Reading a post by Sizzie a few minutes ago, reminded me how I learned to cook. When I was a child in our southern household, my favorite place was the kitchen. I loved to stand and watch my grand'mere make orange marmalade in a big kettle, and I would have spent all day in there when the cook prepared Sunday dinner. Usually, however, I was shooed out. "Don't bother Victoria," my mother would say.
When we finally hired a cook for our house, Mother remained good to her word. I wasn't allowed to watch. I am still not sure why.
The result, however, was that I went away to grad school in London unable to cook anything other than scrambled eggs. I learned a few things from my flatmates, though. Bangers and mash, for instance. Pork sausages browned in a skillet with left over mashed potatoes and cabbage. Surprisingly good, actually. I could boil the potatoes, too, and mash them. And once I went over to Fortnum and Mason, the specialty store, and bought canned Mexican food items--Spanish rice, canned tamales, canned chili con carne. And I prepared a "Mexican" meal for my flatmates. They ate it and said it was good, but really!
So when I was on my own in DC a couple of years later, I was desperate. Fortunately someone had given me the first Julia Child cookbook. This was a brilliant idea. She broke the ingredients and process down into small increments that even a novice could understand. Moreover, she taught technique--how to chop, etc. Eventually I became a fairly competent cook, especially in the days when one could use butter and cream.
Using her cookbook, in fact, I made only one odd meal and that was garlic soup, which I prepared for my mother and my fiance about two years after that. The mistake I didn't catch involved the liquid that should be used. (Sizzie, please note: not the amount of liquid, but the kind.) The recipe said that one could use broth or water. I had no broth, but I did have water. And the result tasted exactly like that: garlic boiled in water. Not a success.
PS: A moment ago I looked up the recipe on the internet (its link is posted above) and they call it aigo buido, and lo! water is correct. However, I promise I followed the recipe to the letter and it was not good. Maybe I didn't use enough garlic!
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The View from the Front Porch
2 comments:
I just stopped by and am delighted to read about your learning to cook. My grandmother made orange marmalade and there was always a box of mason jars filled with it and stored under the guest room bed. I recently read a journal one of her sisters wrote about their time as children (in the 1890's rural England) and a mention was made of orange marmalade stored in a box under a bed. I don't remember ever trying it though.
You may be interested in the new movie coming out with Meryl Streep as Julia Child, focusing on how she took french cooking lessons as a lark and later in life and wasn't a whiz at cooking. It's paralleled with a story of a modern day young woman who has a blog and starts a project to cook each recipe from Julia's famous cookbook in 365 days -- hard as she is in a little apartment kitchen and there are about 5oo+ recipes to fit into the 365 days. Supposedly both stories are true.
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