Learning to cook

can be simple or complicated.  It seems to err on the side of "complicated" for many people.

My cousin's partner sent me a recipe for a cake yesterday. He is an extremely intelligent man who has taught himself to cook and bake. He approaches the whole business of food and eating in the same intelligent way he once approached his work. (He had a very high powered legal role in finance until he retired.) 

R...wrote the recipe himself and gave me all the information I need if I decide to make the cake. (I don't do much baking.)

I mentioned this to a visitor and she asked, "How did you learn to cook?"  The answer to that is both simple and complicated. My paternal grandmother taught me the basics. Grandma was a basic, no nonsense sort of cook.  She grew up on a farm where they made their own bread and their own butter. Her father or, later, one of her older brothers killed the sheep they used for meat. They grew their own fruit and vegetables. 

Grandma didn't know about pizza or spaghetti bolognaise or hamburgers. Chicken was something you had as a very special treat and sausages were what you had on the barbecue cooked by my grandfather if we went on a winter picnic. Grandma could make pastry and thus pasties. She made oatcakes but Grandpa made the porridge. There were sometimes puddings for a second course but most often it was fresh fruit in summer and stewed fruit in winter. There were scones and cakes to feed hungry children and then grandchildren.

Grandma taught me all these things along with soup and stews and the weekly roast. There was "shepherd's pie" and fish on Fridays. The fish on Fridays was not because she was Catholic but because that was the day local people could buy directly from the small boats that came into the port.

Grandma took me with her when she went shopping along the road which led to the jetty. There was a butcher who knew she knew about meat. There was a greengrocer who knew she knew about quality as well as quantity. There was a bakery where Grandma talked about the quality of yeast with the baker's wife. All of them treated her with respect.  

I don't know how they treated other women or how much other women knew. It was almost certainly far more than it is now.  They all did far more cooking than anyone I now know. There are some who still cook "from scratch" but by no means all of them do. 

I was teaching the Whirlwind to cook and to bake. She actually wanted to learn. Food generally just appeared on the table at her boarding school.  It was good but it did not have that "extra" that is home cooking. Her father was deeply appreciative of being able to take out a home cooked frozen meal. Yes, he could cook but it was "basic" and he knew she could do far more than he could. 

The two boys across the road are growing up and their mother, a busy doctor, has found time to teach them some early basics. They wouldn't starve. Next summer, if I am still in this house, we have agreed they will come and learn to make pasties. 

But, I have to confess, if we make those pasties then I will succumb to buying the frozen pastry sheets....I still can't make pastry the way Grandma did.