baroque_mongoose

My mother wouldn't teach me to cook, because I was a child and would therefore obviously make a mess, which I would equally obviously not be competent to clean up so she would have to do it. This continued to apply all through my teens, regardless of the fact that I objectively didn't make a mess doing other potentially messy things; there wasn't a thing I could do about it. My mother just had a very low view of children and that was how it was, and she didn't appear to be able to differentiate a sixteen-year-old with very obviously excellent fine dexterity from a regular three-year-old. Of course, there was also the fact that teaching children anything at all was a nuisance, and you did it only if you absolutely had to, because that was what schools were for (other than, of course, to get the children out of the way while you did Important Adult Things). But, in any case, I learnt to cook very fast when I got to university, and became pretty good at it, at that.

Although I wasn't allowed to cook, I was fascinated by the processes involved. Cakes, for instance, were quite amazing. You mixed ingredients in a bowl and got a sloppy batter, which you then put in the oven and out came a cake. How on earth did that come about, and how had it been discovered in the first place? I asked my mother, but she had no idea. Then there was meat; I knew it was very difficult to cut raw meat, but once it was cooked you could cut it with a table knife, and those weren't very sharp. Raw potatoes, too, were pretty solid (and apparently poisonous, at that), but once they were cooked they were quite soft, safe to eat, and delicious. Exactly what was going on here?

So when I was eventually told I was going to do something called Domestic Science at school, I got really excited. At last, I thought, I was going to get proper answers to all these questions, since they clearly were scientific ones. Whatever was happening when you cooked food, it wasn't some kind of magic, since it was repeatable and more or less predictable; things might occasionally get slightly burnt, but you still knew that if you put the batter in the oven for a certain time at a certain temperature, you would get a cake and not, for instance, pastry.

Alas, I did not get the answers; for that, it turned out, I had to wait many more years, until I was finally able to get my hands on a copy of Cooking for Geeks by Jeff Potter (published by O'Reilly - it isn't cheap, but I have just managed to replace my former copy with a second-hand one at a much more reasonable price). "Domestic Science", as it turned out, wasn't what it said at all. It was just cooking, and not even very good cooking at that; mostly, to the great disgust of my mother, it involved putting dishes together from pre-packaged ingredients. I recall her being very cross at being asked to provide me with a packet of pre-made puff pastry. She thought the school should be teaching me to make puff pastry myself, despite the fact that a) almost nobody ever does that these days and b) I don't even really like pastry. (I have never made pastry of any sort. Why would I? I can find plenty of other stuff to make that other people like and that I also like.) There wasn't even a little bit of basic theory involved - nothing about why frying seals in flavour and boiling doesn't, for instance, or why steaming is better than boiling in terms of both flavour and nutrition. Nope. It was nothing more than "this week we're going to make X, here is a list of the ingredients you will need, your parents are expected to provide them". It was a tremendous disappointment, and I learnt absolutely nothing from it.

Cooking for Geeks, however, does have all the answers. That tells you exactly what is going on when you make a cake, or when your toast browns, or even why you can cook with liquid nitrogen (not something I am at all inclined to do, but it's still fascinating to read about). It does have recipes, but it's definitely not cooking for vegan geeks, so I need to adapt most of them (and there's nothing at all I can do about the discussion on how to hack the perfect pizza, because I also don't have a conventional oven - I have other pizza hacks, naturally). I don't think it was out when I was ploughing through "Domestic Science", but if it had been, it ought to have been our textbook.

Of course, to make a good cake, you don't have to know how all the processes work; and I made many a good cake before I finally found out. But even so... the science is what I'm here for, OK?