danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
A friend of my eldest daughter, 28 years of age, was round for dinner and was asking what I considered very basic questions about cooking.
It turns out that she didn't have fall back starting points of how to cook something with what one has in the cupboard. She only followed discrete recipes every time and shopped specifically for those.
I taught myself to cook in my late teens because I wanted control over the food I ate, and particularly become vegetarian. (C/f pilchard puff, which I wanted to avoid). I did this with cookbooks we had in the house - 70s standards like Good Housekeeping - intended for meat eaters, so I had to adapt the recipes accordingly.
So it seems to me basic that you need to know some bases to start from.
Like how to make a bechemel, veloute, mire poix or soffritto, a French tomato sauce, an Italian tomato sauce. How to adapt these to make bechemel into a cheese sauce if desired, or a veloute into a supreme by adding cream to it while cooking your protein in wine, what to do next with your mire poix or soffritto, and so on. Or which herbs are good with which sauce. Where lemon juice can help. Or lemon rind.
None of this was available to me as a boy at the time. We had the option on Wednesday afternoons at school to do "cooking for boys" as a "leisure" class for a term. But these were basically recipes for a hapless man who finds his wife is in hospital (probably to have a baby). So it was how to put ham and tinned pineapple on cheese and toast to make "Hawaiian toast". Things like that. The patronising patriarchy of the day.
Some of the things I learned from the books might seem dated, but if you have a tin of butter beans or a pack of seitan but no recipe to make them into a meal, you can do worse than trying one of these sauces or bases and go into muscle memory mode. Something not available to my daughter's friend.
What are your cookery 101s you'd like to pass on to the public?
It turns out that she didn't have fall back starting points of how to cook something with what one has in the cupboard. She only followed discrete recipes every time and shopped specifically for those.
I taught myself to cook in my late teens because I wanted control over the food I ate, and particularly become vegetarian. (C/f pilchard puff, which I wanted to avoid). I did this with cookbooks we had in the house - 70s standards like Good Housekeeping - intended for meat eaters, so I had to adapt the recipes accordingly.
So it seems to me basic that you need to know some bases to start from.
Like how to make a bechemel, veloute, mire poix or soffritto, a French tomato sauce, an Italian tomato sauce. How to adapt these to make bechemel into a cheese sauce if desired, or a veloute into a supreme by adding cream to it while cooking your protein in wine, what to do next with your mire poix or soffritto, and so on. Or which herbs are good with which sauce. Where lemon juice can help. Or lemon rind.
None of this was available to me as a boy at the time. We had the option on Wednesday afternoons at school to do "cooking for boys" as a "leisure" class for a term. But these were basically recipes for a hapless man who finds his wife is in hospital (probably to have a baby). So it was how to put ham and tinned pineapple on cheese and toast to make "Hawaiian toast". Things like that. The patronising patriarchy of the day.
Some of the things I learned from the books might seem dated, but if you have a tin of butter beans or a pack of seitan but no recipe to make them into a meal, you can do worse than trying one of these sauces or bases and go into muscle memory mode. Something not available to my daughter's friend.
What are your cookery 101s you'd like to pass on to the public?
