Native Wood-Notes Wild Syndrome, as applied to cooking

[oursin]

Have been thinking lately, largely inspired by some of the articles in book on food studies recently very kindly sent to me by lloronas_eyes, about the idea of women as 'instinctive' cooks - in particular women who (perhaps for reasons of ethnicity, or class) have not, for example, had the (somewhat dubious) advantages of education in 'domestic science'. (Also

Comments

[oursin]

From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food (ed. Avakian and Haber) - as with any edited collections, some unevenness, but some v good articles.

[chickenfeet2003]

I would certainly say that the good female cooks in my family are very far from the 'osmosis' model. My mother has City and Guilds in Cookery. My Aunt Kathleen cooked for years at Brathay Manor. That said, I've never heard either of them speak in "food technology" terms, except perhaps where jam making or sugar confectionery was involved.

I'm more the technician in that regard as depite having no formal cooking training I did spend quite a few years in the packaged food and food ingredients business. I actually think quite a lot about the physical and chemical processes involved in the kitchen.

I have no idea what this proves beyond IAMC.

[serrana]

I dunno -- at the same time that I concur with many of these ideas, I also know from the women in my own life that once a female line has lost the cooking "thing," it's very hard to get it back. For example, my MIL wasn't taught to cook by her mother (she was at the tail end of a large family) and, lo and behold, neither of her kids can cook. I remember my sister in law watching me chop potatoes once and declaring that she could never do anything that complicated (uhhhhhhhh).

Mind you, some of this may be them.

Though some of it, I think, is growing up around someone who knows cooking, just like taking to auto repair or home maintenance or gardening as an adult has a lot to do with being raised around it, and not just having a willingness to learn and signing up for a couple of classes at the adult ed. There are an awful lot of skills involved in all these things, and they're the skills that are transmitted more by apprenticeship than from classes or books.

[oursin]

Oh, I think tradition and early example may be there and important but tradition is not static and unchanging, and allows for more change and development than the idea of line of women in kitchen from time immemorial conjures up. But it is possible to teach oneself even starting from scratch, though it probably helps not to see it as this great mystery.

[serrana]

Well, and you just have to look at all the new ingredients that have come into people's kitchens in the last few centuries to appreciate how much changing-in-accommodation there's been.

[oursin]

It's fascinating to look at the cookery columns in women's magazines and the way they convey new nutritional ideas and how to cook unfamiliar ingredients - I seem to recall (I was actually researching something quite different at the time) spotting 'what to do with aubergines' some time interwar - well before the E David revolution.

[ide_cyan]

"Chef" male cooks tend to be paid workers cooking for strangers, at the head of a group of workers in a restaurant, for instance. Female cooks tend to cook as unpaid (or underpaid, if they're hired servants) domestic labour, for their families. The relations of production limit the prestige of their respective jobs; NOT the quality of the cooking.

[oursin]

And even when women do become restaurant chefs, my sense is that they tend to be much more about natural simple organic/grandmother's kitchen/traditional peasant style, than doing the far-out 'molecular gastronomy' type of thing.

[londonkds]

Reminds me of codslapworthy (imo) letter in Observer on Sunday by a current critic at the NME on why conscious use of the intellect is foreign to rock music (which must be unmediated barbaric spontaneous yawp)and a sign of bourgeois hatred of the working class (which would have horrified likes of Bragg, Curtis, I Brown, and other working-class intellectuals in rock history).