“First of all we have a scheme of education which fails to provide instruction in a girl’s domestic duties; then we have the wife who undertakes the task for which she has never been properly trained; next, instead of well-cooked and very much varied meals, we have a conspicuous and a disastrous failure; and finally, we have the bread-winner driven to the public-house—and happiness has left that home for ever.”
Chapter VIII on 'School Cookery and Its Influence on the Australian Daily Life'
If Mr Muskett is to be believed, bad cooking in the home is a sure-fire way to send the inhabitants on a downward spiral into drunkenness. Some of the meals I attempted to cook in my early twenties verged on the disastrous, but I can honestly say they never forced anyone out the door to the pub.
Muskett’s chapter on school cookery did however highlight the role that domestic education plays in creating a healthy and happy population. In her 1995 article, “When did we teach our girls to cook?” Beverley Kingston suggests that for most of the nineteenth century Australian girls had little opportunity to formally learn about cooking. It wasn’t until the last 20 years of the nineteenth century that cookery and other domestic skills were added to the curriculum (for girls) of schools in the various Australian colonies. Critics of the introduction she says, “argued that both cooking and sewing were things that girls could and should learn at home from their mothers and were a waste of time and money in schools.”
Leaving aside the obvious focus on girls only being the ones for whom domestic education was deemed to be appropriate, this did make me reflect on the role of the education system in the teaching of domestic skills.
In Australian schools, food preparation and cooking now goes generally by the name Food Technology, although none of the high schools we are considering for our daughters offer this subject. A recent article in The Age highlighted that Victoria's peak health promotion agency, Vichealth, has proposed in a submission to the Federal Government’s obesity inquiry that food technology be made a compulsory subject for students up to year 10.
While we wait for cooking to end up on school curricula, perhaps we should look to the wisdom of those 19th century critics: is cooking something children can learn at home from their mothers and fathers?
There is nothing like total immersion to learn a new skill, so at the start of this year we allocated one night a fortnight to our then ten-year-old daughter as her ‘cooking night.’ She has to plan what she wants to cook, write up a list of ingredients she needs and go shopping for those ingredients at the markets. We offer advice and assistance if required during the cooking process, but she is in charge.
Last week, she chose to cook (for the family and two guests):
- Racks of lamb served with herbed mashed potato, steamed beans and broccoli
- A fruit and cheese platter (selection of three cheeses)
Over the past months, she’s learned some really valuable lessons in choosing foods at the market, preparing ingredients, timing and coordinating the cooking process and catering for people with food intolerances.
The pride on her face when (several months ago) she cooked a pork roast with vegetables and all the trimmings for one of her school friends and her friend’s father made the entire process worthwhile.
We don’t see this as a girl/boy issue. If we had a son we would also do the same with him. The ability to cook fresh, tasty, wholesome food is an essential life skill.
And so far, on her cooking night, no-one has been tempted to nip out to the pub!
How did you learn to cook? And who is teaching the children in your lives to cook?
14 comments:
mmm looks delicious!
I learnt to cook from watching my parents serve chops, frozen peas and deb instant mash and what I learnt was that a) care was needed to make it palatable b) this was not what I wanted to be eating for the rest of my life.
Luckily I also learnt about gardening, jam making and baking from my mum and nan in between and caught some made from scratch skills that way. At my school, academic girls were dissuaded from doing home ecc or commercial cookery as it was in that day. Which is a great pity, I would have loved to have become a chef (and had my own cafe for a while).
Now Grace at 3 and a 1/2, can pour herself a glass of milk and get an apple or some bread from the fridge, sets the table, picks food from the garden, helps with shopping (when not screaming on the floor of the supermarket/greengrocer), chops mushrooms with a small knife, mixes, puts things in the bowl and squashes biscuit dough. Hopefully as she grows up, we can just keep building on that.
Unfortunately pretty much all she'll eat is bread, broccoli, pasta, and apples. And biscuits if they're around.
There was Home Ec at my school, I can't say I learned anything interesting or useful, but like most things the quality of the teaching is of the essence.
The first lesson was Ants on Logs. Which is celery with peanut butter (it was the 90s, before kids were allowed food intolerances) with currents sprinkled on top. The flour generally had weavils, anyone who didn't want to consume something they were allergic to was told to eat it anyway, and I generally threw anything we'd cooked in the bin on the way home. Then when I got home I cooked real food with decent ingredients.
Fortunately most of my classmates knew that food was pleasurable, and how to cook, before they met Mrs Omond. So she wasn't able to completely destroy any prospect of us eating well in adulthood.
I really wish we'd had a Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden program instead.
Both my children (10 & 8) WANT to cook but, mostly, I just can't bear the mess. They love making scones - all that flour flying everywhere.
I really need to separate them to cook as they fight together over the mixing bowl. Not a good thing when there are knives around. Must get my act together and allocate separate cooking days!
I love this post and I think it is a really important topic. So many of my friend's don't let their kids anywhere near the kitchen and I find it really strange given how I was brought up.
My Dad is a fantastic cook and he introduced the same idea as you have with your daughter when we all young. We didn't live with him so this was something we did on visits but basically we had to cook a meal for a dinner party and buy all the ingredients etc. It was Dad who bought us our my first cook books - mine was The Complete Margaret Fulton Cookbook and and I still have it.
On the home front with Mum, as a single parent she couldn't do everything without our help so we were rostered in for help with dinner, washing up, laundry, cleaning the house etc from an early age. We often cooked meals but they were much more simple than at Dad's place and usually just with what we had. We made our own breakfast and lunches to take to school.
Mum was a very adventurous cook and was using ingredients and cooking food that most suburban households didn't use, unless they were from another country. We grew up with salami, olives, lentils, chilli etc and there was a pile of cookbooks that we could explore.
I also spent long periods of time with my grandparents and so was always in the kitchen with grandma baking and making jam.
At school my best friend (now a chef) loved to cook so we would spend afternoons in her mum's kitchen baking too so it was just a normal part of life for me growing up.
Strangely, though, we did have Home Science (as it was called in NSW) and I absolutely hated it and would wag the class at any opportunity. I found it boring and the food awful compared to the cooking we did outside school.
Whenever my friend's kids come over and we are having dinner together I get them to help with chopping vegies or stirring things and have one of my grandma's old half aprons hanging in the kitchen for them to use and a stool to stand on and they love it. They love being involved.
Cooking, like anything, is a skill and it requires practice to learn and it's really important to engage kids with it when they are young so that they can have a healthy life. I have adult friends who don't cook and it must cost them a huge amount to eat out all the time. I guess that was another part of our upbringing - we didn't have any money so we had to cook at home and be creative. One thing my mum used to do though which to this day I love her for: on our birthday's we could pick a restaurant to go to and it was so exciting and the only time during the year we ate out. That also gave us a great appreciation of food from other countries and all of us have held onto that into our adult lives.
My mother is a wonderful cook and always set us to work in the kitchen. She was also a working mother so I was quite often given the responsibility of putting on the roast before she got home, she'd ring and talk me through the details. I still feel very comfortable bunging on a roast but I still suck at making gravy. (I'll go without rather than resort to gravox though!) When I was in my teens my parents and I completed a Szechuan Cooking course together which taught me some handy techniques and was actually a really great thing to do, excellent family bonding.
But it was baking that Mum gave me a lot of autonomy in, and to this day I love baking. She used to ask me to do my 'speciality' -French Apple Tart- if she was throwing a dinner party which I loved to do and also loved basking in the acclaim!
Some days I think I'm not a great cook (too distractable which means burning accidents happen along the way) but really, there I am cooking tasty, nutritious, made-from-scratch meals every night and I really think I can thank my Mum for that
We had compulsory Food and Nutrition classes in my first year of high school (or Food and Nut as we called them). All I can remember learning was how to cut a tomato into a fancy shape, and how to make a curried egg sandwich. Neither of which I have ever done since. I picked up some skills from my mum who is an excellent cook and baker, but mostly I have learnt to cook though trial and error (mostly error) as an adult.
We had a very intensive "Domestic Science" course in Scottish schools in the 1950's.Starting with breakfasts we progressed through soups, main courses, desserts and baking for morning and afternoon teas and so by the time we reached 3rd year which was equivalent to year 10 we were capable of producing any sort of meal.My mother was an excellent cook and what I didn't learn at school I definitely learned from her.
By the way,Fairlie, I found your "Food and Nut" note book the other day and you did get 32/40 in your year 8 Test!! Shall I keep it for you?!
One of the few tv shows I am following at the moment is Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food. What he is finding is that poeple no longer know how to cook and rely on ready meals bought from the supermarket and take aways. This is one of the reasons many people are overweight.
Also, harking back to your "busy" post Fairlie, it seems people complain of being too busy to cook. But nutritious home cooked meals can be whipped up in 20 minutes when one knows how (or buys a cook book and teaches oneself!) 20 minutes is usually quicker than it takes to wait for home delivery.
So, I think it is vitally important that we all learn to cook, including kids! If we don't start being more mindful about what we put in our mouths, trouble awaits. And how do you do that - by preparing it from scratch yourself - and showing how to one's kids (something I need to take up more and more myself).
Personally, I am a self taught cook who was thrown into the deep end when I left home to attend university. Like Janet, I wanted to avoid anything that even remotely resembled food prepared at home ;-)
ps. really love what your daughter is doing - really inspiring.
right I am going to steal your idea immediately and implement it with Will.
I picked up stuff from Mum and Dad who both cooked and actually learnt alot during Home Ec at high school.
Leaving home forced me to learn to do more varied cooking and then marrying J was great because he is a fantastic cook.
Great post again!
My high school had compulsory Home Ec (at least for the first couple of years). We learnt cooking and sewing. In first year I remember learning to make apple crumble (we were allocated 15gms of butter each) and a wrap-around skirt which I totally stuffed up because I misread my waist measurement as 76cm rather than 67cm.
Mon dieu — but those chops look mouth-watering!
I never learned to cook until I learned to enjoy eating,which was pretty late in life.
My grandmother was a great cook, but my mum wasn't, bless her.
And at school (a snooty private one in England in the '60s), cooking classes were decidedly infra dig. The choice was Latin or 'domestic science', which was looked down upon to such an extent that the miserable wretches who opted for the more practical subject had to trudge across town to a lesser school which had kitchen classrooms. The implication was that by dint of our superior and liberating education, we were all going to become well-paid career women who would not need to cook for ourselves.
I cannot make a Victoria sponge, but I can quote Virgil, read Caesar's 'Invasion of Britain' and sing Jingle Bells in Latin!
Can I just say that I'm quite impressed with the lamb choice? Very sophisticated. I'm sure she gets it from her mother.
My mother is an excellent baker, but doesn't really enjoy cooking otherwise. I learned my baking skills from her and the cooking has been trial and error and from pitching in with my mother-in-law in the kitchen.
Both of mine (boy and girl) like to help out in the kitchen. J.T. will be eight soon... perhaps old enough to help with menu planning and at least some cooking prep?
I did Home ec at school. This was cooking and sewing, I can remember enjoying these subjects. Both my parents worked shift work, but there was always one at home. Both Mum nd Dad cooked and being the only girl I loved spending that one on one with which ever parent was cooking..The boys had to do the cleaning up....
When I left home the first thing I got was some cook books and I still have a weakness for cook books. I love to cook any-thing.
I have four girls and they have always been in the kitchen with me. The youngest is 10 and she to can cook a whole meal from scratch...
One thing I think is take away is so easy to get. Why go to the trouble of making some thing when you can buy it!!!!
Thereis not many girls I know that can cook.
At the childrens school they learn to cook in grade 8 and for alot of them this is a first time....I think this is so sad no wonder we have such an over weight socitiy.
Mandy
I learnt to cook from mum. she cooked most from scratch. being a stay at home mum made it easier.
We had home ec at high school in the first few years. If they are making sport compulsory till grade 10 (thank goodness i am not back there- hated it), why not cooking? Many kids do out of school sport anyway, but not out of school cooking.
My girls healp me with some of the cooking, that does not involve anything sharp. they like basting the pastry with egg for pies, mixing stuff etc.
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