[Sca-cooks] Ancestral cookery- was Re: Garbage

[Saint Phlip]

On 6/8/06, Laura C. Minnick <lcm at jeffnet.org> wrote:
>
>
> Problem is, it's been... uh, something like 37 years, and Swiss steak
> _still_ tastes like liver to me, no matter what I do, even when I make it
> and I know darn well it isn't liver.
>
> 'Lainie
> ______________________________


Well, some of us are just unlucky enough to have Important Forebears who
either could, or couldn't, cook. Sounds to me like your mom is one of those
who really tries, but doesn't really understand how food works.

I was kinda lucky. Although my (maternal) grandmother, Mimi, couldn't cook
(she used to tell the tale of dating my grandfather, and inviting him over
for dinner, and how she forgot to put the baking powder in the biscuits- he
asked her to marry him a week later, and we're reasonably sure it wasn't for
her cooking ;-) very well, she COULD make a few things well, and she not
only knew how to eat well, but had a talent for hiring good cooks. One of
them, Alberta Brown, was very patient with me when I was a kid, basicly good
Spouthern cooking, and taught me a few things that stuck pretty well. And,
my other grandmother, Grandma Peg, my father's mother was not only an
excellent cook until she went wonky on the health foods, but she taught my
mother to cook. My adopted grandmother (I had more parents than the average
kid has siblings and cousins) also was an excellent cook, although in the
German-American style, so I got a fair amount of exposure. Add to the fact
that I rapidly learned, as much time as I spent in boarding schools and
summer camps, that the best people to get to know (mostly because the other
kids ignored them) were the Cooks and the Nurses, I wound up getting a
rather eclectic background.

One, for example, taught me that I liked seaweed, another that Asian foods
were good stuff, so that, unlike many kids who were basicly raised on
Standard American, the only variety being provided for school lunches, I
learned to eat many different things, and, once I was on my own and unable
to afford to eat out all the time, rapidly discovered that if I intended to
eat in the style to which I had been accustomed, I had better learn to cook.

But, to this day, my mother swears the reason I hate bell peppers is because
of the spaghetti dinner we were invited to when she was divorcing my father
(I was just started on eating Real Food- maybe two? ) which had so many bell
peppers in it that she couldn't eat it- and she likes them.

-- 
> Saint Phlip
>
> Don't like getting old? Beats the Hel out of the alternative.
>
> The purpose of life is not to arrive at the grave, a beautiful corpse,
> pretty and well-preserved, but to slide in sideways, thoroughly used up,
> totally worn out, proclaiming, "Wow! What a ride!"
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