The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (6 page)

She tilted her head to one side. “I don't know. I've never thought about it. I like it, but I mainly buy it because it's cheaper than the other ones.”

Later, I calculated that over the course of a typical day, Sabra consumed a cup and a half of sugar. Sabra's food choices were motivated by money, ease, and that refreshing live-forever mentality that grips so many of us in our twenties. Who has to worry about their diet when they're so young? Isn't youth enough to overcome a high-sugar, high-fat, high-salt diet? She represented the dark side of “taste memory” that comes from the early adoption of unhealthy foods such as fast foods. Everyone has their comfort food, that flavor that harkens back to a time in childhood that they felt safe and loved. This explained her fondness for Gold 'n Soft and McDonald's. But it was clear that she put more thought into creating cocktails than into developing dinner.

Our next stop offered insight into a whole different generation. Trish was a sixty-one-year-old psychologist living in a modest condo on the edge of the affluent Madison Park neighborhood. She fretted when Mike and I showed up with a small video camera in hand to record the proceedings.

“I'm sure that I'm going to be doing everything wrong,” she said, a tinge of defeat in her voice. She literally wrung her hands. Mike kept the camera low, out of her face, and joked with her to keep her talking as she gave us a tour of her comfortably modern apartment dominated by obviously inherited antique furniture, dark yet luminous with a patina developed through many decades of careful polishing. Trish wanted to feel like she belonged in the kitchen. “I want to feel at ease. I want to feel like I can make meals for my friends who are good cooks.” She pounded her fist into her palm. “I want to like cooking!”

Trish grew up outside Washington, D.C., in what she describes as a “fairly typical” 1950s suburban family. Her grandmother played an important role in their lives. She taught Trish and her siblings to bake, read “old-fashioned” cookbooks, and lent a formal but friendly note to the family dinners and conversations. In Trish's house, dinner was served at six o'clock sharp on a table set with silver and china. Despite her grandmother's baking prowess, her mother wasn't much of a cook; she relied on
The Compleat I Hate to Cook Book
. Dinners starred a meat, supported by some kind of potato and at least one canned or frozen vegetable cooked to the point of gray. Her mother's star turn was fried chicken.

“I remember some truly awful stuff, such as spaghetti sauce made from tomato soup!” Trish said, laughing. “I guess I was kind of a picky eater. I loved the mahogany furniture, the chandelier, the silver and china, but I never cared about eating.”

Trish's cabinets and fridge offered a striking contrast to Sabra's, with baking supplies, cans of beans, tomatoes, tuna, salmon, and chicken, boxes of organic soup and broth, jars of pasta sauce, salsa, pickles, jams, salad dressings, and artichokes, oils and vinegars, dry pasta, spices and herbs. “For a meal, we usually open a can, a box, or a jar,” she said. But most of it was real food, just preserved. She had the same kinds of stuff in her cupboard that I had in mine at home.

She climbed on a stool and pulled down three flat silver boxes. As she opened one, a strong smell of curry mingled with cinnamon escaped. Inside she kept carefully marked small flat disks filled with spices and dried herbs. “I got these storage things somewhere years ago,” she said. She shrugged while looking at them. “I wish that I knew how to use all these spices better.” She closed the box and put it back up on the shelf.

“I guess I can cook, but I'm not very pleased with the results. I've never learned to cut or chop things properly. Lots of times I try a new recipe but the results are disappointing. It's hard to get enthusiastic about cooking a meal that's going to take more than thirty minutes to make and it doesn't usually turn out well.”

When I asked about recipes, Trish took us over to her well-ordered bookcase. She pulled out volume after volume of excruciatingly organized recipes, categorized and neatly maintained in a series of white binders, another marvel of organization. I gazed in wonder. A protective plastic sheath housed each clipping. As a Gemini and a creative type who can barely keep track of bills, I could never imagine having done such a thing.

She pulled out a binder labeled “Entrees.” She flipped through it. “Yeah, this turned out sort of bland. And this one, I did something wrong, the chicken was tough.” She flipped a few more pages. “Oh, this one, it came out all right. I was kind of surprised.”

As I looked through the recipes she'd clipped from magazines, I recognized the names of a couple of food writer friends, including the dish she referred to as bland. I later talked to the author about it. “Oh, I know the recipe she's talking about,” she said with a sigh. “I was only allowed to include six ingredients in the list. So I cut out at least four from my original version. Plus, I had fresh basil in the dish, and that really made it work. But my story got bumped from August to November, and since basil isn't seasonal then, the food editor cut the basil. It's funny, home cooks think recipes turn out bland because it's their fault. The reality is that there is so much pressure to make recipes short that food writers have to cut out steps or ingredients to make them look simpler, or, in the case of the basil, less expensive.”

For lunch, Trish made ratatouille. She chopped an eggplant in a curious moment of butchery with a blunt paring knife. “Knife skills,” I wrote on my notepad. Next she opened a couple of cans of tomatoes. As it cooked, she talked. Mike kept filming her discreetly. She and her husband avoided fast food, red meat, and pork for health reasons. Trader Joe's was their main stop for groceries. “We don't have a budget for food, but, then, we don't have extravagant tastes either. We're coming close to retirement age, and, like most everyone else, there is less money now.” She broiled the occasional fish fillet in the toaster oven or baked sweet potatoes. Her husband made the nightly salad. She bought a lot of bottled salad dressings. I made another note on my pad: “Teach vinaigrette.”

“In terms of seasonings, they're basic. I sprinkle a little balsamic vinegar on green vegetables, lemon on the fish, and butter and salt on potatoes. That's what I know how to do.”

As we sat down for lunch, she fussed, setting the table with expensive antique dishes, embroidered white cloth napkins, and real silver. Her ratatouille was good, just a little undersalted, which made sense as Trish seemed absolutely terrified of salt.

All this made me curious as to how a smart, organized woman who possessed the basic building blocks of cooking had ended up so tentative. When asked a question, she'd invariably answer, “I don't know, is that right?” Yet she's a psychologist, a professional paid for thoughtful commentary and insight into others' lives. She had so much emotional baggage wrapped up in cooking that I kept stifling my urge to say, “And Trish, how does that make you feel?”

The next day, Lisa and I pulled up to a classic 1960s-era ranch house with a white picket fence in a quiet working-class neighborhood. Toys in various states of repair languished on torn-up sod in the front yard. Shannon was a thirty-two-year-old stay-at-home mom with two kids. She had recently purchased a couple of chickens to keep in her backyard and grew a small patch of vegetables. Shannon subscribed to food magazines and combed Internet sites for recipes. None of it made her feel what she called “kitchen confident.”

Her mother answered the door. “I don't know what you're going to teach her,” she said dismissively to Lisa and me, turning away as soon as we entered. “She burns everything.” Shannon appeared behind her, a trim, pretty brunette with an easy smile and a pixie haircut, a lean baby girl balanced on her hip. Visibly irritated by her mother's remark, she let it pass. Shannon handed her the baby and took us into her kitchen, a large sunny space with pale Formica countertops and a classic suite of nondescript white appliances. She kept a row of cookbooks on one shelf, something of a rarity in the kitchens we visited.

Shannon has an easygoing way about her, occasionally punctuating sentences with flinging arms or wide-eyed expressions or a curious rolling-winking of one eye, an endearing tic. “I'd describe my cooking skills as pretty basic,” she started. “I can bake pretty well but cooking has always kind of escaped me. I can read a recipe and follow it, but most stuff turns out pretty bland. I make a lot of casserole-type dishes, which aren't very popular in my house.” Cue eye-rolling tic.

Unlike the other cooks I would meet in the project, Shannon did try to plan meals before she hit a grocery store. “My problem is when I'm making up the menu for the week. I just run out of ideas and end up cheating by filling up two days with burritos and spaghetti.” By “spaghetti” she meant a jar of sauce. “Oh, yeah, that's it. I've never made it from scratch. Sauces, that kind of thing, it's all just kind of beyond me. I buy those or get a seasoning packet.”

Otherwise, a meal to her included a meat-plus-veggie-plus-starch combination. “I'm not very good at cooking meat. I'm scared to death of uncooked chicken so it's usually super overdone.” Pork chops are pretty easy, she said, but she usually did the same seasoning every single time, a mix of salt, garlic powder, and pepper. “I try to fit in fish once a week, but it is always a boring night because I really don't know what to do with fish.”

She budgeted about seven hundred dollars a month for groceries and meals out. Given they're a family of five, restaurant trips were a rarity. Her big splurge was a sushi place near her house. “At the beginning of the month, things are good. By the end, the meals get increasingly basic as I try to stick to the budget.”

I asked about her mother's remark. “Oh, my mom.” Her cheeks flushed, a wince flashed across her face. “My mother started every single meal with a can of soup. She cooked but she never really wanted me in the kitchen, so I didn't learn much. I want to teach my kids to cook when they're older, but since I don't really feel like I know what I'm doing, what am I going to pass on?” Shannon would occasionally make variations on the stuff her mother had served her, such as Parmesan chicken, sweet and sour beef with egg noodles, and tuna casserole, even though she now considered it “old lady food.”

“I am so interested in cooking, but I find it frustrating. I can't look at a recipe and conceptualize how it will taste. I can't figure out what is necessary in a recipe and what can be left out. I wish that I were one of those people who could look at my cupboards and my fridge and just improvise something. Or go to a restaurant and eat something I like and then replicate it at home. I don't feel like I have the skills to do that, you know?”

Shannon had the desire, motivation, and time to cook but felt she lacked the core competencies. Like so many people, she didn't learn to cook from her mother, nor did she learn any cooking skills in school. By contrast, women of her mother's generation had multiple opportunities to learn—from their own mothers and in high school back in the days when home economics enjoyed a more robust place in the curriculum. She struck me as similar to a frustrated aspiring musician who just wanted to get the scales down so that one day she could riff.

“Welcome to the hood,” Dri said, spreading her arms wide in a welcome as we walked up the neat path to her well-tended apartment building in the city's Central District. In theory, this is the “rough” part of town, but in recent years much of it has been undergoing serious gentrification. When there's a Starbucks on a nearby corner, it's tough to think you're in a ghetto, even in Seattle.

Vivacious and good-natured, Dri had the air of a nervous comic about her. She kept a smile fixed on her face for almost the entire visit. Dri planned to move soon into a condo she had bought in another part of town. “Good-bye, eight-by-six-foot kitchen!”

Dri was dressed entirely in black, possibly an effort to hide the extra fifty-plus pounds she carried on her tall, sturdy frame. She had recently started hitting the gym. “But the whole food piece is just kind of missing,” she told Lisa and me as she started to empty the contents of her cupboard. Her kitchen was so small, only she could fit in it; I stood in the doorway and watched.

She was as delighted as a kid at Christmas by the first thing she dug out—a caked packet of spices. “Oh, here's the magic herb mix that they gave me [at the food co-op] to make pot roast one time. Once. I only did it once. How sad.” She dropped it dramatically on the counter. Dri pulled down aging jars of paprika and curry, a bulk jar of peppercorns, catering-sized jugs of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. “Every time I make a real meal I seem to buy new spices. I usually buy them in bulk, so, hello”—she pulled down another quart container. “Give a hearty Dri's Kitchen–style welcome to another stupidly large container of cinnamon!”

Although she lived alone, Dri bought a lot of her food at a warehouse store. It's a habit she adopted from growing up in a family with seven kids. Her kitchen seemed so small yet food kept coming out of the cupboards like clowns from a circus car. At one point, she produced industrial-sized boxes filled with granola bars and instant oatmeal. “For breakfast,” she said. “Oh, here's five pounds of cheap not-very-good-for-the-world kind of rice.”

Dri described her “vicious circle,” one that will likely resonate with a lot of people.

“Okay, so I go to the grocery store and I have all these great intentions. I think, Okay, I'm going to make my lunch every day this week! I see all these great greens and I stock up on them. But then it's late when I get home, I'm tired. I promise myself that I'll eat them the next day. By then, I'm back in my routine that doesn't involve a lot of food preparation.” Eventually, she finds a big, wilted, green stain at the bottom of the drawer. “So I throw away a LOT of food. It's tragic how much I waste.” A statement she followed up by noting that she has a degree in environmental studies; she now works in urban planning. “I try to buy organic because sustainability is important to me, as a life choice.”