Are we living in a golden age for home cooks?

[nakji]

The other week, my CSA decided to give me three heads of broccoli. Broccoli is the sort of vegetable I'll tolerate, but I really only like it if I've drenched it in butter, covered it in breadcrumbs, and run it under the broiler until it's crisped beyond recognition. I posted on my Facebook feed to see if anyone had any suggestions for what to do with it, and my father laughingly suggested I try his version of broccoli beef - which I had completely blocked out of my memory. Because it was awful. I really, really hated my father's broccoli beef when I was growing up. It wasn't his fault, though. All he had access to in my small Canadian hometown was "minute" steak; frozen broccoli; a cast iron pan (no wok); indifferent rice - not minute, at least; and V-1 soy sauce. And he was cooking from "Wok with Yan", a book he purchased after watching the PBS series - the only place to see cooking shows when I was growing up.

Now, of course, in my home town there are at least three Asian markets; five kinds of rice available at the supermarket; authentic recipes all over the internet; even more cookbooks it seems than ever - available on-line if you can't get them at a shop; blogs; specialty cookware retailers in the malls if you need a certain piece of equipment; a couple of cooking networks on TV...obviously, there are a lot more outlets if you want to pursue cooking.

People talk a lot about how it was better in their grandmother's day - more people knew how to cook; food was fresher, etc. etc., but I'm wondering if there couldn't be some argument made for the times we live in now being better if you want to develop your skill as a home cook? Leaving aside all the people who seem more interested in watching programs about food than learn to cook, is NOW better than before to be a home cook?

[David Ross]

Absolutely-NOW is the time for home cooks. While I wax nostalgic over the dishes of my Grandmother's and Great Aunt, they had a fraction of the ingredients, equipment and techniques I have at my disposal today.

The only fresh fish my Great Aunt Bertie had access to was rainbow trout out of the Snake River in Southern Idaho, and that was in the warmer months when they got out to fish. She may have gotten an occasional fresh salmon when the family drove over to the Oregon Coast, maybe a Dungeness Crab or two. Today I have access to seafood from around the world and day of the year.

My Grandmother's probably only knew the basic techniques like frying, roasting, poaching and grilling. Yet today I'm exposed to a variety of cultures and ethnic cuisines and techniques like wrapping fish in banana leaves.

Definately, the world for cooks today is ever-expanding. We just need to push ourselves to explore the bounty we have in our hands and not fall into a trap of opening plastic packages and calling that "cooking."

[chef koo]

To be honest, from my observations, in North America cooking seems to be a glorified hobby, where as every else in the world, it seems to be more of an extension of their culture and history. To say that this is a golden age would be a matter of perspective. Someones golden is someone elses dark age. I think the awareness of slow food and the environment at large is a big step in the right direction. But for the home cook and the consumer at large, in North America, there's still a huge lack of respect for ingredients, and cooking. The internet has given people opportunity to explore other cultures and such but when I see people "put their own spin on things" I wonder if it's for the better. You can see the frustration in a servers eyes when an ignorant customer comes into their sushi restaurant and turn the menu upside down. Imagine a pizza maker from Naples standing their listening to someone ask for pineapple on their pizza. I think we're just at the begining of a golden age but not quite.

[heidih]

In terms of expanding horizons I would agree. Between the internet and the multicultural nature of many many areas I perceive the information exchange as burgeoning. It is a fun time to be able to order something one hears about off the internet, or to have "Little "X"'s" in your town where you can taste completely unfamiliar dishes and often have shops nearby that sell related unfamiliar ingredients so that you can cook the dishes. The playground is HUGE I would say.

[ScoopKW]

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it ws the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way."

Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities

In terms of volume of food sold, we're in the worst of times. In sheer tonnage, I'm sure that fast food, packaged microwave "food" and processed crap reigns supreme.

Some days, it seems like we're trying to hold back the tide of McNuggets, Hot Pockets and Cool Ranch Doritos with a broom.

[andiesenji]

For me it is truly a "golden age" as I am constantly spending a lot of "gold" on ingredients, goodies, gadgets and equipment that werre simply not readily available to me even a few years ago.

I still love the traditional tasks (made two pounds of butter today) but I also like the new ideas, many of which I learn here, as well as the traditional ethnic foods I stumble across almost every day.

Now being able to learn how to prepare foods that I have only read about in years gone by is wonderful.

Edited January 16, 2011 by andiesenji (log)

[Crouton]

For the home cook (enthusiast) yes... But for the average joe, id have to say no, it's gotten worse. Most of my friends' ideas of good food is doritos, velveeta and olive garden. Cooking ones own meal is such a foreign concept to them and mostly considered a waste of time...

Edited January 16, 2011 by Crouton (log)

[ChrisTaylor]

Maybe for the average person it's got worse. I don't know. Then again, I don't eat that food. If you want a wide variety of stuff--and if you're prepared to pay the cost (although not all of it's expensive: hit up the Asian markets and you can find bargains, albeit the quality of fresh produce varies dramatically)--it's all there for the taking. From 'exotic' fruits to game meats. The range of cookbooks and recipes you can be exposed to is massive. For an Australian perspective, no longer are we limited to our crazily overpriced local bookshops: we can get stupidly cheap books and free shipping from Book Depository. Or we can shop on Amazon. Get stuff for free online from thousands, maybe millions, of websites. The internet has made so many things possible--sites like this, sites that sell the sort of kitchenware you're not likely to find in your local restaurant supply store or department store, easy-to-follow instruction sets for rigging up sous vide setups from a cheap rice cooker and a handful of parts from an electronics shop.

It's a golden age if you want it to be.

[Dakki]

Absolutely! I can remember a time when there was one kind of tomato, one kind of lettuce, one kind of onion and olive oil was an exotic substance you had to hunt for. We haven't progressed as far as you lucky people in the USA though - we still only get one kind of potato, and peanut oil is an exotic substance I have to hunt for.

As some people already mentioned, the Internet has made access to the knowledge base far easier than it was - I basically just wouldn't know how to cook anything but a few Mexican dishes if it wasn't for cooking sites, YouTube and Amazon.

As for the average joes eating prepared foods - people who eat frozen dinners (and yes, these exist in Mexico) are people who have better things to do with their time than slaving over a hot stove. Maybe they spend a little extra time with their kids, maybe they take a class, maybe they watch soap operas - the point is that we get to spend that time however we choose instead of having that choice made for us - we just happen to spend that time arguing over the relative merits of fleur de sel and Himalayan pink salt instead of following Ugly Betty's adventures or learning Mandarin. I'm going to risk an e-lynching here and suggest "glorified hobby" is no that bad a thing for home cookery (beyond the most essential things) to be.

[mrsadm]

It is a golden age for those who want to cook and to learn to be better at it. Would I have ever learned about sous vide here in my little neighborhood in upstate New York? Could I have owned a video with Rick Bayless showing exactly how to make a homemade tortilla? Would my local supermarket carry Meyer lemons? For those who don't want to cook the fast food choices are not "golden", however, but if you make the effort and take advantage of what's out there - it's a wonderful feast.

[Chris Amirault]

Here's one way to approach the question that avoids the red herrings, echoing the 1980 Reagan question: "Are you better off now than you were X years ago?" There's no doubt that I am, whether that number is 5, 10, or 20. (Maintaining geography and income, roughly, of course.)

[Doodad]

I have a unique perspective on this from my childhood. My grandfather was a trader with China in a small western NC town. Mostly decorative pieces, but in the late 40s and 50s it was more than unique. It earned him the nickname Trader.

They learned a good deal about Chinese culture and my grandmother being the great cook that she was, experimented with the food as well. I don't know if they ever got food goods shipped, but I grew up eating rudimentary Chinese food when you were lucky to have one Chinese restaurant in any town in NC or many other rural southern places. I don't remember much more than the soy sauce, duck sauce and mustard being unique other than of course the cooking methods and mise prep.

Fast forward to this morning as I am shopping specialty asian seeds to plant in our garden because we cook so much asian food. My grandmother would be so envious of the produce I can buy in a short drive that she could only read about in books.

[Kent Wang]

Surely better than the present will be the future, when we will have even more high-tech tools and maybe genetic engineering will bring us even more delicious foods.

[DanM]

We live in an era where we have a wider variety of foods available to us at all times of the year. But have you tasted a tomato in the middle of January? It tastes like cardboard. We are also disconnected from the creation of our food. Fewer and fewer have seen a chicken farm or pulled carrots out of the ground for dinner.

We also have access to "professional style" appliances and cooking utensils. "Cook like a chef!" seems to be the marketing mantra of the day. Its hard not to walk through a kitchen and see the faces of Paula Deen, Rachel Ray, and other chef wannabes on merchandise. The endorsement does not make a product great. Are they any better than the cheaper, more utilitarian products at the end of the isle? You can also find yourself in possession of a monster 48" eight burner stove. Who here has ever managed more than 4 pots on the cooktop at one given time, or had the need to?

[Fat Guy]

I think most things have improved and some have worsened.

Availability of ingredients, in all but the most war-torn lands, is a slam dunk in favor of the present.

Quality of ingredients is mostly in favor of the present, but there are some key categories of ingredients that used to taste better especially at the mass-market level in the US (e.g., beef, pork).

Written information is vastly better now than ever before, as is multimedia. Information handed down through families is weaker now than in the past, though it may be rebounding.

If we break the question into all its components I think we can find out the parts of the answer.

[Ufimizm]

I think at times we get too distracted by all the techniques, "special" ingredients and equipment we have access too. I was lucky to grow up in the country and was spoiled by being raised on local beef, pork and chickens. Where meat tasted like it is supposed to. My favorite example is chicken. When you get the good local raised birds that are yellow vs. the pasty white ones you get in the supermarket. Unfortunately now that they have the free range-organic-locally grown…names to them you have to pay top dollar to get what used to be the standard.

I also think we sometimes get off base by using all of the things we have access to and take away from dishes. I love the Bobby Flay Fried Chicken Throwdown where he lost to a guy that used 5 ingredients and simple techniques to Bobby’s 15 ingredients. While I love to use all of the odd and weird and wonderful ingredients I have collected. I also like to cook really simple basic food and I believe sometimes this simple cooking comes out better and tastes better than the more involved recipes.

I think somestimes we just need to take a step back and cook simple to really appreciate everything we have access too and to relearn how to use these things in the best manner.

[Crouton]

Information handed down through families is weaker now than in the past

I've been wondering about this myself... as the nostalgia for hand-me-down recipes has worn off since I now have access to a wide variety of recipes online and on tv. I tend to be skeptical about any recipe that wasn't published by a noted chef or America's Test Kitchens. I don't know if this is a good thing or not and irritates my wife to no end when I start critiquing a family recipe.

Edited January 18, 2011 by Crouton (log)

[Paul Stanley]

Information handed down through families is weaker now than in the past

I've been wondering about this myself... as the nostalgia for hand-me-down recipes has worn off since I now have access to a wide variety of recipes online and on tv. I tend to be skeptical about any recipe that wasn't published by a noted chef or America's Test Kitchens. I don't know if this is a good thing or not and irritates my wife to no end when I start critiquing a family recipe.

The trouble is not with information that can be written down -- it's the information that can't be. The sense of how things should look, feel, smell, sound. That sort of thing is hard to communicate in writing, and for which many of the time-honoured expressions (dough "doubled in size", fat rubbed in so pastry resembles "crumbs", things baked until "golden brown") are rather imprecise, and can even be misleading.

Another example. Try writing instructions for boning or carving anything of any complexity. Far easier to watch and learn.

New technologies (things like youtube videos) may help with some of those things ... but only to some extent.

[Mano]

As someone who grew up in the 60's and 70's the answer is a definite yes.

Better quality meats, specialty items such as game, foie gras and so forth are available through purveyors like D'Artagnan or by developing relationships with restaurants that will order them for you. Many cities have market centers that carry better and hard-to-find produce. Small farms raise and sell grass fed beef, fresh lamb and pork products and if you can't drive there they'll ship. Sure the cost is higher but it's available.

On the simpler side of things, if you have room to grow produce heirloom tomatoes weren't available even 10 years ago. Making fresh pasta using Kitchen Aid attachments is quick, affordable and so tasty.

Cooks tools are always improving and professional tools and appliances are more available than ever. Dozens of Japanese knife brands are available on the internet and some are surprisingly affordable.

Internet forums and you tube are a terrific resource for every aspect of home cooking. Sure I'd rather be taught in person, but one New Years resolution is to learn how to break down a chicken Japanese style using a honesuki. I never knew either existed until a week ago.

Maybe I'm wrong, but in my circle, people entertain more and wine and dinner groups share information, technique and make me a better and more enthusiastic home cook. The line between restaurant patron and chef is crossed not only on television and the internet, but at the restaurant itself. Send the chef a glass of wine or just ask how a dish is made and they're glad to share.

One challenge was mentioned above. Keeping things simple. There's so much out there my inclination is to want to use it all by adding more ingredients and using technique for the sake of technique.

Edited January 18, 2011 by Mano (log)

[Robbie]

I definitely think this is a golden age, people are just really getting into cooking and eating healthy. I just moved in with an old friend who use to eat hamburger helper 5 nights a week, now he makes amazing meals every night and watches the cooking channel constantly. Same thing with my wifes parents, we use to try and get them to eat real food and they would fight us on it (one time her sister refused to eat my mashed potatoes because they weren't from a box). Now they buy cook books and eat a huge variety of foods.

I think people are really trying to eat healthier and in the process are learning to be better cooks. It is really at the point where frozen dinners and the such are looked down upon.

BTW you have just reminded me of one of my favorite recipes for beef and broccoli that I will be making tonight