The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (5 page)

As I pulled on headphones in the pleasant, cluttered studio, Chef Thierry offered me a glass of a nice French red he had brought in to sip during the show. I told them about the woman in the supermarket and what I'd been learning about home cooking. Tom and Thierry were intrigued.

“This is a person you just met out of the blue?” Thierry asked.

“She went along with you, in this cold call in the grocery store?” Tom asked incredulously.

I threw in a few statistics that I'd picked up. Americans waste about a third of the food they purchase, for instance. I told them about the project and that I wanted to include some of their listeners.

“How long do you think it would take to find a person who can't boil an egg and change them into a person who can open up a fridge door and figure out how to make something from what they find inside?” Thierry asked.

“I don't know, I guess we'll find out,” I said.

Tom nodded behind the tangle of microphones. “Also, maybe they can realize that cooking can be fun, and a good way to spend your time.”

Then we took a call. “I used to listen to these radio shows and the old-time commercials were thrown in,” the caller said. “I remember there was one for what to make with evaporated milk. That woman must have rattled off various recipes in a minute or so. It struck me that no one could understand those recipes today. No one would even understand the vocabulary. We've moved into a place where people don't understand basics of cooking and food.”

Tom thanked the caller. Then he looked at me. “How do you plan to address this lack of knowledge?”

“That's an interesting point,” I said. “You know, recipe writers don't use certain words anymore, like
braise.
Instead, they write, ‘Cover and simmer in the oven,' because people don't know what
braise
means. There's a loss of language specific to the kitchen, and it's evaporated just like that milk.”

“But it's not just
braise,
” Tom said. “I mean, people are uncomfortable with the idea of a pinch of salt. What's a pinch?”

We talked about the demise of home economics in public schools and the notion that many Americans are two generations away from knowing how to cook.

“I think you can trace a lot of those skills back to Madison Avenue and the ad agencies,” Tom said. “They're the ones who sold us the idea that you didn't need to cook, you could simply buy products instead.” He looked at the clock on the wall. “Well, thanks for coming on the show. I'm excited to see how it goes. And you know what? In a funny way, I'm interested to see what you get out of it.”

When I got home from the show, I found two dozen messages waiting in my e-mail inbox. More streamed in over the weekend.

As I read through them, I realized that the conversation on the air had appeared to touch a nerve. I glimpsed moments of guilt, embarrassment, and downright melancholy.

“When I was nineteen, I was asked to make the salad at my boyfriend's parents' for Thanksgiving. I didn't know where to start, and they all made fun of me. It made me never want to try to cook anything ever again,” wrote one woman.

“I rely on boxed products because it's easy, but I don't want to. I have NO idea how to butcher anything. I can't fillet a fish, cut up a chicken, etc. When I look at an artichoke . . . well, I just walk right on by,” wrote Cheryl, a thirty-three-year-old mother of two young sons. “I'd like to learn how to make ‘real' food, more food from scratch and what I have on hand, rather than pulling out a frozen pizza for my family.”

“My mother never let me in the kitchen; she thought I was in the way,” wrote Shannon, thirty-two, also a mother of two. “When I read about little girls cooking side by side with their mothers . . . it makes me so sad for what I missed.”

Another wrote, “I grew up with a grandmother that could make a meal out of nothing and make it taste as good as any five-star menu. I've lived for years on frozen dinners and anything that is easy or fast.” She considered herself “addicted” to cooking shows. She watched them all—
Top Chef, Iron Chef, The Next Food Network Star,
Alton Brown, Giada, Emeril. “But then I am totally lost when it comes to knowing what to do when I try to fix anything. I've watched Gordon Ramsey while eating Tuna Helper. I'm so ashamed.”

In the end, I selected ten people for what I began to refer to simply as “The Project.”
⁸
They shared little in common in terms of background, except that they all identified themselves as a “poor cook” or an “aspiring cook” who relied regularly on processed or fast foods. I told them little about what to expect, other than a few dates and times. I wasn't trying to be mysterious. I didn't really have a plan.

In retrospect, I'm not sure what I was thinking. I'm not an academic type or a researcher; I had taught only a couple of informal cooking classes. My thoughts on what lessons I'd teach were murky. I would have to make it all up as I went along.

The first stop was a generic apartment building in the rustic former logging town of Granite Falls, Washington. After three hours, I climbed back into our Mini Cooper and leaned my head against the steering wheel. “What did I get myself into?”

CHAPTER 3

“This is what you call White Trash Garlic Bread,” announced Sabra, a lovely, fair-haired twenty-three-year-old young woman clad in a skin-tight blue shirt and strategically ripped jeans. “This is one of the few things that I learned about cooking from my mother.” She slathered one-half of a soft hamburger bun with Gold 'n Soft margarine, added a few hearty shakes of generic garlic salt, and topped it with dried Parmesan cheese from a can. After repeating the process with a half dozen buns, she slid the baking sheet into her immaculate white oven.

Sabra was the first volunteer I met. She shared an apartment in a basic but pleasant complex with her boyfriend in a sleepy former lumber town an hour north of Seattle. Her standard-issue kitchen was small but tidy. In the living room, a tiny kitten she had rescued the day before took halting steps on the black leather sectional, her occasional mewing competing with the big flat-screen TV tuned to a poker tournament that Sabra wasn't watching.

While the buns lingered under the broiler, Sabra alternated between sips of Red Bull and peach schnapps mixed together in an orange plastic tumbler while waxing poetic about her favorite food. “I
love
Gold 'n Soft,” she said, holding up the half-full one-pound plastic tub of margarine. “If it had Gold 'n Soft in it, that's what my mother and I ate growing up. Now pretty much everything I eat has Gold 'n Soft in it. Anything else, especially butter, just doesn't taste right.”

The “garlic bread,” combined with Stouffer's five-cheese lasagna, straight from thirteen minutes in the microwave, constituted her lunch. As the microwave counted down, she and I finished the inventory of her cabinets, freezer, and fridge. Among the goods: nine varieties of Stouffer's frozen dinners, six boxes of Hamburger Helper, a five-pack of mac and cheese, half a case of Cup Noodles, and the remainder of a case of Red Bull, all of it from a recent warehouse-store haul. Sabra and her boyfriend dedicated the rest of the pantry to an impressive liquor assortment that featured thirty-eight bottles, everything from bitters to vodka and five varieties of schnapps.

In the fridge, newly purchased bundles of broccoli and cauliflower filled the crisper drawers to capacity, a change for her. A recent pap test found precancerous cells, curable but a worrying sign that she inherited a familial propensity for cancer. A doctor suggested Sabra overhaul her diet to include more fruits and vegetables. “We found a fruit stand near here, and it's cheap. We got three pounds of cauliflower for three dollars,” she said. “I couldn't get Cheetos that cheap.”

Sabra was nominated for the project by her stepmother, my friend Lisa, a culinary school graduate, a part-time chef, and the kind of woman who routinely makes her own mayonnaise. Back in 2006, I decided to hire someone to help test recipes for my first book. I put an ad on Craigslist describing appalling pay and erratic hours. Within twenty-four hours, eighty-five people had applied. Many sent résumés and long pleas for the position. Lisa had assumed that I was a man and responded with a snarky “Is this a dream job or are you looking for a date?” When we met, the intense, briny smell of cheese preceded her. She walked into my office and handed me a bag. “My mom owns a cheese shop. If you hire me, there's more where this came from.”

Lisa quickly became one of my best friends. She tested recipes, helped me organize various events, and Mike insisted she play Clinton Kelly from
What Not to Wear
when I went shopping for clothes to wear on book tours. (“You want jewel tones, no pencil skirts, and at least two pairs of Spanx.”) When I told her about the project she said, “That sounds like a ton of work. If you're really going to do it, I'm all in.”

Over the years as we worked together, Lisa relayed stories of frustration in terms of food as it related to her relationship with Sabra. When she married her husband in her early twenties, he had primary custody of Sabra, then six years old. When Sabra was a child, Lisa would make dinner, such as roast chicken with vegetables and a salad. Sabra would sit back in her chair with her little arms crossed over her chest and refuse to touch it. After rejecting dinner, Sabra would run from the table to call her mother, who lived less than a mile away. Lisa would overhear the litany of complaints about the fare Sabra said she'd been served. Invariably, they'd hear a honk from the driveway minutes later—it was Sabra's mother, there to take her to McDonald's.

After a couple of years of this, Lisa bought a case of ramen noodles. If Sabra didn't want what she made for dinner, fine. But no more McDonald's, not for dinner. Sabra could eat ramen instead, which she liked, but she had to make it herself. After four nights of noodles, Sabra started eating dinner with them again.

I asked Sabra about all of this, and she nodded, taking another long pull on her drink. “Oh, yeah, I
love
McDonald's. When I was a kid, that's how my parents showed me they loved me after they were divorced. Who took me to McDonald's the most? That's who loved me the most.”

I pondered this as Sabra checked on her garlic bread. How much of this was about the food? Or did that trip to McDonald's mean time alone with her parent, forced to focus only on her as she swung, slid, and ran around the colorful play area?

As part of the kitchen visit, I asked each volunteer to prepare a lunch or dinner, something that they routinely ate, so I could get a sense of their kitchen skills and eating habits. Could they hold a knife? Did they taste as they cooked? What kind of portions did they serve up? Frozen dinners were Sabra's go-to dinners. Breakfast involved toaster pastries and half a can of Red Bull. “That's because I don't drink coffee,” she explained. The Cup Noodles was her midmorning snack. She hit McDonald's for lunch. Throughout the day, she consumed a few soft drinks. “And there's the constant grazing on a lot of chips and popcorn. There's always a bowl of something on my desk,” she added.

Red Bull for breakfast isn't as unusual as you'd think for someone her age. It has roughly 70 percent of the energy-drink market, a narrow but influential wedge of consumers between ages fifteen and thirty. At age sixteen, Mike's niece, Michelle, lived primarily on various energy drinks for three months. The caffeine gave her energy, while the high sugar content—roughly equivalent to a glazed doughnut—kept her from feeling hungry. She drank several every day. Her doctor commanded her to quit. “You're not getting any nutrients,” he said. “You're starving yourself.”

Sabra offered some bright spots. The guy at her liquor store introduced her to a woman who supplied fresh eggs from a nearby farm. As a downside, Sabra warned me that she didn't want to spend more than twenty minutes making dinner. “If it takes longer than that, I'll just get fast food.” Plus, there was her devotion to Gold 'n Soft.

We sat down for lunch. To me, the lasagna had a vaguely sweet tomato flavor. The “garlic bread” was an exercise in blandness. I asked her how she liked the lasagna. “Well, this brand has really good deals, like, you can get four for ten bucks sometimes,” she started.

“No, what I mean is, do you like its taste? The flavor, I mean.”

She thought about it. “I don't know. I like it better than some of the other frozen lasagnas.”

“But how does it compare to homemade lasagna?”