Just came across this thread as I was about to post what may be considered a somewhat naive and ignorant question elsewhere. This thread title reminded me of a question I asked many years ago, and which may have been the very first cooking question I ever asked outside of a question or two asked of my mom or grandma.
It was 1965 and I was living in Missouri at the time. I wasn't particularly interested in cooking, yet for some reason I was reading a food/cooking article in a now unremembered publication and came across a reference to a Waldorf salad. There was no recipe for the salad in the article, so I wrote a letter to "The Chef" at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in NYC asking for the recipe. This was my very first inquiry in what later became a long-term, off-and-on again, interest and curiosity about food and cooking. I was so ignorant then that I was unaware of cooking magazines, recipe books, and the like. Cooking shows on television, of which there were a fair number, the first having been produced and aired almost three decades prior, were still obscure and often confined to local markets. In any case, I was unaware of them. So, a letter to the hotel seemed like a good idea. I never received a response, which with hindsight is not surprising. "Marcel, regarde ça. Quel idiot!"