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How
far we've come -- and not come -- in cooking
Sept 11, 08
Suzanne Havala Hobbs
Cooking from scratch is an important
way to improve our diets and health. It’s also one of
the greatest dietary challenges most of us face.
Nobody knows that better than Jean Anderson.
Anderson, a Raleigh native living in Chapel Hill, is an award-winning
food journalist and cookbook author. Her latest book, A Love
Affair with Southern Cooking, won prestigious best cookbook
awards from the James Beard Foundation and the Southern Independent
Booksellers Alliance.
Anderson has been helping ordinary folks learn how to cook
for more than 50 years.
With a degree in food and nutrition from Cornell University,
Anderson began her career testing recipes in the 1950s at
the Ladies Home Journal magazine. It was an era when convenience
foods promised to save time in the kitchen.
Recipes were developed for specific products in partnership
with the food industry, which paid to run ads for name-brand
ingredients.
“It was a constant parade of these big food companies
through our kitchen,” said Anderson.
Convenience foods in search of a recipe included Campbell’s
soups, Cool Whip, Jello, Hellman’s mayonnaise, Kraft
cheese, Tabasco sauce and others.
“We had a whole bunch of generic terms for the brand
name,” said Anderson. Examples included “lemon-flavored
gelatin” and “hot red pepper sauce.”
Anderson has witnessed first-hand how trends in home-cooking
have evolved since then. A few highlights:
* The Julia factor. Julia Child surfaced in 1963 with her
television cooking show, The French Chef.
“We all thought she was a joke,” said Anderson.
“She was comic relief in the beginning, this big, hulking
giant with her falsetto voice.” Child was clumsy, too,
and television at the time didn’t edit out the mistakes.
“But she was the first celebrity chef to champion cooking
from scratch,” said Anderson.
* The age of granola. From the late 1960s through the 1970s,
Americans began to travel internationally and become familiar
with new foods and styles of cooking.
“Suddenly people were writing colorful books on Italian
and other ethnic cuisines,” said Anderson.
This coincided with the youth movement. “The whole vegetarian
thing surfaced then,” Anderson said.
And chefs began to emerge from culinary schools to inspire
many of us to spend more time fixing meals.
* The show-off chef. By the 1980s and into the early 1990s,
cooking at home became a popular hobby. High-end kitchen appliances
and other gourmet kitchen features became more common.
“It was, ‘Can you top this?’” said
Anderson. “We called it the era of the edifice complex.
Chefs would pile food on a plate so high that you could hardly
eat it.”
The 1980s also brought farmers markets. “Cooking from
scratch gathered steam,” said Anderson.
* Enter the Food Network. When the cable TV station aired
in 1993, chefs who understood food took their lessons to the
masses. The era was short-lived, however.
By 1997, the network was sold, and chefs were replaced with
entertainers.
“Rachael Ray, Sandra Lee and Paula Dean are all hustling
packaged foods,” said Anderson. “It’s depressing.
We’ve done a 180.”
Now, cookbooks cranked out by ghost writers under celebrity
names often include recipes that aren’t tested and don’t
work, said Anderson.
“A Hollywood mentality prevails,” she said. “It’s
all about the bottom line.”
So where does that leave us today?
“We’re very conflicted,” Anderson said.
“We have the localvores who seek out farmers markets.
It’s an enlightened group. These people are well-heeled
and well-traveled.”
“But the masses follow Rachael Ray,” she said.
What does Jean advise for those who want to wean themselves
off packaged foods?
A good cookbook written by a reputable author. Anderson’s
The New Doubleday Cookbook, for example, includes explicit
instructions for people of all skill levels.
Take a good, basic cooking class, too, Anderson advised.
Next week: tips for putting this simple advice into practice.
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