I’ve lately been having a debate with my boyfriend, am I a great cook or merely a passable one?  He takes the former view and I the latter.  For the record, I can bake a single type of bread without the help of a recipe, know the proportions of a roux off the top of my head, can give the USDA approved internal temperature of a chicken breast without looking it up, and frequently make my own spice mixes, salad dressing, and pasta sauce.  To me this is all standard stuff, but when I told my cousin in DC the other week that, “I’m a decent cook with a good imagination,” Sam jumped into inform her that I am a fabulous cook who is inspired.

This debate has made me think more than usual about common cookery now as opposed to 50 or 100 years ago.  My grandmother and great-grandmother made pickles and pasta sauce every summer, canned them, and never gave it a second though.  House wives and house keepers of the late 1800s and early 1900s knew how to bake cakes and bread without the aide of recipes (and even if they had recipes they weren’t the organized things we think of as recipes today.  Moreoften they were simply lists of ingredients, out of order, and often without measurements).  When I can, pickle, or bake today people think it’s an astonishing feat, but in a different age I would be considered the most inconsistant and helpless of home cooks.

My friend Asta of the blog Only an Almond Bean wrote a post this week about the need to restore Home-Ec as a class in schools.  Her idea is that in an age where microwaving a TV dinner is considered an example of culinary prowess it’s no wonder that obesity and other nutrition related health concerns have become epidemic.  While I hate to play down my own skills in the kitchen, I totally agree.  Everyone should have the ability to steam, fry, sear, bake, broil, and grill in order to turn raw ingredients into a nutritionally balanced and tasty dinner.

The reason I don’t think of myself as a great cook is because I shouldn’t be a great cook.  In an ideal world everyone should be able to cook the way I do.  And by the way, my bread recipe is 2 parts flour, 1 part warm water, 1/2 teaspoon yeast per cup of flour, 2 hours rising, a pinch of salt, and then 3 more 1 hour risings before being baked at 400 for 45 minutes; roux is 8 parts flour to 7 parts butter; a chicken breast should be cooked to 165, but will rise about 5 degrees after it is removed from the oven; and my recipes for pasta sauce and salad dressing are already listed on this site.