Becoming a Foodie

[MarketStEl]

I guess I didn't know it at the time, but probably the point at which I crossed the line from food lover to "foodie"--if such a line exists or can be drawn so sharply--is when I took a mini-course on French cooking during the January inter-semester session at Sunset Hill sophomore year. (Sunset Hill was the all-girls school that coordinated classes and calendar with Pembroke-Country Day, the all-boys school I attended; the two have since merged into a coed institution called Pembroke Hill. A Sunset classmate actually brought that course up during our recent reunion--she recalled every dish we prepared! [i could only recall Coquilles St. Jacques and a dish that involved ground beef and a beaten egg but was not meatloaf; its name escapes me.] Said alum went on to train professionally as a chef; she arranged the catering for our 30th class reunion, which was provided by a wonderful local restaurant, Room 39.)

However, I prepped for it. I loved to hang around Dad--the better, or at least more frequent, cook in the family--whenever he got around to grilling or cooking rotisserie meats outdoors (he couldn't barbecue, as his grill had no lid). And I absolutely loved to eat bits of leftover biscuit dough that my grandmother and Mom would set aside for me. I always clamored for "Bikkits!" at Sunday dinner as a young child. (I also pestered Granddad to let me have a sip of his "Cars"--Coors beer--which I guess prefigured a fondness for alcohol that I have since had to temper.)

I started making recipes out of our Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book somewhere around the time I turned 12. (This, maybe or maybe not coincidentally, was also when my parents divorced. Mom would go on to fix fabulous Sunday brunch spreads--a practice I have since adopted--but often as not, the meals I ate as a teenager were ones I fixed myself.)

And I had my own little food revelations--my first taste of Roman Meal bread at 13, for instance, made me a whole-grain convert on the spot.

Which brings me to cheese. My cheese revelation wasn't in quite the same class as Lordof7's--it was Kaukauna cold pack spread, back when they still sold it in those clay crocks, that taught me that cheese had the potential for wonderful and interesting flavors--but it had the same effect on me.

BTW, Lordof7: I did discover Cabot after moving to New England, and I agree that it's a great Cheddar, and their premium varieties are among the best in America. But as with Gates' Bar-B-Q among Kansas Citians in the know, it's been eclipsed in my favor by other, far more impressive varieties, such as Pennsylvania Noble, which is technically not a Cheddar because the cheesemaker skips the brining step, but is otherwise made in the same fashion.

Edited May 27, 2006 by MarketStEl (log)

[artisan02]

Clearly, I didn't know what a Foodie was back then.  But in hindsight, this was my indoctrination into the world of good eating.  How about you?  When did you first know you were a Foodie?  And what was the memorable food item that pushed you over the edge?

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I don't know if I knew I was a foodie at an early age, but the memory of a memorable roast chicken has stayed with me for years. It was a benchmark of sorts.

I was probably about 8 or 9 and I was home sick with some bug. The black lady that came to clean our house in those days, roasted the most incredible chicken for me to have some of it. I don't know how exactly it was cooked, but it was buttery and the flavor was incredible.

My mother later told me that this woman had been trained to cook at some of the James River plantations, by French cooks.

And ever since, I have been searching for the perfect roast chicken. And that memory made me realize that I had something of a palate, and it gave me a standard of excellence to try to emulate and search out.

[Alchemist]

I was seven years old, and my parents had brought me to the outer reaches of India. We were staying with a family that we had known for years. the Patles served an amazing meal. I wanted something different (we had been on the road for a few months) something that I recognized, something safe. My mother leaned over and said that I would love what I was served. I hunkered over the huge round plate and shoveled, with three fingers and the thumb of my right hand, some Pataka Shak into my mouth. Oh my god curried potatoes!! The comfort of spuds (I'm of Irish blood) with the wondful complexity of the masala, knocked me off my jeans (I was sitting on the floor). I worked my way around the plate loving it all. My father hated the food. It was just my mom and i delving into this amazing world of hot, cold, spicey, sweet, bitter, crunchy, smooth, coarse, fine, funky, normal, good, better and a multitude of things I can't even explain.

[DTBarton]

I think I knew by the time I was about 8 or so that food was a big deal to me. I enjoyed cooking with my grandmothers wwhen we visited. My Dad's Mom was from Oklahoma and she made two dishes that my brother and I always asked for: beef and noodles and beans and ham. She was the first person I saw make homemade pasta, rolled it out by hand, cut it and hung it to dry all over the chairs in the kitchen. She never heard the word pasta (noodles, they were), much less "artisinal", but that's what she was doing. She mixed the noodles with pot roast that had been braised and shredded and beef gravy. She also made my grandfather's favorite, corn meal mush. Never called that something high falutin' like polenta! Served the long cooked beans and ham over cornbread, aaaahhhh. My Mom's mother was an old school Shenendoah valley Presbyterian. Cooked very simple and fresh. They had a big garden so all summer had lots of fresh produce served with simple roast beef or ham or chicken. She used a pressure cooker all the time to cook vegetables like green beans, carrots, or corn. Her rule was as soon as she could smell the vegetables in the pressure cooker, they're done. The Presbyterian picnics were feasts with all the church ladies trying to outdo each other in fried chicken, salads, deviled eggs, and desserts.

My parents would do food projects on weekends. I remember the homemade bread or the big projects like roasting a suckling pig or a whole rockfish. I distinctly remember the revelation of neighbors taking me to a Chinese restaurant (basic Cantonese) for the first time at age 7 or 8. Then the serious awakening when we got a Szechuan restaurant in town when I was a teenager. My brother and I would go there for the whole fried fish in spicy black bean sauce and kung pao shrimp.

[tino27]

How I became a foodie is somewhat of a mystery to my family. No one in my family cooks much of anything and when they do, it is normally an assemblage of stuff coming out of cars, jars, and box mixes. The thought of doing anything from "scratch" is just abhorrent. I, however, am a firm believer that flavor trumps convenience -- so, almost everything I make for my family is considered "gourmet" -- which bothers me in a sense because I don't normally offer eclectic foreign dishes that only myself and fellow foodies would eat. It's because I take the time to make a roasted chicken from scratch with a compound butter stuffed under the skin or take the time to roast my garlic, slowly, before I make my hummos that my family considers this to be gourmet.

As a child, I did do quite a bit of baking using my mom's Joy of Cooking books - some successful, some not so much. I think the Divinity I made with corn oil instead of corn syrup probably speaks best to my failures. But as a 12 year old, making a double layer orange cake with a chocolate buttercream frosting definitely impressed those around me. As I got older, I would doctor my mother's spaghetti sauce without her knowing it -- more salt, more garlic or onion powder -- so that it would actually have flavor.

I think my first foodie revelation was early in my college career. I had Chinese food for the first time and the broccoli was crunchy. Thinking it was undercooked, a friend tasted it and said that no, it was fine. Up till this point, my only experience with broccoli had been in the form of the frozen variety, boiled to death (where the water was greener than the vegetable itself), and completely mushy. It sort of occurred to me that maybe there were other things that I was used to that weren't supposed to taste the way I remembered them.

And from there it's been an exploration ever since.