How to become a great cook- Have a good teacher. Pt. 2

After writing my last blog, I started looking at some of the other cookbooks I own. Like a hundred other things I have collected, cookbooks have always interested me. I bought a Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook a little while ago. It was copyrighted in 1950. It was in pristine condition, which meant no one ever used it, so it was a great find for me. The illustrations are truly historic artworks and worth preserving. I first started reading the recipes out of curiosity, but now I have fallen in love with it. It is so dense with great information, like how to set a table, how to measure properly, as well as how to make fancy canapés. Most of the content is still useful. In fact, I want to make many recipes in it soon.

My mom got a degree in Home Economics in the 1940s. Home economics sounds to us today like a frivolous degree, but it was far from it. You could certainly learn about running a household, but you could also learn food nutrition for schools and hospitals, chemistry, and actual economics. My mother actually worked in a lab in NYC after graduating before marrying my dad in her twenties and then applying what she had learned to start a family, ours.

Here are some of the things I learned cooking with my mother that made cooking so much fun. (Many of them also appear in my newly acquired Betty Crocker Cookbook.)

Examples:

1. To get a piece of eggshell out of an egg white, lift out the piece of shell with another eggshell.

2. Add flour to the bits on the bottom of a roasting pan before adding water to start a delicious gravy.

3. Blend a little water and flour together before adding it to a liquid as a thickener to avoid lumps.

4. NEVER use a beater that is greasy at all if you want egg whites to whip.

5. Freeze your bowl and beaters before making fresh whipped cream.

6. Whipping cream too long actually turns it into butter. (That’s what butterfat is, kids.)

Once my mother put a few cups of whipping cream into a glass jar. She had each of her 48 first graders shake the jar a few times and pass it on. It went around the room until it separated and turned into butter. Afterwards, she spread the butter on saltines for each of them to see what they had made. There’s got to be a chef that came out of that day’s experience.

1. How to set a table properly. Every night. Even my brothers learned how to do that.

2. How to substitute one thing for another. Any and everything from nuts to flour to sour cream.

3. How to make buttermilk if you don’t have any for a recipe. (Add vinegar to milk; in a few moments, this acidic mixture will do the same thing.)

4. How to know if an egg is hard-boiled or fresh if a loose egg is lying about in the refrigerator.

5. Jello will not set if you use fresh pineapple because of an enzyme called bromelane in fresh pineapple. The same enzyme that can start to tingle your tongue if you eat too much.

6. It’s easy to make creme anglais. (She used to pour it over jello as a dessert if we didn’t have anything else.)

7. Always put a piece of potato into the pot when cooking rutabaga to avoid a bitter taste.

8. Soak calves’ liver in milk before cooking. It just tastes better.

9. To soften rock-hard brown sugar, place a slice of apple in the bag or canister, at least overnight.

10. To measure shortening correctly, put a measured amount of water in a measuring cup. Add the shortening, push down on it, and when the water reaches the measurement in the cup minus the amount of water, that’s the right amount. And the shortening doesn’t stick to the measuring cup.

11. How to Delmonico an orange.

12. How to peel a fresh tomato.

13. How to mold a hard-boiled egg into the shape of a pear or an apple or dice (for a bridge club party) by pressing very gently while the peeled eggs are warm.

Some of the tools we had in our kitchen were exciting to a receptive kid like me:

1. A Foley mill helped us make fresh, warm applesauce on a whim.

2. A hand meat grinder that ground chunks of leftover ham into ham salad. It only worked when it was screwed onto the picnic table in the backyard, no matter the season. No other table in the house held it firm enough. I loved ham salad, so I was always up for that job.

3. A bain-marie, besides having an exotic French name, also made perfect, uncurdled custard.

My mother was my teacher. We cooked side by side almost every day after she got home from school. I learned about the tools, techniques, and language of cooking hanging out with her, never realizing what a gift that really was. Her consistent love of providing delicious meals for our family every night fueled the flame for my creating BonBonerie, as well as the five hundred dollars she gave me to get started.