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Default Recipes dumbing down vocabulary - Wash. Post

This may make cooks blanch

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepu...ookiq0329.html

Recipes dumbing down vocabulary

Candy Sagon
Washington Post
Mar. 29, 2006 12:00 AM

At Kraft Foods, recipes never include words like "dredge" and "sauté."
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 such terms as
"blanch," "fold" and "sauté," 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 OK 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 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 20s and 40s for Betty Crocker showed that 64
percent of women in their 20s had mothers who worked full time, outside
the home, during their childhood, compared with 38 percent of those in
their 40s. The group in their 40s 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 Washington, 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 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 "sauté," 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 40s 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.' "

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