I’m trying to figure out if this means that 40% of all people are Dopers.
I’d say it’s higher than that, even given the fact that probably 50% have never cooked in their lives in the first place.
I’d also say that the vast majority have had food that was prepared with some form of alcohol.
I’d be surprised if it was more than 10% of the general population. I wouldn’t include things like extracts but only because in my experience extracts can be kept for a long time after opening. Because the reason my husband and I don’t cook with alcohol isn’t because we’re opposed to it. It’s not because we have religious restrictions and it’s not because we’re alcoholics. It’s because if we open a bottle of rum or wine or bourbon to use a cup in a recipe or a couple of tablespoons in a dessert , we will very likely end up tossing the rest of the bottle that we possibly bought just to make this recipe. As far as I know , that rum and wine and bourbon will not even keep for a year after opening, while the vanilla extract will be good for four or five years.
I was actually very surprised when someone mentioned a lot of Chinese food ( stir-fries? ) contain wine because I’ve never seen any of the Chinese people I’ve seen cook using wine. I’ve also never seen any wine served at a Chinese banquet - just beer and Scotch. That could absolutely be a regional thing - but I think it also means that whether someone is used to cooking with wine is going to depend a lot on what they cook. I can guarantee that my mother never cooked with wine because my mother cooked very plain food. The only sauces /gravies she ever made were a tomato sauce that was basically just canned tomatoes and gravy for roast beef/chicken ( that didn’t even start with a roux but did involve Gravymaster). There’s not a big chance of cooking with wine when you’re making fried pork chop, breaded chicken cutlet, London broil and so on. I suspect that most people (even if not most Dopers) cook that sort of plain food most of the time.
Ha! Good one! When I drank, I never understood wasting booze IN the food, rather than pouring down my gullet. And never personally tasted a brat that I felt was improved by soaking it in beer.
These are just our WAGs, but I consider making a PBJ or pouring a bowl of cereal to be “cooking” in the scheme of preparing a meal. Not to mention microwaving a burrito, heating a can of soup, or the haute cuisine of Kraft Mac 'n cheese! I’d wager that well over 50% of people have “cooked” by my definition.
Unless you define “cooking” by some arbitrary decision as to how many ingredients are used or how much time you make it take and how many pans you dirty. 
Why would you automatically exclude Muslims? Do their views not count? Even if no one else thought this way, Muslims definitely count as “lots of people” (and I don’t buy the “oh they’d care more about being halal” line. The very real non-hypothetical Muslim people I know. who are not strict adherents but still self identified Muslims, will avoid pork and alcohol but not be strict about only eating halal)
But its not just Muslims, the other non hypothetical people I know who feel this way (off the top of my head) are:
- Latter day saints.
- People (like my in-laws) who are not religiously barred from drinking but are immigrants from countries that don’t have the western drinking culture. They are OK with rum at a celebration, but not with things like popping to the pub after work, and definitely not feeding their grand children wine sauce.
- People who are children of alcoholics or otherwise have experience serious trauma of alcohol abuse, and want to avoid any exposure for their children.
- People raising in the more puritan teetoal protestant sects (e.g. some baptists), who aren’t teetotal (or even necessarily religious any more) but still have a suspicion of alcohol around their kids.
I’ve posted a poll.
It may vary regionally, or you may not have recognized the bottle.
That’s the cooking wine version (of one brand), so it has salt in it to preserve it and keep it from being drunk as a beverage.
Also, though not Chinese, teriyaki sauce is made from a mix of soy sauce, mirin and/or sake, and sugar. Both mirin and sake are types of wine. Kikkoman Teriyaki sauce – probably one of the most common commercial ones – has wine as the second ingredient.
That is standard fare. It’s what my mother made 95% of the time. But even she, with her pretty much non-existant cooking skills, occasionally would watch a show on food network and try to recreate what they did including using wine.
So, if you are saying 10% don’t use wine to cook with regularly, I’d agree completely. But the statement is that no more than 10% have ever used wine in their cooking, and I find that suspect.
And the percentage who have had food cooked with wine is even higher, even if they didn’t know it.
It’s called flavor. There is a reason why the kid in the OP’s story was raving about this sauce, it was good. Now, part of the reason that it was good was because it was homemade, which, if you know what you are doing is easy to make much better than out of a can. But, by adding wine, it adds and develops additional flavors, flavors that this young person’s palette could detect and appreciate.
It’s not my favorite, but I do occasionally get some Beck’s Dark, and simmer a few brats in it. It’s a whole different experience than grilling them, and a much much better than just boiling them in water.
Yes, by cooking I do mean starting with at least some raw ingredients and using methods of heating to do more than just warm them up.
I do wonder how much the outrage of the OP’s story was in someone being upset about being upstaged by another mother’s cooking. When I started into the culinary field and quickly became a much better cook than my mother, she wasn’t too open about accepting tips to improve her cooking.
And in Japanese dishes, https://www.amazon.com/Kikkoman-Manjo-Aji-Mirin-17/dp/B0002YB210#immersive-view_1677878137301
Well, if that were actually true, then lots of people would be fucking idiots. Who lets anyone feed their kid without mentioning any dietary restrictions?
Now I’m curious about later day saints.
My husband is a child of an alcoholic, and he’s fine with my cooking with wine.
But the weirdest one to me is
They are OK with rum at a celebration, but not with things like popping to the pub after work, and definitely not feeding their grand children wine sauce.
Because i would rank feeding your kids food that includes tiny amounts of cooked-down wine as far less “boozy” than drinking rum at a celebration. And neither is close to the same level as popping into the pub after work.
Hard liquor, like rum, bourbon, etc. will keep for years after you open them so long as you seal the bottle. And they’ll remain good enough for cooking for decades. I have some VERY old bottles that i inherited (one that got decanted into an old juice bottle) that still work for a recipe that calls for a little grand Marnier or rum.
Wine declines in quality much faster, but if you seal it and keep it in the fridge, it remains good enough for cooking for months.
I usually get box wine. It holds up a whole lot better than a bottle, and while the drinkability goes down after a few months, it still cooks just fine.
If you are part of a group that has such a strong aversion to alcohol that you think foods cooked with wine are not for children, it is incumbent upon you to let people know your dietary restrictions. Since the vast majority of Americans do not share the same ideas. It is no different than if a kid eats a cheeseburger at a party and then the parent whines later that they don’t mix meat and cheese. If you don’t tell someone your preferences, they can’t read your mind.
Oh, I didn’t catch that. Vanilla is a minimum of 35% alcohol ABV. Rum and bourbon typically start at 40% abv and can go quite higher than that (like, say, Bacardi 151.) There’s no reason vanilla would outlive those. There’s nothing in the rum or bourbon that would cause it to go south more quickly (it’s not macerated with anything or flavored with anything after distilling) and with the high ABV, I’d expect the opposite (though all should last pretty much indefinitely under good conditions).
Liqueurs, cordials, anything containing cream, etc., do usually go bad over a year or two, but it depends on what is in them, how strong they are, what they are flavored with after-the-fact, etc.
OK, TIL so maybe I’ll use rum now.
The alcohol in cough syrups, and other similar medications, is there as a co-solvent. In other words, the active ingredient, usually dextromethorphan, dissolves poorly in water, but it does dissolve well in alcohol, which in turn dissolves in water. The amount is generally negligible, but it can produce reactions with certain medications, and people whose personal philosophies, or medical issues, whatever they may be, prohibit any alcohol consumption, should use an alternative.
More and more I’m glad I never had kids. The landmines parents encounter in day-to-day life are unbelievable.
For the record, my mom used wine in a number of dishes she served the family when I was growing up. Most of her contemporaries did the same and no one thought twice about it because it was just an ingredient, like salt. I use wine as an ingredient when cooking; and, again, it would never occur to me that anyone would have a problem with that.
If I knew their religion forbade wine, I’d certainly cook their food separately, but it would never occur to me to change my recipe just because someone was underage for drinking.
That being the point. They have very different ideas, based on their cultural upbringing about what constitutes appropriate behavior around alcohol. And they grew up in a former British colony with a very British influenced culture, that does have a drinking culture albeit one that is different to the western world (the US and UK specifically)
It’s erroneous to assume that your attitude towards why it’s ok to serve wine sauce to kids (and the logical reasoning behind it) is universal.
I never claimed it was universal. And if I’m feeding your kids, and you don’t want me to use wine when i prepare their food, I’m happy to oblige. You just need to let me know. Really not that hard.
The poll is running 22 people who cook with wine, and two who don’t cook with any alcohol, so far, fwiw.
But please don’t refer to my chicken with ginger & scallion as “chicken with wine sauce”. It isn’t.
I can see where the mom didn’t think to ask about wine in the food, the babysitter didn’t think anything about serving her standard, wine-containing sauce to a child, and both of them assumed their views were completely normal. What I can’t see is making such a huge freaking deal about it.
When my kids were pre-teens, I didn’t allow them to watch R-rated movies or play M-rated video games. Once, after my ten-year-old visited a classmate’s house for the first time, she told me they’d played a first-person shooter game that was specifically banned in our house. Rather than hurrying to call that parent and ream her out about soiling my precious baby’s mind, I just had a quiet word with her the next time the kids played together to let her know my preference and offered to send another game with my kid. I presented that with a chuckle, letting her know that I realized I was a tad overprotective.
Similarly, a friend of hers slept over one night and I rented a movie that it turned out later her very religious mom would have preferred she not watch. When I found out, I apologized and assured the mom I’d run any future selections by her first.
No one yelled, no one accused anyone of being a bad parent. We all came to an understanding (and silently judged the other parents in our heads). I think the problem here lies in people assuming there’s just one way to care for children and everyone should know what it is.