(no subject)

[geekchick]

pecunium, cover your eyes. ;)

From the Post on Saturday:

Recipes are increasingly avoiding the use of terms like "cream", "braise" or "sauté" because people don't have the slightest clue what they mean.

Basic cooking terms that have been part of kitchen vocabulary for centuries are now considered incomprehensible to the majority of Americans. Despite the popularity of the Food Network cooking shows on cable TV, and the burgeoning number of food magazines and gourmet restaurants, today's cooks have fewer kitchen skills than their parents -- or grandparents -- did.

I don't cook very often and never really learned any serious cooking skills, but at least I know what "simmer" means. I don't think dumbing down recipes to avoid terms that might be unfamiliar is really doing anyone any favors, I would much prefer to see the correct terms used to encourage some basic level of competency. Include a glossary with your cookbook if you really think your target audience won't know what it means when you direct them to dredge a chicken breast in flour, but the level of ignorance about proper cooking terminology is only going to increase if you skip the opportunity to educate people who might not already know the terms you're using. If you're bemoaning the fact that people don't know what to do when you tell them to cream the butter and sugar, how exactly is it improving matters to avoid using the term altogether and instead simply say "beat the butter and sugar using your mixer"?

Comments

[gsh]

Well, if the person reading the recipie beats the butter and sugar using a mixture that sounds like an improvement over thinking you need to add cream in order to "cream" the butter and sugar.

[geekchick]

But that's a basic technique, why should people be encouraged to not know what it means?

[gsh]

I see is as it more important to know what to do, or what to call it? I favor the first. But then I hated the bits of biology where I had to memorize large lists of names.

[geekchick]

I happen to think they're both important. As one of the people quoted in the article mentions, we expect people who drive to know what "brake" and "parallel park" mean, why shouldn't we expect someone who cooks to know what at least the basic cooking terms mean?

[gsh]

I don't have any statistics to prove it, but I think cooking has more weird terms to describe things than driving has. I mean you can beat eggs, fold eggs, scramble them, even if you can't spindle or mutilate them.

[geekchick]

even if you can't [...] mutilate them.

I don't know, I've had some pretty bad egg dishes. ;)

[gsh]

The worse egg dishes I ever did was putting them in the microwave. I don't know why microwaves turn eggs into rubber, but man they aren't edible afertwards.

[geekchick]

See, you can mutilate them! ;)

(Ew.)

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

and you can coast, back, reverse, brake, engine brake, slip-shift, suicide-clutch, synchro-mesh, perfect-shift, power shift, lug, late-shift, short-shift, punch it, roll-start, left-foot, make donuts, bootlegger-turn, bump, push into traffic, force-merge, tailgate, angle park, head-in, back in, parallel park, street-park, garage a car, and those are just what come to mind in a couple of moments stream of free-association.

All arts have nomenclature and jargon.

Do I expect a casual reader to know the meaning of mise when I'm talking prep? No. So I leave that out, unless I'm writing for pros, or need it (in which case like defining an acronym, I'll make it clear the first time).

But if one drives, there are things which are basic. The same with cooking.

TK

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Then that person will learn.

Cooking is a contact sport, and things go wrong. Me, I hit a phrase I don't know, and I look it up. A recipe (in a newspaper) may try to make things easier by dumbing things down, but that's no help when someone hits a place which assumes people know what it is to deglaze a pan.

If one is in doubt, then one needs to make the process part of the term (Cream the sugar into the butter by taking chilled butter, and a stout spoon/mixer, and press/beat, them until a light, slightly grainy texture is achieved). That makes the reader happier too, because they get the feeling they are being treated as an adult.

I do a fair bit of writing on cookery. I take a lot for granted, on the part of my readers, and one of the things I take for granted is they are grown-ups, and capable of looking things up, or (because I write on my Lj) asking me about things I have left too vague/abstruse.

TK

[free-of-whip.livejournal.com]

I rather tend to doubt the premise of the article. Check out the older Fannie Farmer cookbooks sometime. She defined every single term she used, which makes me suspect that our parents and grandparents weren't necessarily up on them, either. And we had endless jokes about the bride who couldn't cook, and the dreadful meals that resulted until she figured it out.

I suspect that the one difference is that today, people have more opportunities not to cook, what with Lean Cuisine, take-out, prepared foods, etc. So if you used "sauté" in a recipe 50 years ago, the person who didn't understand the term would look it up in the glossary, like it or not. Today, the food manufacturers have figured out that many people will simply give up if they don't understand the terms.

And that's not entirely a bad thing. It's one thing for people who enjoy cooking to do it. But I'm old enough to remember when women were stuck with cooking, whether they liked it or not. I really would not like to see those days come back.

[geekchick]

I think that the fact there is more opportunity not to cook means that fewer people have kitchen skills that they would otherwise have if there weren't frozen dinners in the grocery store and a McDonald's on every corner. I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing, I almost never cook at home myself because I'm tired when I get home from work and don't feel like scrounging up something to cook. I don't think it's a good thing though to encourage people to not be familiar with very basic cooking terms if they're going to be cooking. Like I said, put a glossary in the book if need be, but I am going to have a hard time being in favor of anything that actively decreases the level of basic knowledge. How hard is it to turn to the back of the cookbook that you've already dragged out in order to make dinner to see what "braise" means if you don't already know?

It's one thing for people who enjoy cooking to do it. But I'm old enough to remember when women were stuck with cooking, whether they liked it or not. I really would not like to see those days come back.

See, I don't at all think that's even close to where this article is going. I think people who don't enjoy cooking are more likly to be the ones who give up as soon as they find a term they don't recognize.

[free-of-whip.livejournal.com]

Ah, but they appear not to be talking about recipe books, as such. The examples given are:

At Kraft Foods, recipes never include words like "dredge" and "sauté." Betty Crocker recipes avoid "braise" and "truss." Land O' Lakes has all but banned "fold" and "cream" from its cooking instructions. And Pillsbury carefully sidesteps "simmer" and "sear."

All of these sound like the kinds of recipes one finds on the back of a box, not ones one finds in a cookbook with a glossary. Thus, it is understandable that companies (who are, after all, trying to promote their products with those recipes) would try to make them accessible to even people with little or no cooking experience or interest.

[geekchick]

Ah. You do have a point there. =) It still makes me a bit sad that what's considered in this case to be the proper way to deal with a lack of knowledge is to perpetuate it though, although in the context you mention I suppose it makes sense from the perspective of the company trying to sell their product to as many people as possible. Doesn't mean I gotta like it though. ;)

[geekchick]

They do mention long arguments at the publisher about whether or not the new edition of The Joy of Cooking should use these terms too, which just makes me go "Sna???"

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I've heard similar stories from a net.friend who is a published cookbook author and food/diet columnist. Before her book and newspaper deals, she started out with a website and email list -- and when she first began to include recipes in her newsletter, the reader response surprised her:

I'm astonished sometimes at the ignorance of what I've always considered very basic cooking terminology, stuff I've known since childhood. When I started publishing recipes in my ezine, I put out one for cookies, and told people to "cream butter and Splenda together." I got a slew of emails asking, "How much cream? It's not in the ingredient list!" I've learned to say, "Using your electric mixer, beat the softened butter and Splenda together until light and fluffy."

She knows her audience pretty well, thanks to years of direct feedback like that from her newsletter subscribers. They're not total cooking novices, for the most part, but many of them are folks who have tended to rely a lot on convenience foods in the past, but are now looking for healthier alternatives that are still relatively quick and simple to prepare. So lots of these folks can follow basic directions, and do actually know how to do some basic techniques like simmering or sauteing -- but they don't always know the accepted terminology for what they're doing, and the back-of-a-box recipes they've largely been using haven't enlightened them. Since she's trying to sell cookbooks to folks like these, she tries to keep the jargon-impaired section of her audience in mind while writing.

Despite that quote above, my friend hasn't totally eschewed the use of cooking jargon in her books and columns. She does still make use of terms like "sear" and "braise" and "cream", but generally in conjunction with simple descriptive phrases like the "using your mixer..." passage above, so even those who may not know the jargon can follow along without having to skip to a glossary or reference section. She also keeps the tone very reassuring, chatty, and informal, telling readers to "slosh" ingredients around or "nuke" them in the microwave, which also seems to make the occasional bit of cooking jargon less intimidating for the novices-- at the very least, her seventh cookbook is coming out next month, so this formula definitely seems to be working for her audience.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

And she was right to do it.

There are a couple of things to know about Fannie Farmer (as we get into the history of cookbooks). Until about the time she wrote her book there wasn't as much understood structure to recipes.

Most of them were more an aide memoire and if one didn't know how the thing (or it's family's habit of preparation) then the recipe was gibberish.

Then people started to devise the formula (ingredients, and sequentional listing of actions, and statement of timeline for parallel actions).

So part of what Fannie Farmer did was codify terms and practices.

Compare to Larousse, or Escoffier.

TK

[free-of-whip.livejournal.com]

And I've long much appreciated that she did it. I don't particularly like to cook on a regular basis. But I've never found one of her recipes that I couldn't make work if I wanted to.

[submarine-bells.livejournal.com]

This issue leads me to wonder what constitutes "knowing how to cook" anyway. I was taught all the "proper" terms when I was a kid, but I really do think that in this context, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Glossaries are fine. Describe the process of cooking however you like - the point of a recipe, as I see it, is to communicate a method of combining ingredients so as to produce a specific end result. If someone can produce a fine souffle or sponge cake, I would say that they were competent at cooking regardless of which terms they used to describe the process of producing said souffle or cake. Cooking's an action, to me. The process descriptions are secondary.

I think the analogy with driving that the article suggests is spurious. A hand-brake is a hand-brake, and a comparable cooking term might be "bowl" or "wooden spoon" or "food processor". "Saute" or "braise" are more comparable to "merge" or "parallel park". It's quite plausible to imagine someone performing these tasks competently while using different terms to describe them. Indeed, when I was a novice driver I used to get very confused over "parallel park" - were you supposed to be parallel to the kerb, or to other cars, or what? Even so, I was quite capable of doing it, and passed my driving test on the first attempt.

The map is not the terrain.

[geekchick]

I think my use of "competency" was not the best word choice; one is perfectly capable of producing a fine dish without necessarily knowing what sauté means. I don't see the point of actively encouraging people to not know what the terms mean though, which is what's happening here, because what happens when you (not you specifically, of course) run across a recipe that uses the standard instructions to cream butter and sugar and you think it involves pouring cream in with them (to take gsh's example) because you don't know what it means? You may be perfectly capable of actually *doing* it, but if you don't know what the term means you'll be lost.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

You were trying to make me look, right?

A glossary is all that's needed; encyclopedic, if needs be (some things, like reduction, can't be explained in just a quick gloss... well not always).

TK

[madbodger.livejournal.com]

Amusingly, "simmer" comes from "simper", by somewhat silly means.

On the value of jargon

[telnar.livejournal.com]

As someone who would not have known what any of those words mean (but knows how to use a dictionary), I can see both sides of this one.

Any specialized discipline will have a jargon which saves experienced practitioners time in describing things that most already are familiar with. One of the steps necessary to become a full member of the community of a discipline is to learn the jargon.

For that reason, the average person picking up a scientific journal (in many disciplines) finds it difficult to approach because there's simply too much jargon, as concepts have often been built several layers away from everyday notions, so the likely definitions of many terms in the jargon will be more jargon at first.

Academics have decided rightly or wrongly that that trade is worth it because few people with no background approach the most jargon filled journals (and perhaps they assume that not many more would even if the language were clearer). On the other side of the balance, the effort required to use language that a non-specialist could easily understand would be quite large.

Cooking has some advantages over quantum mechanics because (I suspect that) most of its concepts are only one or two levels removed from everyday experience rather than several. That makes it plausible for a recipe to be written in plain English. Should it be?

In my view, that hinges on the fraction of the people reading it who have studied or are likely to study cooking more seriously. Jargon is a valuable thing for long term use, but it's going to be far more trouble than it's worth for someone who will read three recipes in his lifetime.

It's natural that cooking jargon becomes less prevalent as the fraction of people reading a recipe who are serious cooks declines. Perhaps that's what is happening here.