Cooking

I was asked how I learned to cook. Here's what I wrote...

My introduction to cooking was as my mother's kitchen slavey, gatherer, and hunter. Peeling. A lot. Clean up. A lot. Every day. Huge summer vegetable gardens, orchards, field stuff, wild stuff--dewberries, blackberries, persimmons, mushrooms. Spade, plow, plant, hoe, weed, pick, gather, glean, peel, hull, husk, pit, seed. Mounds of produce for freezing, canning, eating. Oh, and the milking (2 cows, 2 x da)--sanitation, butter, cream, sour cream, whipped cream, cottage cheese. Not to forget chickens--meat prep, egg gathers. Calves, pigs, wild rabbits, quail, and summertimes--frogs. To put those years into a frame of time, Bill Haley and the Comets' "Rock Around the Clock" hit the top of the charts and Milton Berle was Mr. Tuesday on our single TV channel. Then, high school was over. I left. When asked, I said I didn't know how to cook. I'd never actually cooked--anything. Well, once in a while, bacon and eggs, and sandwiches.

When the hippies went "back to nature" in the 60s and did their communal farm thing. I said, "Are you kidding?! Been there, done that."

I worked, I went to college. Got married. A funny thing happened. I LIKED my own kitchen. Back when all that prep was happening, I was actually absorbing lots and lots--even basics from my Freshman HS year of a hated (required of girls) Home Economics class--white sauce, e.g., had osmosed through stubborn brain barriers. I discovered a deep respect for food, its source, its procurement, its preparation and its enjoyment. I knew far more than I'd admitted to myself, or anyone. I bought my first cookbook, a 1950s edition of Mrs. Rombauer's "Joy of Cooking". A lifetime's enjoyment and exploration in the kitchen began. Best of all--enjoying it with friends and family.

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It's so green again. A couple of days ago as I parked in the lot where I live, a shower broke up showing the sun low behind new green leaves...