This is more a sample question about the level of genuineness in your relationships and was prompted by my roommates.
She made a pot of very delicious beans on Thursday night. But it was a small pot, and we finished it off. Her boyfriend, who lives here too, asked her to make more the following night. She did, but she screwed it up and the beans were inedibly salty. When she served them to him, he picked at them and didn’t say much, and she finally had to say out loud, “damn! I screwed up the beans! I can’t even eat them because of the salt!”. She told me he was trying to protect her feelings.
Now, this strikes me as utterly bizarre. They have been together for 4 years, she feeds him every day. She made delicious beans the night before. Why on earth would he hesitate to say:" Whoops, babe! Thanks for trying but it looks like you messed up the salt." End of story. For a million reasons, but not least being the fact that the salt issue was not a matter of taste; no one would have eaten the beans with that much salt. AND undercooked, actually, I almost forgot.
So anyway… I would never hesitate to say that the beans were too salty for me, while I might adjust how I say it, depending on the cook and our relationship. But I would always say it, I would never pretend they were edible.
Different strokes for different folks - if their relationship includes picking at oversalted beans, I guess if it works for them, more power to them. They could have an ancient agreement that complaining about food cooked for you results in doing all the cooking yourself in the future.
When I was a teenager, my mother went through a phase where she decided that she was going to cook whatever the fuck SHE wanted and to hell with the rest of us. We got stuck with some pretty godawful meals that no one at the table other than her wanted to eat, and it got pretty dramatic what with her angrily carrying on about the whole thing. :rolleyes:
Some people can get pretty messy about any possible criticism of their cooking. Have you known them long enough and well enough to know that this has ever happened or not?
Hell, if it was a matter of picking at inedible beans or facing a week of crying, carrying on and holding out on me…I’ll have the beans please.
Some people get really, really psycho when they think they are being criticised – perhaps he thought she would be like that? Honestly, I don’t know. I have on occasion made food that I considered to be inedible that my husband ate – and said he enjoyed. Of course, his mother is a notoriously bad cook (she once tried to serve us chicken that was still raw – like not even warm, raw!) so there ya go.
Me? I’d probably not say “dayum, this is nasty” but more like “heh, it’s a little saltier than I can handle right now. I think I will make some tuna” or some such.
Maybe he was raised to never complain about what he was served. My dad was like that. He’d dutifully eat anything mom put in front of him, without a peep. She didn’t find out he hated her ham-and-broccoli casserole as much as us kids did until we were almost grown!
You’ve heard the joke about the guys on the hunting trip, right?
It kinda sucks to ask someone to do you a favor (even if her cooking is a long-standing thing) and then criticize the way they do it. If I’m ever in a similar situation, I hope it’ll be with someone I can speak my mind with, even when things aren’t perfect. But I can understand trying to spare someone’s feelings when they’ve done something nice for me.
My husband was raised this way, too. I could quite literally serve him an old boot and he would eat it without a murmur. He would probably raise it later, possibly days later (Like this: “Oh, by the way, let’s not have old boot any more for a bit, okay? It didn’t agree with me somehow”) but never at the table. I have, I think twice in the past five years, put my fork down and said that I thought it might be time to get some takeout as this experiment failed. And he was not displeased to stop eating and get takeout both times. But he would not have brought it up.
I have an SO that would never say anything negative about anything I cooked. He feels like If I cook, then he should appreciate it, as I appreciate the fact that he works and I don’t. But if it is something is terrible, or burnt, I will announce it to him before hand. Sometimes he will try and eat it anyway, to be nice. Sometimes it goes in the trash, then he praises a side dish to compensate. If a whole meal is ruined, he helps me cook something else. I do the same for him.
I think it is sweet he tried to eat them anyway, she should have spoken up in the beginning though, poor guy.
If someone cooks me food…it would have to be pretty damn bad for me to critisize it! People don’t have to cook me food…the fact that they are doing so says something!
Why bring it up when she is sure to notice herself and say something? I mean, if she sent him to work with beans that she hadn’t tasted and didn’t know were too salty, it would make sense for him to say “hey, don’t pack the rest of those beans tomorrow, they are really salty.” But she’s right there, she’ll figure it out herself in just a second, why mention it?
My grandmother used to make the best damn bread in the county. One day my mom asked for her recipe, but all Grandma could say was, “A pinch of this and a dash of that”. When mom nagged her for specifics, she eventually made a confession.
Apparently Grandma didn’t know how to make bread when she was first married. This was back in the day when every girl was supposed to know such things. And this was way before Betty Crocker, when recipes usually started with something like, “Lay in a good supply of firewood and catch yourself a fat chicken”.
So every day when Grandad was off working on the farm, Grandma would experiment with baking bread. She knew generally what went into it but had many failures along the way. Every afternoon she would take the failures down and throw them in the hog trough to hide the evidence. That, she explained, was why she couldn’t say exactly what her recipe was. And this was the first time she had ever told anyone including Grandad.
Across the room from behind his newspaper, Grandad said, “Yes honey, I know. I’ve known that since we were first married”. Apparently the hogs wouldn’t eat it either. So every day, to keep Grandma from being mortified, he would fish the brick-like loaves out of the hog trough and bury them behind the barn. And for 40 years he never said a word. Only time I ever saw Grandma cry.
There are a variety of ways that a family could possibly communicate in a potentially sensitive situation. I understand the OP situation, you got to be careful when you critique a loved one’s food, especially if they put a lot of time and energy into it.
In my family, if one of us makes a cooking mistake, we try to allow for the cook to discover the mistake first, then give an honest assessment of the situation. I can’t think of a single time from my perspective in which my wife made something that I didn’t like and she didn’t pick up on it after a few bites. This is still actually a rare occurance, we have been together long enough so that we know each other food preferences well. I feel sorry for couples who don’t have some protocol for letting each other know that what they made is either bad or not to their usual preference. How to handle making food compromises would be a good thread.
My mum, like Jaglavak’s grandmother, was a novice cook when she was first married. She still tells the story of the time she overcooked the potatoes to the point where she *poured *a serving on to my dad’s plate. He looked at them for a long moment, then smiled and said;
“Creamed potatoes, fantastic!”
They both knew the spuds were a watery mess, but dad cared more for her happiness than her culinary skills.
The title doesn’t really fit the story of this thread. I wouldn’t say the boyfriend “lied”. He just remained silent on the subject. So the answer, I have no idea why someone would lie about salty beans if they were directly asked about it. Most would give a tactful but truthful answer. On the other hand, not eating the beans is a pretty clear sign that you don’t like them. It’s not really necessary to say anything. But I guess everyone’s “at home” dynamic is different.
I’ve been happily married for over 10 years, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned is never to criticize my wife’s food before she does. Fortunately for me, my wife is a phenomenal cook, and she generally apologizes for her rare screw-ups before I have a chance to say anything (and besides, you can earn major brownie points by saying, “no, honey, its really not that bad!”).
Of course, we almost always eat dinner together, so it’s never a case of her serving me before she’s tasted it herself.
Not to worry. This is going to sound like I don’t believe your story, which is worse - I’d rather be too sentimental than too mean.
Okay, here’s what I don’t get: if your grandma practiced day after day until she got it right - to the point where she made “the best damn bread in the county” - why on earth couldn’t she explain how she did it? Seems to me she must have eventually figured out a successful process and subsequently did it the same way every time to produce delicious results. So why couldn’t she just tell your mother what she finally discovered?
Beats me why I’m so curious about this, but I am. Maybe because I like to bake bread, and I’m hoping your grandma found a novel way to do it.
It would seem that grandma had been raised by a mother who didn’t need to bake bread but married a man who took it for granted that a woman would know how.
Grandma strove to overcome her ignorance and be worthy of her mate’s expectation but apparently nursed an insecurity-that she really had to work at something that should have “come naturally”.
Sort of an O’Henry theme, with Grandad’s reciprocal grace of silent understanding.
