Learning to Cook
How cookbooks, food trucks, and making soups have largely taught me my basic cooking skills.
I am, mostly, a self-taught cook, and credit books as my main teachers. I learned to ferment foods by books, as well as cook dishes like coq au vin and lamb vindaloo and baba ghanoush from books.
Around last Thanksgiving, my grandmother (my mom’s mother) passed away. We came down to Texas to visit my grieving grandfather in December, and with our visit, I inherited a big stack of her cookbooks.
My grandmother, Nana, was a great cook, always interested in both food and nutrition. My mom has stories of growing up and seeing Nana make yogurt in the bathtub, or seeking out a health food ingredient like “wheat germ”, which was very difficult to find in the 50s. Always interested in other cultures, new flavors and spices, she was an adventurous cook, too. A brilliant woman, she studied anthropology, spoke Spanish, and, along with my grandfather and as a single woman, had always loved travel. Even in the seemingly quotidian town of College Station, where they lived in Texas, she was well-versed in its history and traits, once giving me a historical driving tour of its city streets.
She loved different cuisines, as is evidenced in her cookbooks; thanks to her, I now have books that aren’t even in print anymore, and books that she bought from other countries that I don’t know how I’d get otherwise. I have very old books about Indian cooking, Kenyan cooking, Chinese cooking, and large books about heritage cooking in colonial times. I have poured over these cookbooks, reading her notes in the margins, looking at her faded cursive on post-its in between the pages. I can still feel her presence when I do this, as if I still get to have a conversation with her.
One thing that is interesting about very old cookbooks is how non-flashy they are. No glossy, beautiful pictures that are curated by a food stylist; just typed up recipes, many times more than one on a page, and for many pages. Apparently, they really used to cram these books with recipes; hundreds, even, in one book with just a plain-looking, unostentatious cover.
The oldest book I inherited from her was one called The Boston Cooking School Cookbook, by a woman named Fannie Farmer, originally published in 1896. (Still in print, it was later edited and changed to be called The Fannie Farmer Cookbook). A pioneer of her time, Farmer is credited as the first person to really write out a cookbook with measurements for recipes (even baking—before then, people would simply write out recipes for cakes and cookies that said “sprinkle of baking soda”). She also was the first mainstream American cookbook author to discuss the link between food and nutrition, waxing on in her writing about the importance of vegetables and the danger in too much sugar.
Chapter 8 in her book is called “Soup”. Soup is an excellent cooking teacher as well, as it is very forgiving, and you are able to experiment with flavors and spices, and use what leftover ingredients you have lying around in the fridge or the counter. She begins this chapter: “It cannot be denied that the French excel all nations in the excellence of their cuisine, and to their soups and sauces belong the greatest praise.” Of course, this is a very Eurocentric take on food, as soups have a much richer history with other cultures that pre-dates French male chefs in tall white hats. Soups are, and have been for thousands of years, very important to Chinese cuisine, for example. Chinese cooking and Chinese medicine have been intertwined since the era of dynasties, with soups being a way to incorporate herbs in foods in order to funnel them easily into the body for better digestion and assimilation. Soups are especially important in Chinese medicine in the winter or colder weather, when your body has a harder time breaking down foods and getting enough nutrients absorbed (think bone broth, spices, herbs, and vegetables). In 2010, Chinese archeologists unearthed a 2,400-year-old pot of soup while doing an excavation. The bronze cooking vessel they found had a covering over it; under the lid was an odorless liquid with animal bones, and tests were done to find out what the other ingredients were. With its rich history of soup and medicinal meals, there are countless recipes for delicious, flavorful, and healing Chinese soups; to me, it seems the French couldn’t even begin to compete with their playbook.
I always want my cooking to improve, and to learn more. I gobble up cookbooks like novels. I love the trend of cookbooks being laced with food stories; I, personally, love the much-maligned blogs where the writer contextualizes their recipe with a story about how it was created, or their memory behind it. Cookbooks are not my only inspiration; I like to say that our small eating-out budget belongs to food trucks or interesting restaurants so I can try to replicate a delicious dish. Some of those eateries are places I sought out and went specially to. Some I still think about: one of the best sandwiches I ever had was in Indianapolis, at the Smoking Goose’s Goose the Market, a sandwich with the unfortunate name of “the Batali”. (I’ve tried to replicate this sandwich with pretty good success with ingredients I can find: really good sourdough bread, sliced salami, olive oil, vinegar, pickled hot peppers, sliced sweet peppers, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, homemade mayo). While working in New York, I made us all drive to Connecticut to visit and eat at Bloodroot, a feminist vegetarian restaurant that I had read about and obsessed over. We had amazing Ethiopian food there, where I am still trying to remember and replicate the seasoning for their beets and cabbage dish. In upstate New York, I went on a quest to find Lagusta’s Luscious chocolates, run by a feminist anarchist collective. (I will brake for chocolate run by social justice activists.) On a camping trip to Vermont, I made us all go specially to a food truck called Dosa Kitchen, where they cook dosas with other Indian food, and where they do not cook with industrial oils and use local Vermont produce. I heard about this food truck on a podcast I listened to over ten years ago, while cooking dinner at our old farm kitchen, and never forgot it. The dosa I ordered there inspired me to seek out a simple dosa recipe and do some trial and error with perfecting it. (Dosa recipe coming soon for paid subscribers!).
I feel that I have a very food-centered life: food, feeding people, and the environment are why I became a farmer. This past year, I graduated from an official cooking program, geared towards holistic nutrition. While wonderful, and while I learned a lot, and it helped me think in new ways about meals, I realized that many things I was learning I had already learned through books. Books still remain the best teachers for me; of course, I still want to go to good food trucks and ethical restaurants for inspiration when we are able to. Restaurants like Chicago’s Sauce and Bread and Washington D.C.’s (and founding member of this newsletter!) Tabard Inn, both run by good people who use good ingredients, are special. I want to support and use our dollars to build up places like these, encourage more of them to bloom, instead of seeing just commonplace chains pop up like invasive weeds. If they are more expensive, then just like paying a farmer a price that they deem sustainable for them to live, I will gladly pay and support when I can; money can sometimes be energy, and good energy is what truly makes the world go ‘round.
On the Road:
I won’t talk about our mechanical woes again, because, frankly, I am sick of thinking about it. Alex and I have had way too many conversations about what the best routes are, what the topography is of this place or that, so that we are able to have as easy a drive as possible with our vehicle’s issues. We left Durango, and to avoid the Rockies, went all the way back down to New Mexico to seek a flatter drive and avoid mountain passes. We camped for one night in the cute town of Aztec, New Mexico, where we really tried to spin this whole debacle for our kids and went to the Aztec Ruins National Monument, where River accomplished one of his dreams by seeing prairie dogs popping in and out of their holes to get some of that warm New Mexico sun.
We have moved so much this week that our kids have practically begged us to stop travelling and to just stay at a campsite for a while. The driving is hard, and it is a lot of taking things down to the floor, making sure our glass mason jars that hold our bulk things like seeds and beans are wrapped in cloth to make them unbreakable during a bouncy drive, and having to lie our bikes in the kitchen (no, we don’t have a bike rack on the back!).
We are currently in Albuquerque, which is a bigger city than we have been to in a while, and our campground feels much more urban than ones we have been to recently. Still, though it feels busier here, and even though we took the boys to the zoo where I saw people do things like tap on the glass where sensitive lizards live and one guy yell in attempts to wake up a sleeping lion so he could take a photo, the mountains are still lovely here, the sunsets are amazing, and we can walk to the river from our campsite. Nature is still beautiful, even when humans are sometimes not.
From the Tiny Kitchen:
With so much travelling, we have been having major camping food this week (that is, very quick). The meal we made tonight is a camping favorite for us: stovetop nachos, possibly one of the easiest things to make. These are not crispy nachos, since they are made on the stove instead of an oven, but they work as a one-pot meal (one day I will have an oven and make crispy nachos again!). I basically just take my big pan, put some ghee in, pour in a bag of tortilla chips, two cans of pinto beans, shredded cheese, and cook, capped, until the cheese melts. I steamed chopped swiss chard in a separate small pot and topped the whole thing with chard. I then seasoned it with salt, pepper, Mexican spices that I have, and salsa. Then, I chop up some cilantro, tomato and onion to mix with lime and salt to heap on top of everyone’s plate. (I also had an avocado, so I sliced that up too.) Honestly, in a pinch when I didn’t get to soak beans or defrost any meat, it works, and everyone likes a heaping plate of nachos, even if the chips are soft. No one even complains about the chard!
This was delightful, and funny. And your discussion of Chinese soups and their connection to Chinese medicine was eye-opening!