Remembering cooking from scratch

Both of my grandmothers bequeathed fascinating cookbooks to me. It’s comforting to know their hands turned the pages that now carry the musty tinge of decades-old paper. One of them is a gathering of recipes from fellow churchgoers including little rhymes and sketches to fill blank areas. It invokes what might seem a less harried life, but the reality is that Grandma found time to cook quantities sufficient to sustain a farm family and managed lots of other chores. When I feel worn out by another round of dishes, it’s humbling to remember she managed without a dishwasher or other modern timesavers. 

Today’s average American family’s meal culture would rattle my grandmothers’ sensibilities like a ride on a farm wagon.

One of the most striking things about the old cookbooks is the time involved in recipe preparation. For example, it’s assumed that people are making rolls from scratch. Today I know a few people who make their own bread or rolls but it’s a hobby, far from quotidian. A 1960s Betty Crocker chicken dinner recipe spans 90 minutes; surprisingly, it’s from the Quick and Easy cookbook.

Little did these cookbook publishers know that within a few generations those 90 minutes would represent about three entire days of meal preparation. In a recent New York Times article, Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, writes that today’s average American spends only 27 minutes per day preparing food. This reality makes my grandmothers’ cookbooks seem silly and burdensome, and so utterly outdated.

Conversely, I suppose the average American family’s meal culture would rattle my grandmothers’ sensibilities like a ride on a farm wagon. Why would we eat things poured by foreign workers into a plastic-lined box? Why would adults ingest ingredients we have never seen and cannot pronounce? How has our food culture gone so awry that factory-produced, frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches make sense to some people?

I never took a home economics class. There was an elective but I don’t remember any of my college-bound friends enrolling. We learned to cook from our parents (usually our moms) or from television.

Many people claim to need timesaving prepared foods or takeout, yet still find the time to watch ample amounts of TV. In “Out of the kitchen, onto the couch,” Pollan makes the point that many time-pressed people tune in to cooking shows whose techniques they will rarely implement. If home skills like meal preparation are taught neither by example at home nor in a classroom, an entire generation is left without the ability to sustain itself. My daughter’s generation might be forced to rely entirely on restaurateurs and manufacturers of processed foods.

As Pollan phrases it, we need to consume less edible foodlike substance and more real food our great-grandmothers would recognize. We don’t need to make every salad dressing and sauce, but we need to know the concepts of how that and other food reaches a table. Our children need to know, too. We might have to sacrifice some other priorities to provide the truly satisfying experience of seeing, hearing, and smelling a meal’s preparation and then the pleasure of eating it. But it will leave our children more fulfilled than sitting in the drive-thru lane and eating food made by strangers.

From last spring to this spring, U.S. restaurant traffic experienced the greatest decline in 28 years, according to market research company NPD Group, Inc. They attributed the plunge to unemployment, more thrifty consumers, and households with children cutting back on restaurant visits. I hope we are on a trend that swings the country back toward food styles that include some cooking from scratch.

I’m glad for influences like my friendship circle, as we occasionally have one another over for dinner. Some friends have found good solutions to balancing home cooking with hectic schedules by sharing meals or preparing large portions and freezing. My husband and I alternate cooking every two weeks and my daughter sees that cooking is important but not necessarily woman’s work.

May our family cookbooks (or printouts from recipe sites) pass down spattered and marked from frequent use to people who still recognize how to cook.

The author is a freelance writer and mother of one. Reach her with comments or suggestions at jill@bayviewcompass.com.

Author Michael Pollan will speak in Madison, Wis. 7pm, Sept. 24 at the Kohl Center and 10am, Sept. 26 at the Food for Thought Festival.