A little lesson on food and cooking

 

 

Leftover roast salmon with pasta.
So good!

My mother made bread by instinct. When she taught me, her caution was, “Don’t use too much flour or your bread will be tough. Knead it until it feels right.” She knew just how much to knead, how long to let it rise. She had a big old wooden board on which she pounded that dough. Her bread came out in beautiful golden loaves. No recipe needed.

I have a friend whose grandmother made “the world’s best” biscuits in a shallow, white enamel pan she also washed her dishes in (on the kitchen table: there was no sink). She dumped in a couple of coffee cups of flour, “measured” baking powder and salt with the spoon out of the sugar bowl on the table, pulled a glob of soft lard out of the lard bucket with her fingers and worked it into the flour. Added milk until it looked right, kneaded a bit, rolled it out with a rolling pin her husband carved from a chunk of maple, and cut the biscuits with a water glass. I still have the old, metal orange juice can that my grandmother used to cut biscuits. Nobody cooks that way now. I call it intuitive cooking.

Jordan gets frustrated when she asked me how long to cook something, and I say, “Until it’s done.” Or when she wants to know how much flour to use, and I say, “Until it feels right.” She wants a printed recipe, complete with amounts and detailed instructions in front of her, and I don’t think she’s unusual in this day and age. Many young women have lost or never had instincts about cooking. (I do wonder if I somehow failed in that aspect of raising her.)

Many of the women of my generation—we old ladies of the Silent Generation—mix instinct with recipes when we cook. We can size a recipe up when we read it, judging whether or not it will work, and then we can adapt it to our taste and needs as we go along. (Christian cooks that way too.) And we can make a pie or rolls without a recipe, because we’ve done it so often—and we learned from our mothers.

The women of the 1950s, that decade when American foodways changed so dramatically, may be the last to base their cooking purely on instinct. They had cooked with their mothers and grandmothers, and they cooked the way they learned. Not all women of the fifties, though. During that decade, food manufacturers switched their attention from supplying the military, since the war was over, to courting housewives. Advertising departments decided women hated to cook, and so the food industry set out to simplify cooking, make it easier and quicker. They did this with prepared food and new gadgets. By the end of the fifties you could buy an angel food cake mix or a tube of prepared biscuit dough. All you had to do was bake.

My theory is that having most of the work done for them by manufacturers, women gradually lost touch with the food they were cooking. They didn’t have to measure and judge the texture and feel the dough to see if it was right. (I hope I get a lot of indignant responses to this.)

On another food note, I read a Ruth Reichl column today which convinced me that I’ve found my niche in studying the plain, traditional food of the fifties. Reichl is writing from Marseilles this week and sending pictures of the food. Beautiful pictures—and probably not a dish that I, a fairly experimental eater, would touch. Blue soup that is fish broth with chard floating in it (no idea what makes it blue); sliced bottarga (I had to look that one up: a cured fish roe pouch) with caviar; a “garden of fish” floating in a green, seashell jelly; a carabinero (had to look that up too: a large, deep sea shrimp) served somewhere between raw and cooked, with fennel; ravioli filled with clams and mussels in an “intense” fish soup. Absolutely gorgeous pictures, smashing photography. But I don’t know that I’d have eaten any of it. I love reading about it, and about the old French restaurants with lots of atmosphere, but I somehow can’t translate that to my life in Texas.

So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go make a pasta dish out of last night’s leftover roast salmon. The simple life. (This is me, trying out material for the cookbook/memoir I hope I’m writing. I’d love feedback.) Just for fun, here’s what I did with the salmon (without a recipe):

Cook enough pasta for one. Drain and put aside.

Melt some butter in the skillet. Add a garlic clove and cook it briefly.

Add salmon and some frozen green peas. Salt and pepper.

Put in a glob of sour cream, enough to make a sauce.

Ad the pasta and stir until dish is warm. Do not let it boil or sour cream will separate.

Put in a pasta plate and top with grated pecorino.