I’ve been working on a book proposal, the content of which has taken me back into my own culinary education; and it got me wondering, how have we learned to cook? Who taught us the techniques, flavour combinations, and dishes of our weekly arsenal? And, most importantly perhaps, are we still learning, and from whom, or where, and when?
Looking back now, it is hard to know exactly why I started my culinary education. It’s not a given, is it? Having worked as a chef and in the world of cookbooks for a long time now, the ‘origin story’ of even the most well know chefs and food writers follows no well-trodden or linear path. For every chef whose knife hand was touched by god and their brain filled from infancy by parents, aunts, uncles and family friends who indoctrinated them with recipes hewn from the granite of culture, family or tradition, there are even more chefs whom I’ve met who never chopped an onion in anger until university, or fell into kitchen work whilst trying to make it as a musician, artists, actor or full-time stoner, and thus learned to cook whilst their focus was taken by something else entirely; others still might have been forced into a culinary education by parents who couldn’t be there each night to cook, or family who had no interest in food and were only too happy for their little upstart to bish-bash-bosh a one-tray from Jamie or mangle a quick curry gleaned off Rick Stein.
As I’ve touched on here previously, my childhood was nothing if not suburban and quite aggressively middle-class. On my mother's side, my grandparents were classic roast chicken and apple crumble-type gourmands, my grandmother a steady cook but not one who frothed with any sense of enthusiasm that might draw a greedy young cove into her kitchen to learn at her apron strings. I gratefully sat at her table for good old-fashioned country kitchen fare, but that was it. No sharing of the hows or the whys or the with whats.
On my dad’s side, my grandparents were much fussier, on the one hand, but perhaps ate from a broader and more aspirational palette. Steaks with creamed spinach, smoked salmon on brown bread, Parma ham and melon, kedgeree, prawn cocktails and soufflés and clever puddings that needed nice ingredients and technique. It is said that my great-grandfather was a chef in a grand hotel, and there was talk of a Canadian uncle who was a large man with an expansive yet refined appetite. I always liked the sound of both these men. Both grandparents on this side were keener to impart their knowledge, and certainly omelettes and the cooking of mushrooms and steaks were things I learned from them by the age of only five or six. For what it’s worth, they were proud too of how things were displayed on their table. So where my other grandparents had good sturdy tableware adorned with autumnal hunting scenes of pheasants and dogs in shades of cream and brown, this grandmother had silver salvers and platters and tiered arrangements for every dish imaginable. Even a cup of tea and a biscuit from a packet were displayed as if one was at the Ritz with gold chintz and doilies, regardless of the company.
At home food was cooked and eaten, obviously, and there are things that I relished eating and remember fondly; BBQ chicken and rice, a bolognese and chilli con carne, a lot of good puddings; and mealtimes were always at the table, which is good, right, but the reality is for me that most of my initial culinary education was from television. I grew up bang in the era of early Jamie Oliver, and I watched every episode of The Naked Chef with barely concealed mania. With Jamie as my gateway drug, I soon chased that early high into UK TV Food. Before long it was rolling constantly in the background like the TV news. Inevitably, soon enough I was in the weeds with Anthony Bourdain and then the vast expanse of YouTube. What a waste of time, you might think. The upside though? I quickly realised I could bespoke my curriculum as I became more and more niche in my desires and peccadillos.
This consumption of food TV and media was the catalyst for action, I suppose that is crucial, and looking back now it was the cooking and travelling and eating that fell out from sitting and watching so much television that was the real education.
I know that for many though this diet of mediocre food media would be anathema to a constructive culinary education. The oratorial passing of recipes from one generation to the next is the most fetishised of culinary educations, just below which is the little cookbook-Matilda who is inhaling Richard Oley, Marcella Hazan, Claudia Roden and Arabella Boxer before they’d even graduated from their Little Tikes toy kitchen. Below this lot are those who’ve had classical training, be it Leith’s or an archetypal catering college, and below these guys are the on-the-jobbers, the Saturday-pot-wash-turned-part-time-prep-chefs, the my-old-head-chef-used-to-do-blah-blah type chefs. Then there’s the budding amateur, the obsessive, the project cook whose got cupboards full to bursting of fermentation kits, dehydrators, smokers and other niche ephemera from their various ‘eras’ of all-consuming culinary crazes. There’s then of course the sweetly devoted cook, the friend who buys a cookbook and cooks from it with priestly observance. I guess nowadays there’s the TikTok and Instagram chefs too, those who’ve come to cooking through choppy editing and loudly-expressed enthusiasm for a well-hyped dish/ingredient/recipe/etc, and I don’t yet know where that type of chef sits in the ranked perception index I’ve inadvertently started above. The truth is I suspect we’re all a little bit of all of these, and some of our education we’re delighted to present to the world, and some bits we keep for when no one can see us.
What I would say though, is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with using Instagram or Youtube or a TV show or a particular recipe or a personality as a way into something, as a jump-off point, so long as this catalyst takes us deeper. Stein or Flloyd or Oliver or UK TV Food have offered so many start points for me. And perhaps Big Has or Thomas Straker or What Willy Cooks or Molly Baz or Alison Roman are the same catalysts for people today. And all of these people exist to offer us the little moments when someone shows you a peek behind the curtain, and allows you that thrilling moment of seeing something for the first time. That the format or perspective or content of what you’re shown that first time might not stand the test of time, might not be the full picture, might wilt under further scrutiny or turn out to be of the highest quality, is not to belittle the mind-expanding insight of that moment. I suppose, and I am thinking as I ramble here, that the issue lies in taking that first moment as the totality of the thing, not as a jump-off point but as the destination.
I suppose I’m keen to explore how we end up learning how to cook. Why do we cook what we do and why do some of us turn it into a lifelong obsession whilst others simply know enough to survive? And I am no closer to understanding that now that when I set off on this rant.
All I do know is that for me, the influences or catalysts mentioned above and referenced below are responsible for those first flashes, those epiphanies, and I love them for that. They are not, nor have they ever been the final destination. They were catapults that flung me headlong and out of control into a world or a dish or an ingredient, and the rabbit warrens I frantically scrabbled around in the aftermath experiencing these things are the things that now make up my brain, my culinary hive mind, my education.
And the second epiphany, if I may be so indulgent, is that so often the joy is in the collision. Of the low brow and the high brow, of the old fashioned with the seemingly current, of the passive consumption with the active creation, of the media consumed and the world it‘s consumed in. So spend hours on social media and the internet, but go as broad and as deep as you can. And then cook a thing, or go and eat, or buy a thing and taste it just for the sake of it. And if you’ve got a peer who is keen to enthuse and educate and pass on wisdom, be it culinary or not, lucky you. Where ever your culinary education might come from, whether you’re starting from scratch or learning anew, take it, add to it, and use it as the impetus for the next thing you cook, and then the next thing you learn after that. And on, and on.
Resources I’ve drawn on for my culinary education:
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