A Slippery Slope

Dear Friend,

It’s 1953, and you’ve just been born. Little do you know that by the time you’re old enough to help Mom in the kitchen it will be 1963, and she will have already begun to supplement the cooking with ready-made and pre-packaged food. By the time you’re old enough to cook by yourself, everything she serves you will have been heated in a microwave oven from frozen. Therefore, the skills she learned from her mother will not be passed down to you. By the time you cook for your own growing family it will be 1983, and you will never have made a pie crust from scratch, let alone breads, cookies, cakes and frosting. My good friend Betty Crocker, who is a for-profit corporation, not a person, will facilitate this slide into ignorance by making it easy to buy all these things from a supermarket shelf. By the time your daughter is old enough to cook for herself, it will be 2003, and she won’t even shop for food, let along ingredients — everything she eats is handed to her through the window of her car. Her grandma will long be dead of heart disease brought about by the clogged arteries she got by eating so many foods made from Spry.

Have a nice day!

Aunt Jenny

Home Baking Made Easy For Beginners and Experts, The Lever Brothers Company, 1953

Why We Can’t Cook

Cooking: what is it, and how can I get involved?

Cooking is a long-lost ancient skill our ancestors used to prepare food to eat. Long ago, in order to eat, people had to “grow” “raise” “hunt” and “cultivate” edible things that they would then “cook” to turn into food. It took all day.

Today, cooking has become popular among a select group of hip individuals who wish to recreate this long-abandoned art in their own homes. People who do cooking are known as “cooks.”

What sorts of things do “cooks” make?

Take pizza for example. A cook will make a pizza using a “recipe” and techniques learned from “books.” They will actually make the “dough” (the stuff the base is made from) themselves using their hands, and the tomato part and the cheese part (although many cooks still buy the cheese). * Then they will heat it in an oven. This is also called “cooking” it, which may be confusing.

But why would someone go to all this trouble?

No-one really knows. You can buy a pizza at any supermarket.

What does homemade pizza taste like?

Again, this is unclear. Cooks rarely allow non-cooks to share their “food.” By the time you show up, it’s usually all been eaten. It is thought they do this to hide the evidence of their habit. The only way to know is to become a cook yourself.

Cooking sounds like a religious cult. Is it dangerous?

As with all new things, caution should be taken before attempting. Before trying to cook, you should document your whereabouts and alert your family, should things go wrong. It is a known fact that people who have taken up cooking have disappeared into kitchens, and are never heard from again. It can take years to track a cook down, and it has proven to be very difficult to re-integrate them back into society. Cooks have also been known to recruit their own family and friends into the habit: it’s a discussion you should have before you become hooked.

*Not the cheese you may be used to: this cheese is made from milk and enzymes which are mixed together and left to “age.”

Fast Meals Cookbook, Rockville House Publishers, 1972

Also from this book: Revenge Salad