Yeah, but can she cook?

Three things crossed in my head yesterday that all point to the same problem, one that isn’t obvious at first but is troubling.   The first  is the conclusion of Brit cook and TV star, Jamie Oliver that the essential reason for the lousy food school children get in most American and British schools is that the schools don’t have enough people in the kitchen to really cook anything.  As  budget pressures mount, the schools  cut kitchen staff to the minimum.  The result is they only have enough people to open cans and bake or microwave frozen entrees and side dishes.  The do not have the kitchen staff to actually cook a school meal.  Oliver pointed out this often isn’t actually cheaper than cooking meals from scratch. The processed and prepared food they feed the students tended to be very high in salt, sugar and industrial sweeteners and fats.  Even when they served fruit and vegetables, they were usually frozen (not necessarily a bad thing, especially in winter) or preprocessed.

The second stray item was in this weekend’s Washington Post, where Kathleen Parker wrote about the sharp increase in obesity, especially among children.   As a throw away line, pointing out her own shortcomings she wrote, “And though I tried to provide family dinners most nights when the kids were small, I told my son when he left for college: ‘“You’re gonna miss my takeout.”’  

The telling point here is that even for a  traditional family,  everyone sitting  round the kitchen table for the evening meal is not common today.  Time pressures with two working parents and children with after school sports and other activities make  a family dinner  around the table  an exception not the norm.  While I’m sure Kathleen Parker is a good cook, take out is often for dinner at her house  for lack of time to purchase, prepare, and cook a traditional  dinner many nights.

While lack of time to cook  undermines the family dinner  for Kathleen Parker’s family,  another  even more troubling  problem  is  that many people who have the time to cook family meals,  don’t actually know how to do it.  Last week on the way home from the San Fernando Valley I stopped at the Ralph’s Market on Ventura Blvd. in Studio City, an up scale LA suburb.  I needed  the usual mid week shopping stuff:  milk, bread and salad greens.  I didn’t even need a cart and got in line with my black basket behind a thirty something women with a cart full of everything.

She was slim well dressed  and intelligent looking, apparently a stay at home mom.  From the large load of groceries it was clear she had a couple kids and a husband.  As she loaded the belt on the check stand, I noticed that she was careful to avoid most “junk” food, even the  breakfast cereal was not sugary.  Much of what she bought was “organic.”  She obviously sent lunch with her kids from the amount of precut apples and carrots in little single serving sealed bags and little cups of fruit.  She bought chewy dark multigrain bread, organic peanut butter, sliced Muenster cheese and a  big cans of tuna.   The rest of the cart was frozen itemd:  entrees, side dishes and vegetables in this or that sauce.

Then it hit  me as the clerk rang up close to two hundred dollars of groceries.  This obviously intelligent, affluent and serious lady didn’t know how to cook.  Except for a bag of oranges,  she had not  bought any of raw or basic ingredients. No onions or potatoes, no rmeat, no fresh raw fruit or vegetables, no spices, canned tomatoes, raw dried grains or beans, nothing fresh except two dozen organic free range eggs.  (I’m sure she could scramble or hard boil eggs but that is a long way from actually being a  cook.)  Even the main courses were preprocessed and prepared outside her kitchen.

This woman’s shopping cart  demonstrates the same essential problem Jamie found in school kitchens,   no knowledge or skill in cooking beyond a few very simple things.  Like the schools, this lady knew how to micro wave  meals but not how to cook them herself.  She paid almost three time the cost of making a pot roast from scratch for a prepared one along with the potato and vegetable side dish.   I  bring this up because at spice firms like Laury’s offer  pot roast seasoning and easy to follow instruction.  McCormick’s even has what amounts to a “Pot Roast for Dummies” kit with seasonings a roasting bad and simple instructions.  All the lady had to do was buy a fresh chuck roast and a kit, put the meat in the roasting bag with the seasonings, a little wine and she could have made a pot roast.  She could have bought three pounds of potatoes and  two pound of carrots or broccoli and made the two side dishes.  She also bought bagged prepared salads that included the dressing.  Why not buy a head or two of lettuce, a bottle of wine vinegar and one of olive oil and make her own salad at less than half the cost of the prepared one?

In my neighborhood there are many immigrant families from a  dozen counties near and far.  These people buy basic raw or simple ingredients and go home and cook them.   Why?  Because their mothers and grandmothers taught them how to cook.  No big deal you would think, but I’m afraid it is a big deal.  It is not just an affluent woman from Studio City but it includes many if not most young men and women. They don’t know even simple cooking.  In high school my brother Michael and often made dinner when my recently widowed mother was at work.  She and our grandmother taught us enough to make simple family dinners.  We didn't need Rachel Ray,  although I have to say that she is very good at showing ordinary people how to prepare and cook good dinners.

This is  ignorance of how to cook even simple meals is problem for all Americans.  It is not the fault of McDonalds or Kentucky Fried Chicken, or any other  food company.  It is our fault. These firms are filling in the gaps individual families make for reasons of necessity or connivence.  It doesn’t have to be this way and it shouldn’t be this way.  As fewer and fewer of our children are raised without a traditional family,  ignorance about cooking is just one of negative consequences.

“We got a problem in River City, right here in River City” as goes the pitch from “The Music Man.”

Bourdain is correct in his judgement of Red's Java House.

Reading on Yelp for San Francisco I noticed many of the comments about Red's Java House  are either unfair or uniformed, if not both.  The hamburgers here are made and served in the old local style, on a sliced slab of sourdough bread.  As a native of SF I should remind younger readers that before the rise of national burger chains each region had its style.  Red's is true to the local style of Burgers that developed in the Bay Area long before there were national chains and locals felt any need to conform to some outsiders standards.

In the San Francisco Bay Area most places popular when I was in College in the the early 1960’s served large hamburgers on slabs of a sourdough  loaf or on a sour dough roll.  They were not “dressed” to use the New Orleans term with a lot of toppings and garnishes but often served with only the meat in the sourdough and any condiments left to the buyer to add or they were served with maybe fresh or grilled onions, perhaps a hint of mayo and even more rarely with a few dill pickle slices.  

For those who can remember, all the various “Joe’s” restaurants which go back to the early years of the the twentith century made burgers this way as did many other restaurants like the beloved Larry Blake's on Telegraph in Berkeley which served their big burger with a side of very very garlicky Caesar Salad not fries.  The burgers in the bay area were made like Italian style sandwiches and only cheap hamburger stands and some diners and cafeterias used the common small hamburger bun in one form or another.

Even family owned pizza joints and small local chains like Round Table Pizza made their burgers this way, on French rolls just like their other sandwiches.  The choice was a hamburger with or without cheese or  a sausage split and grilled with your choice of a Polish kilbasa, a Louisiana Hot link or Linguiça served in the same dressed french roll.

In LA hamburgers were served fully dressed with thousand island dressing, onions, tomato slices, whole lettuce leaves and pickles or relish and a dab of mustard and catsup. In LA this system of “dressed” hamburgers applied even if they were  covered in a generous glob of chili or if sliced avocado or a thick guacamole was added.  Midwestern and East Coast folks still disparage these California "salad in bun" Southern California hamburgers, but that is and was the authentic local style and it remains so.

The burger at Red’s Java House is very authentic old time Frisco, not something odd nor a national standard burger or one of the hyped “gourmet” super burgers that are popular and go for something between ten and twenty bucks.  Anthony Bourdain was correct in his judgment, favoring as he often does a strong authentic local tradition while at the same time also recognizing innovations that build on it.  That he dings some of the more extravagant or mystical contemporary trends is OK with me.  Perhaps he realized that may of the new local and organic savants are in fact going back to what  my grandmothers and other women who learned to cook before WW I knew and did.

My comment is this, before you stick you nose up at something old and authentic, get your facts straight and learn the local traditions and customs.  San Francisco and the Bay Area had good cooks and a special authentic style long before  the mystical organic folks arrived and rediscovered good and local ingredients.  In many ways it was the old authentic local traditions that allowed this movement to grow up and flourish.  However, as Bourdain makes clear it is only one of many schools of cooking and one that exists on the higher levels of restaurants and cooks.

Sad news.

On a new post on Yelp,  one of the previous reviewers has posted that the Portuguese
Grill in Rancho Cucamonga closed last week.  It is a very sad thing and my best wishes go to the family that ran the small restaurant.  As I wrote, it was like in a Portuguese American home with so many of the wonderful dishes I remember from my growing up in large extended family with many fine cooks.

Perhaps some one could buy it and bring it back.  The unique barbecue/grilling system they installed is something that could be used for many styles of cooking.