How can someone be a bad cook?

Cafe Society
21

My poor departed grandmother was raised in an orpahnage, so she didn’t really have a lot of good cooking role models. My dad used to joke that we should never give her more than a few hours’ warning that we were coming to visit, because if we gave her, say, three days’ notice, that’s when she’d put the chicken in the oven.

Dad was the same way when my parents split up; he couldn’t fathom why turning up the heat twice as high didn’t just make everything cook twice as fast. He’s much better now, thank goodness, because my stepmom can’t cook to save her life, either. I wanted to throttle her once for ruining my recipe; we came home covered in 18" of slush after schlepping 5 hours round-trip to my uncle’s funeral, only to find out it had been postponed. I dragged my wwet, exhausted, depressed ass to the grocery store to buy the makings of pot roast, assembled everything, and put it in the Crock-Pot on low so it would be ready for dinner. An hour later, while I was taking a much-needed nap, she decided it wasn’t cooking fast enough, so she dumped everything into an (uncovered) lasagna pan and put it in the oven on 350. By the time I woke up and realized what was going on, my poor pot roast had the approximate texture of shoe leather.

22

I think there are two varieties of bad cooking. There are the overly bold attempts at inventiveness. “I added mango, and blue cheese, and chervil” which result in bad food. As I type it occurs to me that bad food is different from bad cooking.

For a while I dated a man whose mom you might call a bad cook. Almost all of her failures could be attributed to temperature problems. Pork chops were dried out to the consistency of sawdust. Chicken was crispy, with a few burnt spots on the outside but still pink near the bone. French toast was not left in the batter long enough to get eggy throughout, and then blackened on a griddle slathered in burning smoky butter. I never asked but I think she had notions about high temps killing more potentially harmful cooties, and that’s more important to her than flavor.

My grandmother was similar to Ludy’s med school friend in that she had too many other things to do than to waste time in the kitchen. She famously boiled dry lots and lots of pots of water. She however, did not get caught up in the line by line directions. She just went through the ingredients list, and threw it all in whatever pot or baking dish it was to end up in, stirred it up and hoped for the best. No “add milk slowly while stirring constantly” for her or “meanwhile, in a small bowl sift together…” Bah! For the most part she was right. Things tasted pretty okay, even if they had the consistency of a brick.

In fairness to my late, beloved, Grandma I should point out when she felt inspired to cook something, or cooked a big holiday meal she was a good cook. It’s just that most of the time she was making dinner so people who lived in her house didn’t starve.

23

My sister is a horrible cook. She doesn’t follow directions well, and makes substitutions without rhyme or reason. If a recipe calls for 1/4 cup of sugar, and she is out, she would see nothing wrong with substituting either something sweet or something white. No sour cream? Well, it is dairy, and so is ice cream, so. . .

My SO is a magnificent cook. If she finds out at the last minute that some old friends are in town and want to stop by for dinner, she can do it. She can glance at what she has on hand and come up with a multi course gourmet meal that everyone will talk about for years.

I am somewhere in the middle. I excel at technique and direction following. Stir roux nonstop for an hour? I’m on it. I’m lacking in the creativity department, but I’m working on it.

24

I thought of another thing…my real mom used to put stuff on the stove and then start reading a book. :rolleyes:

25

You have to cook enough that you get a sense of these things.

I never thought I’d be just my mother and grandmothers, but when my husband tries to cook, I’m annoyingly vague. Add enough of this. Stir that until it’s thick enough. Sautee until it’s right. It drives him crazy because he doesn’t have the experience to know when it’s thick, right, done, etc., whereas if you’ve been cooking awhile you just know. He has to follow recipes exactly, with scientific precision, and there’s no “adding to taste”–you have to tell him 1/4 teaspoon, etc. Cooks who don’t experiment may not produce some dreadful results, but you also don’t get a feel for substitutions and for being able to walk into the kitchen, open the cupboards and fridge, and simply produce something good to eat with what you have on hand. I’ve made loads of pasta and sauce out of leftovers, garlic and chive cream cheese, whatever veggies are around, etc. Lots of goulash the same way (although it never tastes the same twice!). You just know what will likely work as a substitute without changing the dish, and what won’t, and I think good cooks aren’t afraid to experiment–but with the solid experience of knowing what will work and what won’t. Bad cooks experiment and substitute without a foundation of knowledge.

I was 20 before I realised that beef wasn’t necessarily supposed to be gray when cooked. However, no one ever died from undercooked meat in my mum’s house! Roast beef crumble, anyone?

26

My grandma is a pretty bad cook and it’s mostly of the bad substitutions/overcooking variety. Usually her substitutions are economizing (she grew up during the Depression)(for example cottage cheese for ricotta in a lasagna) and sometimes they are the result of errant creativity (I added cinnamon to the lasagna!) – either way the end result is just inedible.

Strangely, she is a passable baker which most people say requires more rigorous adherence to “the rules” to work.

27

When I was a bachelor, I would try my hand at cooking. I’m actually a fair cook, because I can follow a recipe, but I can see where people who are bad cooks get caught.

A cookbook will say something concrete (measure 1 cup of water), followed by something vague (cook until soft). I can understand the concrete instruction with no problem, but what is “soft” or “done” or other vague, subjective description? This is what separates good cooks from bad - the good ones have enough knowledge or experience to know what these vague terms mean. The bad cooks don’t, and so the food comes out too salty or mushy or burned.

If all recipes were prefect formulas, anyone could be a good cook. Not to say that they would be very creative, but at least their meals would be consistently good.

28

My wife cannot cook and is not allowed to try anymore.
Anytime I was gone from home for any length of time my kids had Pizza…every day!
Forget following a recipe, she was famous not for substituting but for leaving things out, lots of things. She only had a notion of cooking on HIGH, why wait right? Boiling items would frequently be left until ALL the water was gone and the pan would sometime catch on fire. During our first week of marriage a whole apartment building was evacuated when she took a nap boiling eggs and the teflon coating filled the hallways.
Bake a cake…HA! Don’t have eggs?; doesn’t matter, measure ingredients?; close is good enough and remember to cook on HIGH!
Some people can’t cook. My kids all learned to cook early in life out of self preservation.
Married over 30 years, I cook.

29

I think the problem here is also bad cookbooks. Good cookbooks define nearly everything somewhere within their pages (for examples, “The Joy of Cooking” or “How to Cook Everything” by Mark Bittman.) As a child if I didn’t understand some part of the recipe, my mom would make read the the “About Your [Food item]” section in Joy.

Bad cooks maybe don’t realize they’re using bad cookbooks? What about the “Bridget Jones Effect” - attempting techniques and recipes far too complex for the beginner?

30

Exactly. I’ve been cooking since I was ten. I wasn’t turning out gourmet meals, but I was learning how to scramble eggs, how to make grilled cheese, how to cook noodles–all basic foundations that you build on. Someone who do any of that stuff until they get their own apartment in their 20s is going to be way behind the curve. It’s like with any other art–it takes both skill and practice.

I think that’s part of it. It can also be much easier when you learn basic techniques from experienced good cook rather than trying to teach yourself from a cookbook. I think that a lot of bad cooks never worked in the kitchen with good cooks, so they just don’t know what it looks/feels/tastes like.

31

Overconfidence.
Failure to understand the consequences of your actions.
Failure to understand why things are done a certain way.
Bad ingredients.
Bad taste.
An inability to taste a significant difference b/t foods prepared correctly & incorrectly.
Failure to taste the food throughout the cooking process.
“That’s the way my mother always did it.”
etc.

32

In her defense, that is a very unusual Fricassee recipe. Technically, it isn’t even a Fricassee.

33

This was the point I was going to make. I grew up with both parents being fair cooks, so I had an idea of what food was supposed to look like as it was being assembled. Without this foundation, it would have been a lot more difficult for me to learn. I still had to learn a lot by trial and error, but I love food and cooking so it was a pleasurable journey for me. A lot of people find cooking to be a chore, so it’s no wonder they never get basic techniques down, or get discouraged when their first attempt at something fails.

Cookbooks, as good as they may be, very often contain a lot of judgment calls or assume some minimal degree of skill. When I began cooking for myself years ago, it took me awhile to discover why my meat wasn’t browning properly, for example. The cookbook says something like “brown meat over high heat.” Well, I would and it would just gray. My problem? Overcrowding the pan and moving the meat around too often. It’s obvious to me now, but back then, it wasn’t.

34

Let me put it this way, if these “bad cooks” actually followed the recipe to the letter, their dishes wouldn’t suck. If they made intelligent substitutions, their dishes wouldn’t suck. If they were attentive to the time and heat they were cooking with, their dishes wouldn’t suck.

The personality traits that cause them to disregard the recipe, make substitutions without the know how to do it right, and forget about pots on the stove, are exactly what makes them bad cooks.

35

Another example:

I didn’t learn how to dice onions efficiently until I worked in a kitchen after high school. Until then, I thought that you diced an onion by cutting slices off a whole onion, piling them up, and then cutting through the slices. A chef in the kitchen where I worked showed me how to cut the onion in half, lay it flat side down on the cutting board, and then make horizontal and vertical cuts, so that it basically stays together until the end, at which point it becomes a nice pile of diced onions.

Without knowing that, my recipes would have much larger chunks of onion in them, irregularly shaped. That works fine in some recipes, but not at all in others.

Although I’m sure there are cookbooks that demonstrate the technique, most don’t. They just say to dice the onion, and you gotta know what that means.

Daniel

36

I think it involves quite a few factors- few of which have to do with the ability to follow directions. There is a lot more art to cooking than science (though baking is a different story):

Timing- 60% of cooking is timing. A good cook can look at the day’s recipes and just know how to pace assembling the salad, baking the casserole and frying the meat. And they know instinctually when things are at the point they need to be even without a timer. A good cook just knows when the dough has risen, the cake done baking and the drinks chilled. Importantly, they also know when the recipe is wrong, which it often is.

A bad cook does not know how to look at the different steps of preparing a meal and see how they all fit together. As a result, some things are rushed, some are forgotten, some are left too long. Stuff burns or wilts or otherwise gets messed up. All the best directions in the world are useless if your plan calls for deep frying veggies and kneading bread at the same time.

Vision- A good cook can look at a recipe beforehand and envision what it will be like. When they make substitutions, it’s not a “let’s see what happens” thing- they already know what it will be like. They can picture ahead of time exactly what a spice will do, or how different flavors will taste together. When the read a recipe, they understand what the finished product will be like, and may even know how to improve on it.

A bad cook lacks this, and as a result often can’t even weed out bad recipes before trying them, Nor do they have the skills to be flexible and creative.

Knowledge of techniques and ingredients- sometimes this is little stuff, like when to use olive oil or why you should never cook avocados. Or it’s bigger stuff, like not understanding why a home made tomato sauce is going to taste better than a can of store brand tomato sauce. There are a lot of tiny things…some technical, some consumer, some just obscure, that you pick up after a long time cooking.

Comfort in the kitchen- I became a much better cook when i stopped worrying about how many dirty dishes I was creating. Nervous cooks, lazy cooks, uncaring cooks etc. are not going to make great meals because their mind is someplace else.

37

When my gf and I cook together, one plays chef and the other scullery maid. Dicing onions is scullery maid work. The chef is the one who tells the scullery maid what to do. Now that we have cleared that up. . .

38

There’s also the “I’ve-got-to-get-something-on-the-table” factor. At one point my MIL was raising 6 grade-school kids and taking care of both an ill FIL and mother. With 6 hungry kids, all she could do sometimes was either cook from a box or make something while attending to x number of things. My husband, to this day, winces at her cooking: No spices save salt and pepper. Everything’s either mushy, overcooked, or loaded with one or more ingredients than necessary.

To this day her mantra about it is something like “Well, what did you expect? If you’d been in my shoes you would’ve done the same thing.”

39

Do you take turns? Are there…outfits?

40

Well, putting on my chef hat, and my chosen weapon is classical french cooking, a fricasse is a white stew, like a blanquette … when it wandered over to america, in the north it sort of became chicken a la king, in the south and midwest it became chicken in a white sauce over biscuits, or with dumplings, or in the deep south over rice.

Since I rarely have leftover chickens hanging around, you have to actually cook the chicken, and the blanquette ‘white sauce’ is made using chicken stock, cream, butter and flour, the only main difference is adding a bit of the broth to the basic white sauce. I cheat and cook the chicken in just enough water and aromatics to make a tolerable stock.

Sorry, when someone writes out a requirement to remove and toss the old veggies and cook in a new batch, it is truely stupidity on the part of the person to use teh same overcooked mushy crap that was to go to teh dog or compost heap. Sort of like the person who whinges it is crap because they substituted flax seed for butter.