Cooking 101: Add 1 Cup of Simplicity
As Kitchen Skills Dwindle, Recipes Become Easy as Pie
By Candy Sagon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 18, 2006; A01

At Kraft Foods, recipes never include words like "dredge" and "saut."
Betty Crocker recipes avoid "braise" and "truss." Land O' Lakes has all
but banned "fold" and "cream" from its cooking instructions. And
Pillsbury carefully sidesteps "simmer" and "sear."
When the country's top food companies want to create recipes that
millions of Americans will be able to understand, there seems to be one
guiding principle: They need to be written for a nation of culinary
illiterates.
Basic cooking terms that have been part of kitchen vocabulary for
centuries are now considered incomprehensible to the majority of
Americans. Despite the popularity of the Food Network cooking shows on
cable TV, and the burgeoning number of food magazines and gourmet
restaurants, today's cooks have fewer kitchen skills than their parents
-- or grandparents -- did.
To compensate, food companies are dumbing down their recipes, and
cookbooks are now published with simple instructions and lots of
step-by-step illustrations.
"Thirty years ago, a recipe would say, 'Add two eggs,' " said Bonnie
Slotnick, a longtime cookbook editor and owner of a rare-cookbook shop
in New York's Greenwich Village. "In the '80s, that was changed to 'beat
two eggs until lightly mixed.' By the '90s, you had to write, 'In a
small bowl, using a fork, beat two eggs,' " she said. "We joke that the
next step will be, 'Using your right hand, pick up a fork and . . .' "
Even the writers and editors of the "Joy of Cooking," working on a 75th
anniversary edition to be published by Charles Scribner's Sons in
November, have argued "endlessly" over whether to include terms like
"blanch," "fold" and "saut ," said Beth Wareham, Scribner's director of
lifestyle publications. "I tell them, 'Why should we dumb it down?' When
you learn to drive, you learn terms like "brake" and "parallel park."
Why is it okay to be stupid when you cook?"
So far, the "Joy of Cooking" editors have compromised by including a
detailed glossary explaining various cooking terms.
At a conference last December, Stephen W. Sanger, chairman and chief
executive of General Mills Inc., noted the sad state of culinary affairs
and described the kind of e-mails and calls the company gets asking for
cooking advice: the person who didn't have any eggs for baking and asked
if a peach would do instead, for example; and the man who railed about
the fire that resulted when he thought he was following instructions to
grease the bottom of the pan -- the outside of the pan.
"We're now two generations into a lack of culinary knowledge being
passed down from our parents," said Richard Ruben, a New York cooking
teacher whose classes for non-cooks draw a range of participants, from
18-year-olds leaving for college who want to have survival skills to
60-year-olds who have more time to cook but don't know how.
"In my basic 'How to Cook' class, I get people who have only used their
ovens to store shoes and sweaters," he said. "They're terrified to hold
a knife. They don't know what garlic looks like."
For many people, cooking classes like his compensate for what they did
not learn at home. "Food companies have to acknowledge that there used
to be a level of teaching in the home by moms and grandmas that is not
as evident today," said Janet Myers, senior director of global kitchens
for Kraft Foods who has been creating and testing recipes for the
company for 30 years.
A survey of women in their twenties and forties for Betty Crocker showed
that 64 percent of women in their twenties had mothers who worked full
time, outside the home, during their childhood, compared with 38 percent
of those in their forties. The group in their forties primarily learned
to cook from their mothers and at school; the younger women also learned
from their mothers, but more of them learned from their fathers,
television chefs, or on their own.
Lisa Bernstein, 31, an employment law attorney in the District, said
that while growing up, her mother was too busy to teach her much more
than how to make spaghetti with sauce from a jar. Tired of microwaving
frozen dinners, she signed up two years ago for lessons with veteran
cooking teacher Phyllis Frucht.
"I watched some of the Food Network programs, but it's not the same as
having someone in the kitchen with you, showing you how to hold the
knife," said Bernstein, who now can make her own pasta sauce for baked
ziti, as well as homemade biscotti for dessert.
Some of these skills used to be taught in mandatory home economics
courses in middle school, but most of the classes ended about 20 years
ago, said Pat Lynn, a Springdale, Md., high school teacher who taught
her first home ec class in 1968. But in some schools, including her own,
home economics has been reconstituted under the umbrella subject of
"family and consumer sciences" to include electives in cooking,
parenting, fashion and career training for jobs in the food-service and
hospitality industries.
And despite laments about the end of home cooking, more than
three-fourths of all dinners are prepared in the home, with women doing
the majority of the cooking, according to the latest figures from the
research firm NPD Group. Interest in food is undiminished, as measured
by magazines devoted to the subject (it's the second-most-popular topic
behind crafts and hobbies for new magazines launched in the past three
years, said Samir A. Husni of the University of Mississippi) and in
sales at gourmet cookware chains such as Williams-Sonoma and Sur La
Table.
Still, in test kitchens at food giants such as Kraft, the goal is
terminology that is "simplistic, and very literal, to make it easy to
understand," Meyers said. Where 20 years ago a recipe for chicken might
have said, "dredge the chicken in flour," today it might say, "coat the
chicken in flour." And instead of saying "saut," recipe writers say to
"cook over medium heat and stir," she said.
At Land O'Lakes, the 85-year-old Minnesota farm cooperative known for
its cheese and butter products, former test kitchen director Lydia
Botham said cooks in their forties and younger are high-tech oriented
when it comes to using the company's Web site for recipes and customized
advice but relatively unskilled when it comes to baking.
"They've grown up with the computer, so they expect things to be faster,
including cooking," said Botham, now director of corporate communication
at the company. "They like baking by adding things to a mix. In recipes,
they want fewer ingredients -- seven is ideal -- and they like
step-by-step pictures that show them what to do."
In 1935, for example, a Land O'Lakes butterscotch cookie recipe directed
cooks to "cream together thoroughly the butter and sugar." Today, Botham
said, "we don't use the word 'cream' anymore. People don't understand
what that means. Instead, we say 'Using your mixer, beat the butter and
sugar.' "
A survey conducted by Betty Crocker Kitchens in 2004 showed adults don't
even realize how cooking-challenged they've become. The national survey
of 1,500 adults found that 70 percent rated themselves "above average"
in cooking knowledge, even though only 38 percent scored above average
on a 20-question cooking-skills quiz. While 98 percent knew the
abbreviation for teaspoon, only 44 percent knew how many teaspoons were
in a tablespoon. Even fewer, 34 percent, knew how much uncooked rice is
needed to yield one cup of cooked rice. (Answers: 3 teaspoons in a
tablespoon; one-third cup of uncooked rice yields 1 cup of cooked rice.)
Children age 10 to 17 weren't much better. A 2004 Betty Crocker survey
of 1,000 children found that while 94 percent could access the Internet,
only 42 percent could cook a spaghetti dinner. Nearly 100 percent could
play a computer game, but only 41 percent could make a fruit smoothie in
a blender. On the other hand, 64 percent said they'd like to help more
with the cooking at home, confirming that cooking is hardly a dying art.
"There's a real need and desire to learn these skills," Ruben said.
*2006*The Washington Post Company