The Kitchen Counter Cooking School

“You have to give yourself that dream assignment. No one is going to give it to you.”

How quickly we shifted back into our regular lives in Seattle. Still, after that moment on the stage, what was my regular life? The notion weighed heavily on me. So did my weight. In France, we ate as if training for an Olympic eating event. Yet I returned weighing a few pounds less. So did Mike. Less than a month back in the United States I gained nearly ten pounds. How? Sure, we walked more in Paris. But what was it about being back in the States that led us to gain weight?

The French eat less in general and lean toward more fresh food and few snacks. As in other European cities, Parisians shop more often for groceries. Some of it is cultural, but most of it is practical. When I first moved to London in 1999, I had to completely shift my thinking about grocery shopping thanks to the dorm-room-sized fridge in my minuscule kitchen. I couldn’t “stock up”; I had no physical space. My freezer was only slightly larger than the size of a paperback novel. Plus, I knew that I had to carry home with me whatever I bought. Since I shopped frequently, I chose mostly fresh food and prepared it that night. In Paris, we did the same thanks to the easily accessible street markets. Even so, I saw a lot of shoppers buying frozen quiche Lorraine in Parisian supermarkets, not to mention the customers who flocked to American-style fast-food outlets. While it might once have been true that French women don’t get fat, more recent surveys show that as the French adopt more American-inspired habits of eating, notably consuming long-shelf-life products, their national weight steadily increases.

Contemplating all this not long after we returned from Paris, I wandered over to my local supermarket, a vast sixty-thousandsquare-foot store that’s open twenty-four hours a day in the urban Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. When it comes to diversity and cart voyeurism, it’s hard to beat the collection at my local grocery.

That was the day I met the woman and her daughter, the one with the cart full of boxed and frozen ultraprocessed food products. She was shopping in a store with a bakery, a full-service deli, a sushi bar, a large meat department with trained butchers, a seafood counter replete with water tanks featuring live crabs and lobsters, plus signs bragging that the store carried 129 different varieties of produce, a third of them organic. With all those options, why did she actively select mostly food in boxes and cans?

We started talking after the butcher demonstrated how to cut up a chicken. “When I make stuff from a box, it always turns out right,” she explained. “I never really learned to cook. Mom made dinner when we were young, but by the time I was in high school, she worked a lot, so my brother and I ate a lot of frozen dinners.”

She picked up one box of pasta, the kind that makes a side dish in a few minutes. “I know that Alfredo sauce is made with cream, but I would have no idea how to make it.”

I spent a year in culinary school learning endless variations on cream sauce. I explained a simple technique—boil cream until it reduces and then extend it with a bit of the cloudy water left over from cooking pasta. “That’s it? Oh, wow, I thought it was a lot more complicated.”

She agreed that if I wrote down the recipe, she’d give it a try. Out went the nine boxes, and in went two packages of whole wheat pasta, a quart of cream, and a small wedge of Parmesan cheese—for roughly the same amount of money yet enough to make twice as many servings.

This result made her curious about what else we could replace from her cart. Boxes of Hamburger Helper were swapped for ingredients to make simple skillet dishes—onions, garlic, peppers, canned tomatoes, and a block of Cheddar cheese. We visited the bulk herbs and spices area and stocked up on several, including a Cajun blend, chili powder, mixed herbs, oregano, thyme, and red pepper flakes. Her daughter, initially bored by our conversation, took over filling and labeling the plastic bags of spices and herbs. “This is fun, Mama,” she said as she sealed one bag. “We should do this every time we shop.”

Real potatoes picked out by her daughter (along with a pink peeler) replaced the dehydrated variety. As we stood in the produce section, the woman looked around feebly. “I know that I don’t make vegetables enough,” she said. “I’m not very good at figuring out what to do with them. I kind of avoid anything that requires a lot of cutting something up. I see those chefs on TV and it looks so easy. I guess I’m not very good at it, and it always feels like it takes a long time.” We bought a few bags of a precut broccoli and cauliflower mixture on sale that day, a bottle of olive oil, and some lemons. I wrote down instructions for how to steam and roast the vegetables, then top them with some lemon or a bit of her new herbs and spices.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that afternoon. I was certain I had overwhelmed her with information. She seemed like a smart woman and a good mom, but when we talked about cooking, she was discouraged, frustrated, and convinced that shortcuts remained the only path she had the time or skill to navigate.

“I don’t mind boxed mashed potatoes” was not the sort of comment that crept into my usual conversations. As a food writer, I’d slipped into what I call “the foodie bubble,” a magical place where everyone talks about ramps,¹ perfect local peaches, and smoked duck prosciutto. People casually name-drop obscure chefs and discuss how many recipes they’ve tried from The French Laundry Cookbook. Don’t get me wrong: Life is great in the bubble. It’s just that most people don’t reside there. Normal people live and shop in the center aisles of the grocery store, just like the woman I met. That afternoon, I decided it was time to abandon the bubble.

I stumbled upon a TV interview with English chef Jamie Oliver a few days later in which he talked about why the United Kingdom had been gripped by an onset of obesity. “The thing, I think, is that as people stop cooking, they get less healthy, yeah? People are going by the chippie² to pick up dinner, but chips³ aren’t dinner.” Without realizing it, Jamie got animated, even upset, his adorable East London accent growing even more pronounced. “If there was one thing that I could do, one thing that I could change, it would be to get people to just realize that cooking isn’t that tough. It’s a walk.”

His words rang in my head. The woman and her cart of boxed food . . . the idea that cooking is too difficult . . . the refrain from the woman in Paris about knife skills. Ever the reporter, I started to conduct research on how they all related. Several studies back up Jamie’s assertions that the less a person cooks real food, the more they rely on processed or convenience foods, whether at home or in the fast-food line, and the more weight-related health problems they experience. To a large extent, the more you cook, the less you weigh.

What intrigued me was that the woman I met felt that she was cooking. To her, opening a box and doing something with it was creating a meal. I disagree. Yet neither of us is right or wrong. Researchers can’t even seem to agree on the definition of cooking. While a lot of food writers bemoan the loss of home cooking, I found surprisingly little research into the matter. Sure, various studies examined the amount of time people spend cooking, such as one led by a Harvard team that found people spend about twenty-seven minutes a day preparing food, about half the time spent in the 1960s.

“There’s this notion that there is some kind of decline in cooking and that people aren’t doing it anymore. But that’s not so clear. It’s just that there are so many other choices on what they can do to get food,” said Dr. Amy Trubek of the University of Vermont, a food historian and researcher who has spent more than a decade studying how people cook. “People aspire to cook what they believe is good, healthy food. But then they find the food environment very complex. There’s also a strong sense of ‘time poverty’ in the American culture, this sense that you don’t have time. Cooking is a thing many people perceive they don’t have time to do.” She equated it with going to the gym. “Everyone knows that you should exercise, so they say that they will go five days a week, but when it comes down to it, they don’t.”

The woman in the supermarket lacked confidence and skill when it came to cooking. She wasn’t sure how to turn whole foods into dinner, and as a result, she found her choices were limited. But that’s the issue. If you can’t cook, you put yourself at the mercy of companies whose interests are overwhelmingly financial.

Frances Short, the author of Kitchen Secrets: The Meaning of Cooking in Everyday Life, says that while consumers may want to eat healthy and even actively seek out this information, it doesn’t have much effect if they can’t act on it. “Advice to, say, grill or steam food can only be followed if you know how to grill or steam,” Short noted.

Trubek told me that what I probably gave to the woman in the supermarket was awareness, a good start. “But awareness is no good unless you have repetition associated with it. That’s how knowledge becomes practice and practice becomes habit.”

One reason that Julia Child made such a formidable impact was her unique ability to inspire people to get off their couches and go into their kitchens. While viewers watched her make potage parmentier, they often took a crucial step—they made it themselves. They searched out leeks, chopped potatoes, and maybe even crafted their own chicken stock. But somewhere along the line, people stopped getting off the couch. Cooking turned into a spectator sport. While Julia demonstrated how to fillet a fish or wrestle the bones out of a roast, most modern cooking shows fall into what industry experts refer to as “dump and stir” shows or reality-based competitions such as Iron Chef. While some viewers may follow along, even executives for the network admit that they focus more on entertainment and less on instruction.

“I watch Wimbledon but it has no relationship to my ability as a tennis player,” Trubek said. “It’s beautiful and aesthetic, but practice is the only thing that is going to help my backhand.”

Back in the 1960s, Julia battled the idea that adding some ingredients to a box or heating something up somehow constituted cooking. Mike’s late mother, pressed for time while working the night shift as a telephone operator on a military base, relied heavily on convenience foods. In fact, when we first married, he waxed so fond about something called Noodles Romanoff that in my dizzy honeymoon state, I spent three full days trying to track down either a box or a recipe for it. It turns out Betty Crocker ceased selling Noodles Romanoff in May 1994. I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but that’s the same month the FDA required manufacturers to include nutritional labels on food products. (I ended my quest when I learned that faithful replication of Noodles Romanoff required a portion of an orange flavoring packet from Kraft macaroni and cheese and commercial powdered mayonnaise.)

We live in a world where experts and the government preach that we should all eat leafy green vegetables, but then we’re bombarded with messages that sugar-laden cereals are part of a “nutritious breakfast,” and commercials present Subway sandwiches as the holy grail to weight loss. TV cooking show host Sandra Lee cheerfully suggests that “gravy is too hard to make, so just buy jars of gravy” and advises viewers to buy jars of garlic because “mincing garlic just takes too long.”

To be fair, I think her voice is just one in a cathedral-worthy chorus shilling the idea that convenience is the most important asset when it comes to eating. No wonder we’ve forgotten that the most essential thing we do is to feed ourselves and the people we care about. When I saw the stuff the woman had in her basket, it struck me as antinourishment.

Consider the ingredient list for a brand-name box of a pasta Parmesan side dish. The goal of the product, a company spokesperson told me, is to approximate the flavor of pasta tossed with a bit of Parmesan cheese and olive oil. In order to do it, they used the following:

refined bleached wheat flour, partially hydrogenated palm oil, salt, whey, reduced lactose whey, corn syrup, natural flavors, palm oil, monosodium glutamate, cultured nonfat buttermilk, Parmesan cheese (cow’s milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes), sodium caseinate,⁴ modified corn starch, freeze-dried parsley, nonfat milk, onions, spices, lactic acid, ferrous sulfate, niacin, soy lecithin, yellow 5, yellow 6 lake, yellow 6, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid

That’s twenty-seven ingredients, mostly chemicals, in place of three real items. To make this palatable, it’s loaded with corn and so much monosodium glutamate⁵ and cholesterol-agitating palm oil⁶ that they had to list all three at least twice. All this to simulate the flavor of three ingredients: pasta, olive oil, and Parmesan cheese.

I believe that everyone has it within them to boil pasta, add olive oil, and grate a little fresh Parmesan cheese over it. I believe that anyone can learn to chop up garlic in less than a minute. So how do companies get consumers to buy a box filled with chemicals, dehydrated milk, and pasta fused with deeply fattening oils so that it will cook two minutes faster? Or to buy products that are little more than dressed-up military rations? They do this by convincing people that making pasta tossed with some olive oil and cheese falls beyond their culinary grasp.

Decades of savvy marketing conspired to make the woman I met at the supermarket believe that a simple cream sauce fell outside her abilities, and who could blame her?

“As a culture, there’s a lack of balancing cost as opposed to actual value,” Trubek said. “We surrender our best interests for the sake of seeming convenience. By failing to understand what’s involved in certain kinds of basic food preparations, American consumers have been duped.”

All of this thinking converged when I stumbled on the show What Not to Wear on cable TV one night. The immaculately coiffed host and hostess went through the weekly guest’s wardrobe, critiqued her normal choices, and then tutored her on what to wear. That week, they transformed a frumpy housewife into a smartly turned-out woman with a chic haircut with particularly striking blond highlights. They visited her two months later to see if she’d stuck to her new look. She had, plus she’d lost her “last ten pounds” and radiated enthusiasm. “You just gave me a push, the confidence I needed to make the changes that I knew I should make for myself. I feel proud of myself.”

I bolted upright on the couch.

Armed with a yellow notepad, I interrupted Mike in the other room as he worked on a kitchen redesign for one of our rental apartments.

“I have this crazy idea . . .” I started.

“Oh, no. Not another one,” he joked. He put his pencil down. “You hungry?”

We talked as I sat on a stool while he made dinner, his specialty, chicken and vegetable Thai curry with brown rice. I gave him the rundown.

“I want to try to understand what could motivate people to cook more often. I want to give people different cooking lessons and see which of the things they learn might stick with them.” But before we started, I told him, I needed to educate myself on what people had to work with at home and get a sense of the choices they had already made. So I would go into homes and look into fridges, freezers, and cupboards—the culinary equivalent of auditing their closets. “I’ll have them make a dish they usually make, so I can see how they cook. Then I’ll put together some lessons around the skills I think they’re missing. Afterward, we’ll follow up and see how they’re doing.” He poured the coconut milk into the curry. “Well, what do you think?”

“Exactly where are you going to find people willing to let a stranger come into their house?” Mike asked.

“Well, I don’t know. I haven’t figured that part out yet. I thought of this just now.”

The smells of coconut and curry filled the kitchen, now so quiet that I could hear the metal spoon dinging around the bottom of the wok as he stirred.

“Our kitchen is too small for lessons,” he said, concentrating on his dish. “What about the commercial kitchen your friend Ace is using?”

“So you think it’s a good idea?” I asked, relieved.

“Well, it’s an admirable notion, anyway. You can’t force people to cook differently. It’s like that old joke, How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“One,” I answered. “But the lightbulb has to want to change.”

“Exactly. If you approach this as a way to encourage people and give them a few skills, maybe it could motivate them. But remember that everyone’s life is different and complicated, and people are smart enough to know if they are willing to change.” I nodded. He handed me a bowl of red curry chicken and brown rice. “Now eat.”

As part of my author duties, I was scheduled to be a guest on a longrunning local radio show hosted by Seattle celebrity chefs Tom Douglas and Thierry Rautureau. I’ve known both since my days as a restaurant critic in the 1990s. The owner of a group of popular restaurants and an Iron Chef America winner, Tom balances the titles of culinary icon and astute businessman, yet for all his success he’s remarkably down-to-earth. Thierry reminds me of my chefs in France. He started as a classic apprentice in French restaurants at age fourteen and worked his way up. He now owns the impeccable French restaurants Rover’s and Luc, plus hosted a radio segment on NPR called What’s in the Fridge? Listeners called in and described ingredients in their pantries and refrigerators, and he’d coach them on the possibilities. They both have won the James Beard award for Best Chef in the Northwest, plus seemingly every other culinary award possible. If that’s not enough, they’ve both appeared on Top Chef.⁷

As I pulled on headphones in the pleasant, cluttered studio, Chef Thierry offered me a glass of a nice French red he had brought in to sip during the show. I told them about the woman in the supermarket and what I’d been learning about home cooking. Tom and Thierry were intrigued.

“This is a person you just met out of the blue?” Thierry asked.

“She went along with you, in this cold call in the grocery store?” Tom asked incredulously.

I threw in a few statistics that I’d picked up. Americans waste about a third of the food they purchase, for instance. I told them about the project and that I wanted to include some of their listeners.

“How long do you think it would take to find a person who can’t boil an egg and change them into a person who can open up a fridge door and figure out how to make something from what they find inside?” Thierry asked.

“I don’t know, I guess we’ll find out,” I said.

Tom nodded behind the tangle of microphones. “Also, maybe they can realize that cooking can be fun, and a good way to spend your time.”

Then we took a call. “I used to listen to these radio shows and the old-time commercials were thrown in,” the caller said. “I remember there was one for what to make with evaporated milk. That woman must have rattled off various recipes in a minute or so. It struck me that no one could understand those recipes today. No one would even understand the vocabulary. We’ve moved into a place where people don’t understand basics of cooking and food.”

Tom thanked the caller. Then he looked at me. “How do you plan to address this lack of knowledge?”

“That’s an interesting point,” I said. “You know, recipe writers don’t use certain words anymore, like braise. Instead, they write, ‘Cover and simmer in the oven,’ because people don’t know what braise means. There’s a loss of language specific to the kitchen, and it’s evaporated just like that milk.”

“But it’s not just braise,” Tom said. “I mean, people are uncomfortable with the idea of a pinch of salt. What’s a pinch?”

We talked about the demise of home economics in public schools and the notion that many Americans are two generations away from knowing how to cook.

“I think you can trace a lot of those skills back to Madison Avenue and the ad agencies,” Tom said. “They’re the ones who sold us the idea that you didn’t need to cook, you could simply buy products instead.” He looked at the clock on the wall. “Well, thanks for coming on the show. I’m excited to see how it goes. And you know what? In a funny way, I’m interested to see what you get out of it.”

When I got home from the show, I found two dozen messages waiting in my e-mail inbox. More streamed in over the weekend.

As I read through them, I realized that the conversation on the air had appeared to touch a nerve. I glimpsed moments of guilt, embarrassment, and downright melancholy.

“When I was nineteen, I was asked to make the salad at my boyfriend’s parents’ for Thanksgiving. I didn’t know where to start, and they all made fun of me. It made me never want to try to cook anything ever again,” wrote one woman.

“I rely on boxed products because it’s easy, but I don’t want to. I have NO idea how to butcher anything. I can’t fillet a fish, cut up a chicken, etc. When I look at an artichoke . . . well, I just walk right on by,” wrote Cheryl, a thirty-three-year-old mother of two young sons. “I’d like to learn how to make ‘real’ food, more food from scratch and what I have on hand, rather than pulling out a frozen pizza for my family.”

“My mother never let me in the kitchen; she thought I was in the way,” wrote Shannon, thirty-two, also a mother of two. “When I read about little girls cooking side by side with their mothers . . . it makes me so sad for what I missed.”

Another wrote, “I grew up with a grandmother that could make a meal out of nothing and make it taste as good as any five-star menu. I’ve lived for years on frozen dinners and anything that is easy or fast.” She considered herself “addicted” to cooking shows. She watched them all—Top Chef, Iron Chef, The Next Food Network Star, Alton Brown, Giada, Emeril. “But then I am totally lost when it comes to knowing what to do when I try to fix anything. I’ve watched Gordon Ramsey while eating Tuna Helper. I’m so ashamed.”

In the end, I selected ten people for what I began to refer to simply as “The Project.”⁸ They shared little in common in terms of background, except that they all identified themselves as a “poor cook” or an “aspiring cook” who relied regularly on processed or fast foods. I told them little about what to expect, other than a few dates and times. I wasn’t trying to be mysterious. I didn’t really have a plan.

In retrospect, I’m not sure what I was thinking. I’m not an academic type or a researcher; I had taught only a couple of informal cooking classes. My thoughts on what lessons I’d teach were murky. I would have to make it all up as I went along.

The first stop was a generic apartment building in the rustic former logging town of Granite Falls, Washington. After three hours, I climbed back into our Mini Cooper and leaned my head against the steering wheel. “What did I get myself into?”