For most of her life, my wife believed that your skill as a cook depended entirely on the quality of your mother's recipe book.
Luckily for my wife, her mother has a pretty impressive set of recipes. A Tennessee Volunteer by birth, my mother-in-law has a well-worn and loosely bound collection gathered from generations of Southern Sunday dinners, and it's seen about as much bacon fat as the family skillet. There was a time when every kitchen had a bulging book or box just like it. If your mother doesn't have one, your grandmother surely does.
Each entry is handwritten. My wife has copied a good number of those recipes for her own collection, itself stained with the sauces and seasonings of a dozen dinner parties.
But stuffed in the pages of her collection is evidence of the modern cook's resources. Tucked behind cornbread instructions older than our house is a handful of glossy magazine clippings, about puff pastries that looked interesting and roasted yams to satisfy a starch craving. Between those, printouts and e-mails.
When I learned to cook, I looked to the source of all my inspiration for new and unusual endeavors -- the Internet. Having grown tired of boxed spaghetti, I decided that if I was going to live like an adult, I should eat like an adult. And while I had a few initial successes, for the most part I found frustration.
Until then, all the cooking I'd done involved programming a microwave at 30-second intervals. I couldn't tell a chop from a dice, and couldn't do either to an onion in less than 20 minutes. Heat settings escaped me -- "medium heat," "medium-high," "simmer"? I could do "boil" and "off."
It wasn't until I found a proper paper-and-glue cookbook that it all came together. A secondhand copy of "The Best Recipe" explained every step in excruciating detail, leaving nothing to chance. And without much attention to low-fat or low-calorie ingredients, even the mistakes tasted good.
This is what I brought to our relationship -- an ability to follow direction and a desire to learn. My wife added the cornmeal, bacon fat and green tomatoes. Together, well, let's just say we don't go hungry.
As we've gone from dinner to dating and from engaged to married, our kitchen has grown with utensils and appliances and a healthy shelf of cookbooks and magazines. Some days, the most time we spend together is the time we spend at the counters and stove.
Now I can come home, glance through the fridge, and come up with a meal without cracking a book or loading a Web site. I can chop, dice, mince, slice, deglaze and deep-fry. And on special occasions, or when we want some quality time together, we'll still do something daring and multi-paged.
In an era of convenience foods and carryout, we're holding on to a kind of kitchen tradition that is itself endangered. We do it for the sake of family ritual and for the history glued between pages of hand-copied cookbooks. We do it for the time we spend together.
But mostly, we do it for the food.
(Ben Grabow writes for the young, the urban and the easily amused. Contact him at thinlyread(at)gmail.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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