Nobody Cooks Anymore
A dying domestic art
In every era the older generation almost always finds some fault with the younger generation. This often comes about when old-timers see youngsters ignoring or failing to master some skill the old-timers consider essential to full adulthood. For example, “real” drivers (i.e., old ones) drive cars with a stick shift while young people drive cars with automatic transmissions. And “real” computer programmers (i.e., old ones) use a command-line interface while young people use systems with a graphical user interface. I’ll explore here yet another old/young divide: cooking from scratch vs. using prepared foods.
What is the problem?
Our economy dictates that to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, both members of a conventional marriage must work. This situation isn’t new: it goes back at least to the immediate post-WWII era. When both husband and wife work all day, there’s less time at the end of the day for activities like cooking. The questions of what gets cooked and who does the cooking must be answered.
Solutions
Over time the solutions to this problem have changed, but two unstable “solutions” appeared right away. First, some men assumed that their wives would continue to cook as their mothers had, and that the same meals would simply appear at the usual hour with no effort on their part. Second, perhaps a reaction to the first, wives would just slop together something that required little time or effort on their part.
Both of these solutions are unstable because, inevitably, somebody feels cheated and the quality of the cuisine is unsatisfactory. The current solution is visible everywhere: precooked, processed food that you can pick up in the supermarket or have delivered to your home.
I saw this trend developing several years ago when a local supermarket offered pre-packaged Jell-O™ cubes. I figured the store managers believed that their customers didn’t want to spend even the minute or two it takes to make Jell-O (or, less likely, that they were complete morons who lacked the skill to boil water.)
The first wave: TV dinners and frozen pizza
The first processed foods I can remember after WWII were TV dinners and frozen pizza. TV dinners were typically a combination of a meat dish, vegetable, and potatoes shipped in a segmented aluminum foil tray. Before everyone had a microwave oven, they were heated in a conventional oven. The frozen pizzas came in a square cardboard box pretty much as they do today and, again, until most people had microwaves they were heated in a conventional oven. For some reason my parents never let me and my sister have any of the pizza. They said it would “cause bad dreams.”
The second wave: the hot bar and other foods cooked on-site
As supermarket freezer cases filled with an ever-increasing variety of frozen meals, entrees, side dishes, and desserts, a new phenomenon began to appear: foods cooked in the store. Some were packaged to take home for re-heating while others were hot and ready to eat at a special area with tables and chairs right in the store.
My local Whole Foods Market has an in-store bakery, a deli sandwich shop, a vegetarian meal counter, a sushi counter, a pizza counter, and several steam tables with hot dishes. Rotisserie chickens are so popular that a new batch of a dozen chickens has to be cooked at least twice a day. Across from the steam tables is a whole bank of refrigerated shelves with food to go cooked in the store. In addition to standard American fare, there is also food from the Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Latin American traditions.
The current wave: meals that cook themselves
You may have seen on TV advertisements for a WiFi-connected smart oven that automatically cooks meals delivered to your home. Each pre-cooked meal comes in its own disposable microwaveable tray. You just pop the tray into the oven and let the system read the QR code that comes with each meal. In less than 60 seconds cooking time your meal is ready. There’s no need to shop, prep, cook, or clean. This is certainly convenient, but it also shows that many now see cooking as an unwanted burden that steals time from other things they’d rather be doing. This suggests that domestic cooking skills are being devalued and consequently are gradually disappearing.
It’s happening everywhere
I have anecdotal evidence that this trend may also be underway outside the USA. My late sister lived for many years in Princeton, New Jersey, just a few blocks from the university. Visiting Japanese faculty members and their wives were frequent visitors at her house. Many years ago she learned from the wives how to make sushi. But the Japanese women who arrived here recently didn’t know how to make sushi and my sister ended up teaching them.
Before her untimely death, my sister founded an organization which is now known as “Eating For Your Health.” The organization’s guiding principle is that you can both grow and cook foods that are better for you than the processed foods that are becoming a dominant feature of the American diet. The organization also shows how both the growing and the cooking (not to mention the eating) can be rewarding experiences in themselves.
My cooking history
I’ve always enjoyed eating, so it was inevitable that I would sooner or later want to learn to cook. One day I looked in either Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book or the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook for a recipe that appeared to be easy. I came up with a recipe for some kind of tart. I followed the directions exactly and put the tarts in a properly preheated oven. After what I thought was the right amount of time I looked in the oven. The tarts were still dead white and looked like blobs of toothpaste with a red dot on top. I figured they just needed more time to brown a bit. After many minutes I pulled the sheet out of the oven again. They still looked the same. My mom, who was just then passing through the kitchen, took one look at the “tarts” and remarked: “You should’ve asked me first. That recipe is no good.”
Mom’s cooking
My mom had many talents, but cooking wasn’t one of them. She did make a pretty good “New York Style” mac and cheese (made with a good quality cheese and a bit of dry mustard), but everything else was pedestrian at best. After all three of us kids were at least of high school age, she went back to teaching English and Journalism, and to a host of other activities, which left little time for serious cooking.
Mom made a vegetable soup that appeared to be somewhat diluted tomato paste with a random assortment of vegetables thrown in. Many evenings she made something called “students’ ragu,” which was crumbled hamburger, bacon, onions, potatoes, and carrots simmered in broth (and hamburger and bacon fat) until she and Dad had finished their pre-dinner cocktails. On special occasions she made “fancy sandwiches.” These purportedly contained shrimp or crab, but they appeared to be mostly gobs of cream cheese colored with pink or aqua food coloring and wrapped in a thin slice of crustless bread.
Learning to cook in college and graduate school
As a matter of practical necessity I began to teach myself how to cook in college and graduate school. It was mostly trial-and-error, but I was greatly helped by two cookbooks that are still available today:
LIFE Picture Cook Book (1958)
Milo Miloradovich. The Art of Cooking with Herbs and Spices: A Handbook of Flavors and Savors (1950)
The Miloradovich book was a real lucky find. After the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, many refugees made their way to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, which was right near my college in New Brunswick. There was already a long-established Hungarian community in town and an authentic Hungarian restaurant just off campus. I found that some dishes at the restaurant were the same as in Miloradovich. Two that I especially liked were chicken paprikash and chicken soup with giblets flavored with Hungarian paprika. I could cook these myself. This was really encouraging.
Speaking of lucky finds: at that time I had a Hungarian piano teacher. During the Revolution she and her husband had escaped from Hungary separately. Neither knew that the other had made it to Camp Kilmer until one day they just ran into each other there.
The Hamantaschen dispute
My mother-in-law was an accomplished cook of pastries and cakes. As far as I could tell she never used a printed recipe. Instead, with an array of ingredients in front of her, she would improvise a delicious treat the way a talented jazz musician would make up an impromptu solo. But I disagreed with her on the right way to make one thing, “hamantaschen.”
The word hamantaschen means “Haman’s pockets,” Haman being the villain in the biblical Book of Esther. They’re ordinarily made as a treat during the Jewish holiday of Purim. In their traditional form they’re triangular pastries filled with “mohn” (a sweet poppy seed paste), but they can also be filled with fruit preserves or pastes made with honey, chocolate, or anything else you like.
I made them the traditional way: a pastry shell with just enough flour to hold the butter together. My mother-in-law insisted on making them with a rising dough that expanded into something like a bulkie roll. The result was not Haman’s “pockets,” but more like Haman’s “backpacks.” Still, they tasted great.
Julia Child and TV cooks
I‘ve lived in the Boston area since 1960 and watched Julia Child’s show right from the beginning on WGBH, the Boston PBS station. The show was always highly entertaining but I didn’t learn much that was useful. I remember one episode where she was cooking salmon. She started by saying “take out your 18-inch salmon poaching pan.” I thought to myself “Am I the only one who doesn’t have one of those?” I began to realize that TV cooking shows aren’t really about learning to cook. They’re more about increasing the viewer’s sophistication concerning food. They teach about foreign cuisines, new ingredients, and new cooking techniques and tools. In my view, recent cooking shows, like Rachael Ray’s, serve the same edifying purpose.
The future
Carried to its logical conclusion, the current trend toward maximum convenience could lead to the development of a device like the “Replicator” in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Whenever you needed something, you just told the Replicator what you wanted and it produced it. In one show, for example, Mr. Data ordered “feline supplement number 9” for his cat, “Spot.” I also seem to recall that at a party on the Enterprise, Captain Picard ordered drinks containing “synthohol,” apparently a non-alcoholic alcohol. Perhaps some future James Bond will order up a “vodka martini, shaken not stirred.” Who knows what the future holds for home cooking?
