“Learning” To Cook

I put learning in quotations because while I did cook with my mom as a child, and my six siblings and I spent many hours in the kitchen preparing, eating, or cleaning up one of her meals I wasn’t so much taught how to cook as allowed to absorb. My present respectable cooking abilities are proof of this—when I moved out on my own I could cook a Totino’s party pizza, and one out of five of those I burned. Further proof is that aside from her Christmas cookies (best cookies made in December, ask anyone) I only prepare one of my mom’s staple recipes: fettuccine alfredo. Not that she doesn’t have many wonderful dishes, it’s just that fettuccine afredo is the only dish with an existing list of ingredients. The rest is made up and that’s what I’ve had to do: make it up as I go.
As long as I’ve lived on my own, I’ve used my mom as 1-800-Dial-A-Cook. She is like a database of kitchen facts: How long is hamburger good? How can you tell if it’s bad? (Note: all hamburger smells bad to a vegetarian.) Can I use unsweetened cocoa cubes instead of powder? (Yes.) Just don’t ask her for a recipe. All you’ll get is: “About a cup or two of this, and maybe half a can of that. Melt some butter and add enough flour to make a white sauce.”
“What’s a white sauce?” I remember asking.
“Butter and flour.”
Ah-ha.
Drives me mad asking my mother how to make something. Unfortunately, despite the cliché, I have become my mother. I cook by handfuls and shakes. When asked for a recipe, sometimes I can pass along a list of ingredients, but it most likely had some mutations from page to platter. Even more often I find myself saying something like, “It was a kind of a combination of two recipes. Instead of using breadcrumbs I used brown rice and zucchini instead of mushrooms.”
I like to think of myself as a moderate savant. I do keep and use recipes, a collection which at this writing is undergoing a major revitalization effort to transfer them from the folder of cut out magazine pages and scribbled, water-damaged notes into a binder full of neatly written pages. However, despite my best efforts, when I cook it’s always clumsy, messy and unpredictable. Usually dinner is good, though sometimes it’s not. No dish tastes the same twice in a row until I get it perfected, which is when others want to know how to make it. I try my best, as my mom always did with me, to recall what I did, but who has that kind of perfect recall? I don’t and I was “trained” by the best.