I got into cooking via Youtube. Youtube cooks became a thing about fifteen years ago. People like Jamie Oliver started promoting first themselves and then others on Youtube and I sort of started watching that stuff to relax. The genius of this was that Jamie Oliver was of course famous but the people he promoted weren't. They were just ordinary people that pointed a camera at themselves while they were cooking stuff. Quite a few of them are still on Youtube and have successful channels now. And of course others have come along. There are many thousands of people regularly uploading stuff. These days if I want to learn how to make something, Youtube is the first place to look.
It took me a ridiculously long time to realize that I could do some cooking myself. If you are a programmer (like me), my realization was that if I can follow instructions and implement some complex algorithm, cooking is a lot easier. And even the failures can be tasty.
Julia Childs was basically doing the same thing as these Youtube chefs but about half a century earlier. You can find quite a bit of her shows on Youtube. But it's got a similar vibe to it: shot at home, very passionate about what she did, very relatable, etc. And it necessarily follows a similar format. She was funny, and no-nonsense. Very unglamorous too. And obviously very skilled. She was a middle aged woman by the time she got on TV. It was all about the food and her character.
I can't say she was a huge influence for me because I never knew she existed until some Youtube chefs kept referring to her and I checked out some of her stuff.
Anyway, I loved the bit of information about her WW II career as a high level intelligence officer. Only makes her more awesome.
Big difference being Child went to France to train as a cook and spent a long time there (she learnt French). There were techniques and recipes that simply weren't available to the English speaking world at the time. It's different nowadays, especially with English being so much more dominant. It's easy for us to find someone French doing a video in English. As of about 10 years ago there was still a bit more to learn if you learnt French, but the amount of stuff left is shrinking.
For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques. Good books like Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking dedicate many pages to this before they get into recipes (this book incidentally sets out the ingredients better than any other cooking book or website I've ever seen). Where YouTube shines is the techniques. Books do an admirable job of describing kneading, but nothing beats seeing someone do it. That's how we really learn this stuff, and must of us don't have a parent to learn from these days. So watch YouTube videos, but pay extra special attention to what they are doing, more so than what they are saying (you could have just read that part).
> For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques. Good books like Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking dedicate many pages to this before they get into recipes
Hard, hard disagree here. Learn some recipes, enjoy eating some food that you've cooked for yourself. Cook some recipes you like for 6 months and _then_ start learning the techniques and fundamentals.
as someone who divorced and didn't want to be the 'mac and cheese dad', I found an older edition of "Williams Sonoma Cooking at Home" a really good beginner book. It goes over basic ingredients, seasonality, cooking methods, cooking tools, proper measuring, and complementary sides before hopping into recipes. I found all of these very valuable as _tons_ of recipes assume basic knowledge of it.
A lot of the recipes are quite involved though so now I tend to go for simpler ones, or pick-and-choose.
> For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques.
For anyone who wants to learn ingredients, tools, and techniques, my advice is to start by learning recipes, preferably from a source that explains both rationale and variations (America's Test Kitchen cookbooks are pretty good for this.)
How to Read a French Fry is the book which introduced the idea of a science of cooking to me. I'd caught a 2001 interview on Fresh Air at the time, which is available by the Fresh Air Archive:
There are far more titles and now websites on the topic, quite probably improving on Russ's effort. But the basics are sound.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic I've taken to baking sourdough bread, which is its own whole set of knowledge and experiments. Every batch is a new discovery, though all have been edible. Worst error to date has been forgetting the salt (much worse than leaving the oven temp too high).
You are not wrong. Watching people on Youtube go through the process is how I absorbed knowledge. The fun thing with people like Jamie Oliver is that he is very loose and imprecise. He doesn't use table spoons, cups, and what not to measure things out. I don't print out or read recipes, ever.
When I was around 20, I lived exclusively on takeout. And not because I couldn't cook, I am and was a solid cook, it's that cooking for one is not that economical (specifically time-wise) and I could just eat places that would allow me to eat a days worth of food in one sitting, think lots of Indian buffets, which made feeding myself on takeout pretty cost effective.
Before that, I lived on takeout because I worked in a restaurant and it was free to take home the food that was going in the trash at the end of the night.
The first couple of years of her TV career are fictionalized in the HBO series Julia, though a lot of it is based on her extensive written correspondence to others. Her editor and her friends were interesting in their own right, as well.
The quote of hers, "If you're alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who's going to know?" Is modified and used for anytime my family drops something.
A friend in high school that worked at a steak house chain called it “floor spice”. He said it was often intentionally applied when rude customers demanded their steak be cooked more. Never send back food.
I highly recommend watching Jacques Pepin videos as well as Julia and Jacques.
Jacques Pepin is alive and well and some of his recipes are just 2 to 3 ingredients and easy to make. And yes, he is highly technical but explains things so easily to regular people like me.
Pepín is an excellent chef to learn from. Because most of his recipes focus on technique and simplicity rather than recipe and seasoning. One of the biggest mistakes that I think people make is just not cooking things to the correct doneness at the right temperatures and times. Often people think that a fancy mix of spices and seasonings is what is important. I grew up not liking chicken or pork or steak unless it was in something because I had never had perfectly cooked chicken, pork chops, or steaks it was always cooked to well done and so dry you needed steak sauce. My parents grew up in an era where everyone feared undercooked meat. especially pork. And it's such a shame because I grew up on a cattle ranch. We would butcher a cow for ourselves every year. Grass fed, but lean, and butcher to thin steaks because you can cook them to saw dust a lot quicker that way. Now, I get beef from the ranch after fattening and have it butchered to steaks at least an inch thick and I always cook with a thermometer and usually just salt. A well done vs medium rare steak is such a night and day difference. Same with pork and chicken, although I prefer them both a little closer to medium.
Well done! I mean you got out of the fire and into the fat. Sorry. Oh, I so feel for those sacrificial cows, if they knew how their corporeal selves would be so disrespected.
"I always cook with a thermometer" Not bad, not bad at all, but! I just hardwood grilled another Choice 1" thick steak cut from a full rib roast which was aged a week. Woulda done two weeks but I got hungry. I thought about the thermometer because I wanted perfect (for us 115F, burnt outside, warm inside) but the finger press worked perfect as a doneness detector. Fresh ground Telicherry pepper, salt, and a light marinade of Worcestershire Sauce made for a truly memorable meal. Had some today left over: pepper, salt, and little Worcestershire to moisten it all up. Outstanding. Still gonna go the full two weeks next time.
Now let us talk fish. Or seafood in general. Somebody like Pepín knows how to do those too, and it's quite simple: intensely fresh, cooked to barely done, which is different for say salmon and tuna or an oyster vs. grouper and flounder or freshwater bass or a lobster. No need for fancy sauces or seasonings (blackening, I'm looking at you).
When cooking for family the pork and chicken are still moist and tender, but with guests and modern sourcing they get the dry shoe and a great sauce unfortunately.
I see a lot of people focusing on Julia's videos (and videos in general) but I don't think those were her major contribution. Translating the French culinary curriculum into US vernacular measurements and sourcing, via the books, was her contribution. I stand in awe at how good they are, so many decades later.
I mean this question sincerely: Is it normal to be handling raw chicken and then just stick your fingers into a bowl of salt like that?
I know I am a pretty poor cook, and I get somewhat nervous handling raw meat, probably more than I should be. They say always use a separate cutting board and wash your hands with hot soapy water after handling raw meat. Then I see cooking clips like this one, with experts who have just one continuous cutting board with everything on it, and this guy isn't afraid to be touching is raw meat at all.
You probably shouldn't, but most bacteria can't survive on or in a very salty environment. Realistically, it's probably not incredibly dangerous or anything.
> Then I see cooking clips like this one, with experts who have just one continuous cutting board with everything on it, and this guy isn't afraid to be touching is raw meat at all.
If everything you're cutting is going to be cooked, then you don't really need to worry IMO. Anything like veggies for a salad, or stuff that won't be cooked, should be cut on a washed cutting board though.
You have to be careful with videos of chefs cooking, because they often don't eat the exact thing that they're filming. The finished dish you see at the end or showed off might be cooked at a different time (usually beforehand) and in a far more sanitary way. What you're seeing is filmed that way for the sake of doing less dishes.
I didn't watch the video but what I usually do if I need to salt meat is to pour the salt separately into a bowl and salt as needed, then use that same salt on food that gets cooked with the meat while the rest goes into the trash. With experience you don't waste much. More often than not salting associated veggies uses it up and I need more for the veggies.
"She did not dumb things down but broke them down, creating entry points for American cooks in their home kitchens"
This is an important lesson for educators, communicators, and colleagues.
Too many people think that "accessible" and "approachable" or "simple" is "dumb" or "stupid", and that things have to be hard and complex to be good or smart.
I didn't know she was so influential with regards to kitchen design and universal or inclusive design. Wonderful article with a lot of depth and much food for thought for anyone interested in trying to find solutions for this problem space.
Americans strikes me as being in crisis due to various social factors making full-time wives and moms relatively rare. Our food culture, recipes, kitchens, home design etc etc are rooted in an implicit assumption that your wife or mom is doing the grocery shopping, cooking, keeping track of your health issues and dietary needs etc when this is no longer true for most people.
There seems to be an endless stream of people complaining they either don't have time to cook or they are fat and broke from consuming takeout and an endless stream of companies trying to address the issue, such as meal delivery companies.
I like Julia Child's skepticism about the effectiveness of productizing the space as the only or prime solution. It seems likely to me we need to rethink and rework our food culture so everyone can eat adequately, even if they don't have some privileged life with a high quality kitchen and full-time wife and mom taking care of all the nutritional concerns and logistics behind that, which are substantial.
What would be the benefits? Sounds like we should prioritize family, as has been tradition for the entirety of human existence. The new approach of ‘everyone has a house/dwelling and their own independent life apart from anyone’ is the experiment.
Off the top of my head, in no particular order and probably not comprehensive:
Improved health for people not living that way.
More freedom to live as you choose. Heteronormative culture has long pressured young people to get married and have kids and told them from birth they are straight without giving them time to figure out for themselves what their sexual orientation is.
Freedom to leave a marriage that isn't working because you no longer are a prisoner of the fact that your wife knows all your health issues and the dietary restrictions they dictate and cooks better than you, so she is essentially irreplaceable because that catalog of data about you isn't readily replaced by merely marrying a good cook -- assuming you can even arrange to remarry immediately and aren't forced to feed yourself (inadequately) for months or years while looking for a wife
Fewer mental health issues from society no longer dictating to everyone "You will be straight, don't confuse us with the facts. You will fall in love with The One meant for you, never mind the overwhelming evidence this is the exception not the rule. You will fit your entire life around tasks society decided are yours at birth due to the bits between your legs."
Less homophobia, less transphobia, less misogyny, more economic stability due to more personal flexibility.
Maybe not full time but I would still say the vast majority of women still do all the duties around the house and those regarding raising children. America has become more like countries in Asia that way where women always worked but still did everything an American full time housewife did.
In households with a nuclear family or heterosexual couple, women still tend to do the lion's share of "the women's work."
But people are generally marrying later, having fewer kids, more couples are having no kids, the number of households with four or more related members has plummeted, the number of households with one to three members has skyrocketed and far fewer people have someone in their life whose primary role is doing the women's work and looking out for their welfare.
People are time stressed, fatter and less healthy, etc. We point to a lot of different causes for those very well established facts and I'm saying that one common denominator that gets largely overlooked is the decline of the number of full-time homemakers.
Every story I read about Julia Child makes me admire her more and more. I also remember an NPR story about her creating shark repellent during WW2 to protect undersea mines.
Readit News
It took me a ridiculously long time to realize that I could do some cooking myself. If you are a programmer (like me), my realization was that if I can follow instructions and implement some complex algorithm, cooking is a lot easier. And even the failures can be tasty.
Julia Childs was basically doing the same thing as these Youtube chefs but about half a century earlier. You can find quite a bit of her shows on Youtube. But it's got a similar vibe to it: shot at home, very passionate about what she did, very relatable, etc. And it necessarily follows a similar format. She was funny, and no-nonsense. Very unglamorous too. And obviously very skilled. She was a middle aged woman by the time she got on TV. It was all about the food and her character.
I can't say she was a huge influence for me because I never knew she existed until some Youtube chefs kept referring to her and I checked out some of her stuff.
Anyway, I loved the bit of information about her WW II career as a high level intelligence officer. Only makes her more awesome.
For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques. Good books like Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking dedicate many pages to this before they get into recipes (this book incidentally sets out the ingredients better than any other cooking book or website I've ever seen). Where YouTube shines is the techniques. Books do an admirable job of describing kneading, but nothing beats seeing someone do it. That's how we really learn this stuff, and must of us don't have a parent to learn from these days. So watch YouTube videos, but pay extra special attention to what they are doing, more so than what they are saying (you could have just read that part).
Hard, hard disagree here. Learn some recipes, enjoy eating some food that you've cooked for yourself. Cook some recipes you like for 6 months and _then_ start learning the techniques and fundamentals.
A lot of the recipes are quite involved though so now I tend to go for simpler ones, or pick-and-choose.
For anyone who wants to learn ingredients, tools, and techniques, my advice is to start by learning recipes, preferably from a source that explains both rationale and variations (America's Test Kitchen cookbooks are pretty good for this.)
<https://freshairarchive.org/segments/russ-parsons>
The book itself is at the Internet Archive:
<https://archive.org/details/howtoreadfrenchf0000pars>
There are far more titles and now websites on the topic, quite probably improving on Russ's effort. But the basics are sound.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic I've taken to baking sourdough bread, which is its own whole set of knowledge and experiments. Every batch is a new discovery, though all have been edible. Worst error to date has been forgetting the salt (much worse than leaving the oven temp too high).
It's all about techniques and ingredients.
What were you eating before you had this realisation?
Before that, I lived on takeout because I worked in a restaurant and it was free to take home the food that was going in the trash at the end of the night.
He had multiple TV cooking shows before Youtube even launched
That woman was a cultural treasure.
Jacques Pepin is alive and well and some of his recipes are just 2 to 3 ingredients and easy to make. And yes, he is highly technical but explains things so easily to regular people like me.
My kids love this recipe: https://youtu.be/zjv_pAmiqhQ?si=63ppn2hCUBiQKiVG
"I always cook with a thermometer" Not bad, not bad at all, but! I just hardwood grilled another Choice 1" thick steak cut from a full rib roast which was aged a week. Woulda done two weeks but I got hungry. I thought about the thermometer because I wanted perfect (for us 115F, burnt outside, warm inside) but the finger press worked perfect as a doneness detector. Fresh ground Telicherry pepper, salt, and a light marinade of Worcestershire Sauce made for a truly memorable meal. Had some today left over: pepper, salt, and little Worcestershire to moisten it all up. Outstanding. Still gonna go the full two weeks next time.
Now let us talk fish. Or seafood in general. Somebody like Pepín knows how to do those too, and it's quite simple: intensely fresh, cooked to barely done, which is different for say salmon and tuna or an oyster vs. grouper and flounder or freshwater bass or a lobster. No need for fancy sauces or seasonings (blackening, I'm looking at you).
When cooking for family the pork and chicken are still moist and tender, but with guests and modern sourcing they get the dry shoe and a great sauce unfortunately.
I see a lot of people focusing on Julia's videos (and videos in general) but I don't think those were her major contribution. Translating the French culinary curriculum into US vernacular measurements and sourcing, via the books, was her contribution. I stand in awe at how good they are, so many decades later.
I know I am a pretty poor cook, and I get somewhat nervous handling raw meat, probably more than I should be. They say always use a separate cutting board and wash your hands with hot soapy water after handling raw meat. Then I see cooking clips like this one, with experts who have just one continuous cutting board with everything on it, and this guy isn't afraid to be touching is raw meat at all.
> Then I see cooking clips like this one, with experts who have just one continuous cutting board with everything on it, and this guy isn't afraid to be touching is raw meat at all.
If everything you're cutting is going to be cooked, then you don't really need to worry IMO. Anything like veggies for a salad, or stuff that won't be cooked, should be cut on a washed cutting board though.
You have to be careful with videos of chefs cooking, because they often don't eat the exact thing that they're filming. The finished dish you see at the end or showed off might be cooked at a different time (usually beforehand) and in a far more sanitary way. What you're seeing is filmed that way for the sake of doing less dishes.
This is an important lesson for educators, communicators, and colleagues.
Too many people think that "accessible" and "approachable" or "simple" is "dumb" or "stupid", and that things have to be hard and complex to be good or smart.
Americans strikes me as being in crisis due to various social factors making full-time wives and moms relatively rare. Our food culture, recipes, kitchens, home design etc etc are rooted in an implicit assumption that your wife or mom is doing the grocery shopping, cooking, keeping track of your health issues and dietary needs etc when this is no longer true for most people.
There seems to be an endless stream of people complaining they either don't have time to cook or they are fat and broke from consuming takeout and an endless stream of companies trying to address the issue, such as meal delivery companies.
I like Julia Child's skepticism about the effectiveness of productizing the space as the only or prime solution. It seems likely to me we need to rethink and rework our food culture so everyone can eat adequately, even if they don't have some privileged life with a high quality kitchen and full-time wife and mom taking care of all the nutritional concerns and logistics behind that, which are substantial.
Improved health for people not living that way.
More freedom to live as you choose. Heteronormative culture has long pressured young people to get married and have kids and told them from birth they are straight without giving them time to figure out for themselves what their sexual orientation is.
Freedom to leave a marriage that isn't working because you no longer are a prisoner of the fact that your wife knows all your health issues and the dietary restrictions they dictate and cooks better than you, so she is essentially irreplaceable because that catalog of data about you isn't readily replaced by merely marrying a good cook -- assuming you can even arrange to remarry immediately and aren't forced to feed yourself (inadequately) for months or years while looking for a wife
Fewer mental health issues from society no longer dictating to everyone "You will be straight, don't confuse us with the facts. You will fall in love with The One meant for you, never mind the overwhelming evidence this is the exception not the rule. You will fit your entire life around tasks society decided are yours at birth due to the bits between your legs."
Less homophobia, less transphobia, less misogyny, more economic stability due to more personal flexibility.
And also false.
In households with a nuclear family or heterosexual couple, women still tend to do the lion's share of "the women's work."
But people are generally marrying later, having fewer kids, more couples are having no kids, the number of households with four or more related members has plummeted, the number of households with one to three members has skyrocketed and far fewer people have someone in their life whose primary role is doing the women's work and looking out for their welfare.
People are time stressed, fatter and less healthy, etc. We point to a lot of different causes for those very well established facts and I'm saying that one common denominator that gets largely overlooked is the decline of the number of full-time homemakers.
compare Rombauer's epigraphic choice of Goethe:
> "That which thy fathers have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst possess it."
https://www.hermanmiller.com/stories/why-magazine/home-ergon...