, and eat with their silverware. Many of the recipes made it to the State and County Fairs and won Blue Ribbons.  I have so many happy memories when I cook in their kitchens on their old stoves in the midst of cupboards bursting with my heirloom pots and pans.  My kitchen is still painted a “white” called butter cookie with shiny black scalloped trim, new there are a bright red toaster and red tea kettle.  

I remember having girlfriends whose mothers did not cook.  I felt deep pity for them; it seemed so unfortunate and downright unnatural to not be a great cook.  At our house every meal is an elaborate celebration.  Cooking and baking are high art—subject to heated debates and long discussions requiring mountains of cookbooks, equipment, and hours of preparations and eating.  Even now, I so look forward to having a crowd to cook for and share the food and conversations with.   As one of my favorite author’s Laurie Cowan says in her book Home Cooking, “One of the delights of life is eating with friends; second to that is talking about eating.  And, for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about eating while you are with friends.”

My first memory learning to cook was of being perched on top of a tall stool over a dark brown polished concrete floor in my Grandmother Marie’s simple Phoenix kitchen.  I was slowly stirring, melting squares of dark chocolate in a stainless steel, copper bottomed revere ware pot over the flames on a gas stove.  Next, Grandma showed me how to scald milk without scorching it, beat the dark yellow eggs till foamy and mix cornstarch into the sugar.  Now we had to put the four parts together.  She showed me how to mix the sugar/cornstarch mixture into the eggs then little by little to add the warm milk until it was thoroughly blended.  We cooked the custard, stirring till my little arm ached and the custard was thick and satiny.   Next we beat in the melted chocolate, and last we stirred in butter and vanilla.  The whole dark sweet mess was carefully spooned into the light brown pie crust she had prepared and baked that morning.  I was not ready for pie crust yet.  Then best of all, after we had used a rubber spatula to get every last slurp of chocolate pudding out of the pot, I got to lick the spatula. I was only five.  Then we covered the pie with plastic wrap and tucked it carefully into the “frig”.  I knew that after it had cooled it would get an amazingly think skin on top of the satiny dark pudding.  After supper we would whip fresh cream, sweeten it with sugar and scent it lightly with good vanilla.  Extra large dollops would crown slices of the velvety dark pie as they were passed around.  Everyone would try to wait patiently for the cook to take her place at the table and have the first bite of pie.  I got to have the first bite.  It was still my favorite.

The meticulous procedures for making a custard or pudding, were followed by simple things like smooth mashed potatoes, composing salads and steaming vegetables.  Sauces and baking came next.  Learning to make a basic roux of flour and butter then stirring in a liquid was the basis of most sauces and gravies.  We did love sauces and gravies at our house.  Most main meals included a savory sauce of some sort flavored with pan drippings from roasted meat or sautéed chicken.  Often a little wine, peppers, chutney or pepper jelly was added to the simmering sauce just before serving.  Ours was a lineage of always creating in the kitchen with what you had on hand and had a hunger for, usually without a recipe.  Naturally, only the freshest ingredients, with herbs and vegetables from the kitchen garden, were used.  Some new flavorful and delicious smelling creation was always coming to the dinner table.  You did have to be careful to get the cook to reveal her secret recipe if you ever wanted to eat that particular dish again.   To this day my mother can recreate anything she eats at a restaurant better at home.

I love to bake.  The house smells welcoming, the eating is comforting and sharing the results with family and friends, is deeply satisfying.  Crusty breads, pumpkin or orange muffins, pound cakes from Mexican chocolate to sour cream; and pies fresh or cooked with berries or succulent fruits are all favorites, not to mention all the possibilities for delicious cookies.  Baking is a little more exacting than what we call “cooking” in our house.  You really do have to follow a recipe.  Something my grandmother and mother “cooking teachers” were always telling me and I have learned from a few kitchen disasters along the way.  I like to make notes in my cookbooks about how the recipe went, any disasters with it and changes I found I liked better.  Today one of my sons is cooking a family favorite; pumpkin muffins from the yellowed and spattered pages from my old Fannie Farmer cookbook.  He is laughing at my note to “remember the sugar, school days ‘92”.  I had made these muffins for his preschool class when he was three, complete with small pie pumpkins from our garden, but had forgotten the sugar.  It made pumpkin hockey pucks instead.  Today Dustin has steam baked the pumpkins just like I did and is remembering the sugar.

Next we graduated in our home cooking school to meals. Roasting everything from juicy roasts in the oven to turkeys in the giant roaster, sautéing fish and chicken, making fresh pastas with savory fillings and luscious sauces has been explored.  My sons now join my mother and I in the kitchen.  Sometimes there are battles from too many cooks in the kitchen.  I run for the hills and wait for the call to the next amazing incarnation of dinner.