My mother-in-law is the dearest, sweetest old lady on the face of the planet, and I love her with all my heart. She is also possibly the worst cook in the tri-county area - possibly the upper Midwest as well.
She doesn’t seem to notice. Her meat is always cooked to gray. She marinated a ham in wine and spices once (ooh! fancy!). This imparted a delicate flavor to the plastic wrapping, which she didn’t remove. She has a very minimalist approach to salads - chopped iceberg lettuce. That’s it. Her pies are half-inch thick nightmares of lard, apparently predigested apples, and amounts of cinnamon and nutmeg ranging from undetectable to hallucinogenic.
Her specialty is a dish of her own invention - lemon pie filling, fruit cocktail, and chopped lettuce, in vinaigrette. I was served this monstrosity early in my relationship with the Lovely and Talented Mrs. Shodan, and felt morally compelled to eat it with a straight face. I referred to it as Fruit Vomit in the car going home, and it has been known as such ever since.
I once asked tLaTMS if it was this way while she was growing up. She glared at me and muttered darkly, "What do you think?’ and I have learned to leave the topic alone.
It’s not as crazy as it sounds. People tend to make associations with certain flavors that give them an overly narrow perception of their potential uses. If you can train yourself to break out of those associations, you find that you tend to categorize things differently. Mustard isn’t a hot dog condiment anymore, it’s an “acid.” Acidity can really enhance sweet flavors if you can proportion it correctly. A little balsamic vinegar probably would have worked better, and mustard is a little unusual, but as a cook, I can understand the impulse to want to add an acid.
Some people have a natural talent I think, but there’s really no substitute for just getting in the kitchen and cooking, cooking, cooking.
My wife won’t cook anything without a very specific recipe. She has a whole bookshelf full of cookbooks she regularly reads, as well as watching dozens of cooking shows but when she gets in the kitchen it’s like she’s gripped by fear. She’s armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of all things culinary, knows more than I do, but she wouldn’t attempt to boil Ramen if she didn’t have a measuring cup for the water. As a result, she rarely cooks, and just doesn’t have that cooking Gefühl you get from trying and botching things over the years.
That sometimes causes problems even for good cooks. Frequently, the hardest part of cooking is timing everything to be done and ready at the desired time. Vague directions for a recipe – “cook until done” – give you no sense of when you should start that particular dish. Good recipes will tell you something along the lines of “This should take 15 - 20 minutes, depending on the thickness of the slices” or some such.
RR
I can cook wonderfully if there’s a recipe in front of me. I make a delicious apple cake, a wonderful gruyere mac & cheese, I can make cheese blintzes, and these are not really easy dishes. I can turn out a perfect omelette with the right pan and ingredients. I can make tandoori chicken divine.
But I ask my aunt to teach me to cook, and she says “ok, put a little bit of haldi (turmeric)”. Well, how much? You’ve been cooking since you were 8, I don’t know! And she can’t write them down…I keep meaning to but she looks at me funny whenever I mention it, like “oh, the poor little american-bred girl can’t even remember a recipe”. And it’s so unfair.
Like others have said, you literally have to work at it, and deal with it when it goes wrong. Thankfully I have an SO who cooks wonderfully and tells me what I did wrong.
I think you might see more bad cooks in times like this. I know I don’t experiment at all with any recipe I try, ever, because I don’t want to waste money on making food inedible. If I had to throw away a pot of something, anything, because I destroyed it trying to substitute for any reason, I’d consider it a huge failure and blow to my budget. I’d spend the rest of the month eating less and carefully cutting corners to make up for what I lost, and I just don’t want to go through that.
My theory is that you’ll find more awful cooking (or bland cooking, depending on how people react) because of food prices increasing.
My grandmother was the same way. She was just an amazing cook, but never, ever wrote anything down and could never give very clear directions. My mom and I have tried duplicating her recipes, but with limited success.
Yeah, I get that part of it. I’ve had balsamic with strawberries & ice cream & the like. With mustard, though, it’s the pungent spice on top of that acid that makes my skin crawl (when coupled with chocolate & ice cream, I mean).
Without reading the whole thread, I’ll give my own answer based on my experiences.
My mom was a bad cook, and I believe it’s because she just didn’t put her heart into it. She felt cooking was a chore, and she had no interest in being inventive with seasonings or pairings of flavors/textures, no interest in trying new things or pleasing us with her efforts. I know this because there were a very few things that she did well (apple pies, potato salad, deviled eggs- potluck foods) that were no-brainers, but what we usually got at home were things like meatloaf bricks, Macaroni With Tomato Sauce (which was macaroni with…wait for it…tomato sauce), cube steaks, concoctions of stuff in crock pots that cooked until they were indistinguishable, vegetables that boiled in a pot until everything else was done cooking, etc, etc. She used recipes, but those recipes were usually the ones with the very least amount of ingredients/instruction possible. It was like as her life got more overwhelming/unpleasant, she just did not see preparing food as something she could be bothered to do. And when my parents got divorced, we were lucky if she cooked at all- actually no, we were lucky that she stopped cooking!
I’ve taught myself to cook and I put my all into it every time and it (mostly) always gets rave reviews.
Most posts in this thread assert that experimenting overboldly and/or failing to use a recipe are the root causes of horrific badness. There’s nothing wrong with simple, basic food. There’s one ingredient in a roast chicken (chicken, + salt/pepper) and it is simple, economical, and satisfying to cook.
Oh! That made me realize that there could be another cause of badness - thinking there’s something wrong with simple, basic food. Trying to make things pointlessly “fancy.”
That’s three ingredients. Plus, I’ve roasted lots of chickens, and I’ve never used just 3 ingredients.
I like fancy food. I like to cook fancy food. I’ve messed up a few times - that’s why the sushi place is on speed-dial - but it’s a learning experience.
Well, there’s experimentation and substitution, and then there’s “making food inedible.” I mean, you could try potatoes instead of carrots in a dish, or maybe add some celery or something, and the food’s not going to be inedible. If the recipe calls for 1/4 teaspoon of sugar and you decide three cups of epsom salts might be good then okay, I can see why you’re afraid to experiment.
I remember back when I was in college and got my very first apartment (with roommate of course) and wanted to make dinner for my friends. I knew how to make a pretty good spaghetti sauce, had a recipe to loosely follow, but had recently read this neat little hint about reducing the acidity of the sauce by adding a pinch of baking soda to it. Instead of adding a pinch, I grabbed the box and tried to shake a little into the sauce. The powder was clumped, and nothing came out. So I shook the box harder. Then harder. Then “fwoomp!” out came a huge chuck of baking soda which immediately made the sauce taste like ear wax. Now that’s making a dish inedible, and making the poor can’t-afford-more-food college student want to cry. I did learn an important lesson about shaking boxes of potentially meal-killing ingredients directly over the pot.
Yes, absolutely. I did some experimenting with Basque flavors a while ago, and came up with spicy chocolate shrimp. The people I served it to looked at me with expressions ranging from :dubious: to :eek: but they all tried it and they all loved it.
Also, I’m going to add something that hasn’t yet been mentioned, following on beowulff’s description of a friend who
Sticking with the musical analogy, some people are “tongue deaf.” They aren’t common, but they have no real sense of what food should taste or feel like. As long as it isn’t so salty or so acidic that it burns your face off, they are happy to shovel in pounds of whatever mushy sawdust is convenient until their gut is filled. When people like this cook, the results are especially tragic, because they don’t know they’ve done something wrong.
I can attest to the importance of this. One time, I ventured to make spaghetti sauce shortly after getting over a cold. My nose was still congested, and I couldn’t smell a thing. When adding the spices, I reached for a jar of what I figured was our home-grown dried basil. This I merrily proceeded to crush into the sauce. Had I only had the use of my nose, my normally competent sense of smell would have told me that it was, in fact, a jar of our home-grown dried peppermint.
That was some interesting spaghetti sauce, let me tell you.
Aside from that, I’m normally a fairly competent cook. I can follow directions, and I feel like I generally have a sense for things that I can only have got from my mother, who is a goddess of the kitchen. As long as I stick to relatively simple things (so I don’t get overwhelmed by kitchen management issues) I can do pretty well.
My dad is an okay cook when it comes to meals; mainly he sticks to simple routines and never varies them in the slightest. So I wouldn’t say he’s a bad cook per se, but he certainly never runs any unnecessary risks of being interesting. However, he does have an impressive repertoire of Indian sweets, which I’m sure Anaamika could appreciate. I’m don’t remember him making ras gulla, but his besan laddu and gulab jamun are sublime.
Those three ingredients make the most sublime roast chicken though. If you don’t believe me, maybe Thomas Keller (of French Laundry fame) could persuade you:
I don’t think I’m ever making roast chicken any other way again. It is simply sublime. And dead simple. Did I mention sublime?
If I’m being fancy, I serve it with a little Thai dipping sauce of limes, nam pla (fish sauce), garlic, and hot peppers. But, really, after doing all sorts of shit to roast chicken, stuffing herbed butters in between the skin, sticking lemons and thyme in the cavity, etc., this method is clearly the best for me. It produces perfect skin every time and, believe it or not, a succulent, juicy breast without need for brining or soaking in buttermilk or any other nonsense.
Just tie the bird’s legs together. Like this. If you can tie your shoes, you can truss a chicken. That said, even if you don’t bother trussing it, it’ll come out fine. Just make sure you pat that chicken as dry as possible (you can even leave it uncovered for several hours to dry it even more that way). Roast at 450 and leave alone in the oven for an hour.
This is hilarious!
