The paperback copy of Judith Jones' autobiography,
The Tenth Muse, finally arrived Saturday, after being on preorder for what seemed forever. Jones is the editor who realized that Julia Child should be published as is, and not dumbed down the way the male editors wanted.
First two paragraphs, enough to tell me this is going to be a fun read:
When my mother was well into her nineties, she announced that she had an important question for me and wanted an honest answer. I steeled myself for something weighty, perhaps about whether I believed in heaven and hell.
Then she looked at me and asked: "Tell me, Judith, do you really like garlic?" I couldn't lie. Yes, I admitted, I adored garlic. She looked so crestfallen at that moment that I was shre she felt a sense of finality about the wayward path her younger daughter had taken.
Now
that's the way to start a book! It's not a long read - the autobiography itself runs under two hundred pages, with maybe eighty more of favorite recipes. But in just the first few pages, something that has been bothering me for a while has been underlined yet again.
Where the frickety-frack did this myth that daughters learn to cook from their mothers come from?
Julia Child didn't learn to cook from her mother. Her family had servants. She had no idea about how to cook until she landed Paul and in France. M. F. K. Fisher's family had servants. Irma Rombauer's family of course had servants, being of the upper crust of St. Louis. And now, here's Judith Jones, whose father was a lawyer but not well-to-do, living in an apartment in NYC, and
they've got a cook!
Heck, my own grandmother's family had servants, back when my great-grandfather was Sheriff of Napa County. Grandma learned the basics of cooking from the family cooks (and a good thing, too, because Grandpa had no money and couldn't afford to hire help until much later, by which time having servants was considered something only the rich folk did, what with the Depression and all.)
All right, Laura Wilder learned to cook because her Ma taught her, but once you get away from the frontier mentality, and closer to the turn of the century, having hired help was not that unusual. Our own esteemed BK has the Evil Eye on weekends - if she could cook, maybe we wouldn't have to worry as much about his eating habits! (Come to think of it, BK, there are people who will cook a week's worth of healthy meals, and deliver them to your house, for a reasonable fee, which is a modern spin on hiring a cook - they just happen to work for several clients, rather than a single household.)
My point is that part of why so many families seem dependent upon Lean Cuisine and Healthy Choice and all this other
cr@% crud that pretends to be good food but is really no better than eating someone else's leftovers, is that the people who were supposedly learning how to cook from their mothers have not done so, mainly because their mothers never learned to cook, either! And, if they don't learn how to enjoy cooking from Mommy, or from anyone else, then the odds are they're never going to learn on their own!
(end rant)
