I'm going to rant a little here, please forgive me:

"Why is it okay to be stupid when you cook?".

Apparently, cookbook companies - even the publisher of the venerable "Joy of Cooking" - are concerned that we are now a nation of culinary idiots, people who will read the phrase "cream the butter and sugar together" and assume that means you dump cream into the bowl (even though it's not called for in the list of ingredients). So they're simplifying the language.

This makes me sad.

I realize I'm an unusual individual - my mother did not work outside the home when I was growing up, and what's more, she encouraged me to learn to cook at her side. (When I asked for an Easy-Bake oven once, as a child, she said, "why do you want a fake oven? I'll teach you how to use the real one." And she did, and let me use it, with her supervision, even when I was quite young.).

There was a certain joy in learning the mysteries of the kitchen - for example, the "start with flour, end with flour" mantra for combining flour and milk into a cake batter. Or how to tell if an egg was still fresh enough. Or how to sour milk if a recipe called for buttermilk and you had none on hand. And I learned the terms - dredge and braise and truss (I got 100% on that little quiz on the article sidebar). It wasn't hard. And because, when I was a kid, I both loved and revered my mom, learning to cook from her was a big deal. It was something I wanted to do. It wasn't work, it was a joy.

I guess that chain of cultural transmission is being broken. Maybe it was even broken before my time - my mother spoke somewhat pityingly of a girl she knew in college, who "couldn't even boil an egg" because her mother wouldn't allow her in the kitchen. (My mom, and the other girls in her co-op, took the non-egg-boiler under their wings and taught her how to cook). But a lot of people in my age group - when I look around me - it seems that they don't cook. (Fellow bloggers aside: it seems that people who are creative in one area are creative in others. I know several of the bloggers I read regularly are very interested in good food and good cooking). The fact that I prefer to make cakes from scratch is seen as sort of a goofy-but-benign eccentricity among some of my colleagues, kind of on a par with a hobby-photographer who insists on developing his own film. (*I* can tell a difference in the taste and texture of "box" and "scratch" cakes; maybe few others can. And the difference is enough for me to want to make "scratch" cakes.)

It occurs to me that learning cooking - and learning cooking terminology is not all that HARD. They make the comparison in the article with driving - you learn new terms and new techniques when you learn to drive. I suspect it's a matter of caring, a matter of what's important to a particular person. Learning how to cook was important to me when I was a kid and teenager, and so it was something I learned readily and eagerly. I wonder if a lot of people just see cooking as not that important, and if they consider the various things that I see as drawbacks in highly processed food (higher sodium, weird texture to meat that's been cooked and then frozen, preservatives, artificial flavor and color, food that conforms to another person's taste-aesthetic rather than your own) as acceptable tradeoffs for the time they "save" by not cooking. (Although I would argue there are plenty things you can make from scratch that take minimally longer to prepare than pulling a package out of the freezer and peeling back the Pliofilm on it).

For me, cooking is a joy - it's a creative process. I can read a recipe and go, well, I don't like bell peppers, but I do have some snow peas in the freezer, let's see how they go in the dish instead. And it's a way of taking care of myself - I feel the same sense of centeredness and well-being when I cook for myself as I do when I take the time to draw a hot bath, or spend a half-hour silently reading.

I don't cook all the time - some nights, when I get home late from meetings or have to go back out to meetings, I'm lucky if I have time to manage making a salad and heating up a bagel - but I do like to cook. And when I have time, I cook properly. And I take a certain pride in that I know how to do it, that I know the apparently-arcane terms and techniques. And that I understand at least a little of the science about it.

I worry about the loss of vocabulary from our language - my limited experience with struggling with high-school French while on vacation in Montreal, and my even-more-limited Spanish when dealing with some of the immigrants here, have taught me that if you lack vocabulary, you often have to take 20 words to say less well what one correct word would. And that's what I see happening with the cookbook issue. "Braise" immediately conjures up a process for me, and I could tell you what cuts of meat you'd want to braise and what type of vessel to use and what type of liquid. "Cook at medium temperature while immersed in liquid" roughly captures the meaning, but it's clunkier and takes more words. And it's less evocative, at least for me. When I hear the word "braise" I can almost smell pot roast. "Cook in liquid" doesn't do that for me.

I often sneered at junior-high and high-school Home Ec. classes, because they were poorly taught in my own junior high. (Seriously. We made lasagne and pizza and fudge, and I think, jelly roll. Not exactly the way to build an understanding of nutrition or the cooking process). But maybe they need to be brought back - and brought back more intensively, if kids aren't learning different cooking techniques at home. (I've also said, on occasion, that it would be good if Home Ec. cooking classes were somewhat revamped to include basic nutrition - I'm kind of shocked at how little my students, and even some people my own age, know about what is healthful and less-healthful eating).

I don't know. I worry that as the pace of life accelerates, we're losing a lot of important things - things that add depth and joy and richness to life. Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe most people don't take pleasure in precisely chopping vegetables for soup, or kneading tortilla dough until it's just the perfect consistency (I remember reading in one of my cooking magazines that an old Turkish instruction for how long dough should be kneaded is that you knead it until it feels like "the soft underside of a woman's arm." I love that image, and it actually works for me - that's exactly how the dough feels to me now when I've kneaded it enough - like the inside of my arm.) Maybe I'm just a voice crying in the wilderness, maybe I am eccentric because I like to cook. But I do, and I'd like for more people to feel the joy that I feel about the process.