I was chatting with someone the other night and he mentioned that his mother is a bad cook. It got me to wondering, as I have on and off in the past, how is this possible? Assuming that one is able to follow simple instructions, I am baffled as to how one turns out a dish that isn’t at least palatable. I’m not talking about haute cuisine or complicated recipes, but how do you screw up a meat loaf or a casserole?
Are you talking about a bad cook or just a mediocre one? Because I definitely am a mediocre one.
And I see on edit that you are talking about bad cooks.
Genuinely bad? I’ll tell you one thing I have noticed in bad cooks - substitutions. No, you cannot subsitute X for whatever they ask for. They often will do silly substitutions, things I think are just crazy. Also, inattentiveness.
One more thing. My mom was not a very good cook and this was because she would substitute “healthy” alternatives even when it drastically changed the taste. She just never cared. She’d rather eat prunes anyway. I’m not kidding.
My mother-in-law is a bad cook, as are all of her relatives. Her cooking is awful because of her unsafe food-handling practices, spoiled ingredients, lack of any kind of spices, and under- or over-cooking everything. Her mother and sisters use copious amounts of salt in everything and use canned vegetables whenever possible. The textures of the foods they produce are either mushy or wood-like, inevitably.
My mom always “cooked” out of boxes and cans, and my grandmother does too (for the most part, although she does actually know how to cook from scratch). So my ideas about good food have undergone a lot of changes since I became an adult and had opportunities to eat in nice restaurants and such.
My husband doesn’t like to eat processed food, so we look for recipes and cook together all the time and he’s taught me a lot. It does annoy me how he likes to measure everything and follow recipes to the letter, though…sometimes I want to get creative.
So, um, in answer to the question…maybe bad cooks haven’t eaten a lot of good food?
My mother is a HORRIBLE cook. I think it stems from her trying to healthify recipes.
For example, she is notorious for what she thought was my Dad’s favourite meatloaf. It was basically little chunks of meat and bran floating in watery tomato juice. Nasty stuff. We still talk about the evening my Dad got home late, and she handed him a plate of his favourite meatloaf and instant mashed potatoes. He stared at it, obviously trying to get up the stomach to eat it, when the cat took a flying leap from the top of a cabinet and landed right on the plate. He looked around as if wondering how he got there before he delicately began eating it. It wasn’t until years after they divorced that we told her about Dad never liking it.
Then there was the birthday cake she made for my husband the first year we were married. It was an orange poundcake, which would have been okay, except that she made it with whole wheat flour so it was as heavy as a brick. He hated it, and I managed to take care of things for him. He needs to use his hands when he talks, so I told him that I’d hold his plate for him. I did, and held it low enough for the dog to eat it without my mother noticing.
i once met a southerner who couldnt make chicken fricassee … and when I told her what should have worked [she is otherwise an experienced good cook] take a whole chicken, cut into ‘serving pieces’ [the more or less traditional 6 pieces that you get cut up whole chicken in] and put in a heavy stock pot with a whole onion, a couple ribs celery and a couple carrots, peeled and barely cover with water that has a bouquet garni in it [we have premade bouquet garni in the freezer - bay leaf, parsley, thyme and marjoram in a twist of cheesecloth] and simmer til the chicken is cooked. Remove the chicken and veggies from the chicken stock, and make a cream gravy using the chicken broth that has been condensed by half, while cooking a small onion, 2 ribs celery and 3 peeled carrots chopped. When the cream sauce is done, add the chicken meat chunks to the veggies in cream sauce, and simmer briefly to reheat the chicken. serve over biscuits. I gave her all this in writing…
What we ended up with was whole chicken quarters in a watery gravy of all the broth not condensed, and a bit of flour shaken in milk, and the original cooking veggies that were now all mooshy and cooked to death … absolutely nothing like I described … unless she filled the cookpot to the top with water and that watery weaker than dishwater stock was condensed … btu that doesnt explain not deboning the meat or using the fresh veggies like i described…
But she does make killer biscuits so we salvaged it with a fast batch of sausage gravy
I think that’s basically it: substitutions that don’t work, underseasoning, oversalting and not watching your heat, causing scorching and burning. Time, too - I had a grandmother who would routinely put a ham into the oven for 6 hours at 350. Ever had ham the texture of sawdust? I didn’t think it was possible. My father (her son) seriously didn’t know that brussles sprouts are independent little green balls - he thought that was the name of a dish of green paste. His world (and waistline) changed when he married my mom!
Why aren’t people good at any one thing in which there is a book to tell them how to do it? Why aren’t some people good at Calculus? It’s basically the same thing. Following instructions is only part of any task. Cooking is chemistry in a lot of ways. A meatloaf may be simple so long as you have mixed, cooked, and prepared everything properly. There are a lot of ways to screw up. Even more so since there is no objective standard. Plenty of people think their awful food tastes pretty good.
Like others have said, truly bad cooks are usually not following recipes, or are too inattentive or careless to stick close enough to them.
and undercooking also–either by overheat (outside burns before the inside cooks) or by underheat.
My favorite substitution came from my dad. Soon after my parents separated, he decided it was time to learn to cook. A recipe called for diced onions, sauteed until tender. He didn’t have an onion, but he did have dried onion flakes. Hey–pre-diced!
That was some acrid damn smoke.
Daniel
BWAHAHA! This is exactly what I mean!
Sometimes, something genuinely goes wrong, too. The first time I ever made paneer (Indian cheese), I don’t know what happened. I came out with, OK, a lump of cheese. I then proceeded to make balls of it, to make ras gulla (sweetened cheese balls in syrup), my favorite desert.
I boiled up the syrup and started putting the cheese balls in there. But after only a few seconds, they began to fall apart! All of them! And instead of ras gulla, I ended up with…a sort of sweet cheese soup. I cried, and then I laughed until I cried. I still don’t understand why they wouldn’t stay stuck together that time. Now I can make them just fine.
My mother and I can both work in the same kitchen on the same day, side by side with the same scone recipe and mine will always come out better, we have no explanation for it.
My mother didn’t believe in seasonings. Maybe a little salt and pepper, a tiny bit of paprika for roast chicken. She also only ever made a few things, which were mostly plain, and cooked until dry. Meatloaf was a lump of unseasoned ground beef, no breadcrumbs or vegetables added, baked until well done all the way through. On a good day, you might get a couple of bacon slices draped over the top. Her tuna-noodle casserole was pretty good, actually, but everything else was completely forgettable.
There’s also technique. Making biscuits, for example, requires some very specific motions. Use too heavy a hand when kneading, and they’ll come out tough. Roll the dough too thin, and they’ll not rise sufficiently. Twist the cutter when cutting them out, and they’ll not rise correctly.
Daniel
Pretty much all these examples, though, are people not following the instructions of the recipe. Of course if cooks are going to get creative or try to healthify recipes (a friend once made me a whole wheat birthday cake too…awful) then they can end up with disastrous results.
(Now that you mention it) I worked at a McDonald’s that made biscuits from scratch, and my biscuits were in high demand. Some customers would ask who was baking that day before placing their order. I couldn’t figure out why my timed and pre-measured stuff would turn out any differently than anyone else’s, until I watched someone else do the biscuits one day. They worked hell out of that dough and produced some tired little hockey pucks.
If you look at older cookbooks, you’ll see that some of the recipes end up being what we would consider bad cooking today (overcooking vegetables until they’re soggy; few spices; no sauces; odd combinations like eggs scrambled with honey). If you learned from those cookbooks, you could have been a “good cook” – making the recipes correctly – and still be a “bad cook” by current standards.
Oh, yeah. It makes me crazy on Epicurious.com to see commenters who say stuff like, “This recipe is horrible! I substituted margarine for butter and soy milk for cream, and it came out gross!” Well, of course, it did–you didn’t follow the recipe, dumbass.
Many recipes aren’t very specific as to the particulars of the techniques, though. “Knead for ten minutes.” But how hard do you knead? “Beat until light and fluffy.” Light and fluffy isn’t exactly a scientific specification. You have to cook enough that you get a sense of these things.
I also think that just like some people are tone-deaf or colorblind, other people have very little sense of taste. When I cook, I’m always tasting and adjusting slightly based on what I taste. I honestly think that most bad cooks can’t taste the difference between over-salted or too sweet and just right.
A friend of mine can not cook. Which baffles me because she is otherwise an intelligent and capable individual. She is in med school for Christ sakes! If you have to boil water to make it, that is just too much for her. The first time I met her she was amazed at our mutual friend making spaghetti, and not even homemade, everything came from a box or a jar.
Anyway I asked her what her issues with were cooking and she came up with a couple reasons.
First and foremost, she gets bored. If you have to boil water she will put it on the stove, leave the room and forget about it until the pot boils dry. Same with anything on a stovetop. If the recipe says sauté for 5 minutes she will put it on the stove and go do something else while it cooks, maybe coming back in 10 minutes or so.
The second reason she came up with is that she reads the recipes and doesn’t know what to prep first so follows the recipe exactly. For example if the recipe says add onions and garlic to a saucepan and cook over medium heat for 5 minutes, she will do exactly that. The next step will be add broth carrots and beans, so after the 5 minutes have passed (or however long it took her to remember) she will start to measure the broth then cut the carrots and beans. At that time the onions and garlic have been cooking for probably half an hour or so. Repeat that for every step.
It’s a good thing she is dating someone who loves to cook or the poor thing would live off of canned tuna for the rest of her life.
This is sooo my mother-in-law. She is an outstanding cook. She makes the best meatballs I have ever eaten. Lasagna to die for. But she just will not stop with the whole wheat organic bran natural crap. I am the family baker and I make cakes for everyone’s birthday. She is convinced my cakes taste so good because I always use “organic” flour. I tell her I use it when I happen to have it, and I don’t always have it, but she closes her ears. A few months ago she called me and asked for my recipe for pound cake, and then wanted to know if she could substitute ground flax seed for the butter. I told her she would be basically baking a brick, and it would be not only inedible but she would not be able to mix it with a hand mixer and she does not own a stand mixer. She went ahead and did it anyway. She ended up with a brick, but was pleased because it was so “healthy.” (She does not understand the difference between the words “healthy” and “healthful.”)
The kind of stuff Ludy mentions is the stuff you have to learn. Coming from a house where cooking is not loved, I was a bad cook because I never knew how to prepare. In my late twenties I got myself an Indian cookbook and diligently began to teach myself to cook. I was really terrible at it. I didn’t know how much to even fry the onions. But I did it over and over and over, throwing away bad food and eating it if it was even OK. I began to recognize some things. And I have improved my skill to the point where I can cook about 5 or 6 dishes really well and leave you salivating for more, and I can cook several more to the point where they’re good, if they’re not delicious, and you can at least eat them and get full.
The bad cooks I’ve known do one of two things:
Either they never get past the “mistakes” part. They are just too afraid to try, or get discouraged.
They are convinced their way is better, even when it comes out bad.