Intro To Culinary Education

Or, how a pot of soup started me down the path of the foodie.

I am, somewhat objectively, a foodie.

It brings me no pleasure to report this, as the term suggests a degree of dilettantish insufferability that I wish to avoid owning up to, but facts are facts.

My life and leisure time revolve around food.

Virtually every present I have received in the last decade has been some desired culinary tool, gadget or contraption. Our kitchen’s storage capacity has long since been exceeded, and now, most of the front foyer coat closet space is taken up by things that wouldn’t fit in the cabinets—the pressure cooker, the sous-vide circulator, the fancy Japanese-made rice cooker, the lovingly-seasoned carbon-steel wok, the springform pans, the paella pan, the Detroit pizza pans, the aebelskiver pan.

I have so many cookbooks that the workhorse ones—The Joy of Cooking and whatnot—have been relegated to a utility shelf in the basement, with room left upstairs only for the most display-friendly. Handsome objets d’art like Sami Tamimi and Yotam Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem, Sean Brock’s Heritage, Pat LaFrieda’s Meat and Judy Rodgers’ Zuni Cafe Cookbook occupy prime visual real estate on a living room shelf.

My mental maps of the world around me are structured around food—whether it’s a different country, a different state or merely a different part of the city I live in, the first thing I think of when set off my normal paths is what can I get to eat here?

On top of all of this, I have—through no conscious plan of my own at first—become a moderately successful food writer, to the point where this very publication lurks just outside the Top 10 of food blogs on Substack, keeping awkward company with actual chefs, critics, restaurateurs and people with real culinary educations. (I’m as surprised as you are.)

For anyone finding themself in this position, it might be tempting to craft a narrative of a lifetime of good taste and culinary skill, of a predilection since birth toward the finest things the world of food can offer. I’ve just recently completed the actor Stanley Tucci’s 2021 food-centric memoir Taste: My Life Through Food, and though I found it a delightfully conflict-free way to spend a few days, I didn’t see much of myself in it. You see, Tucci—the grandson of Italian immigrants to the United States—weaves a tale of Epicurean destiny, of someone who was always going to end up this way, of having grown up helping his grandfather bottle homemade tomato sauce and wine in the cellar and watching Julia Child’s The French Chef with his mother.

I have no such provenance.

Don’t get me wrong—my parents are both very fine cooks, and I ate well as a child—but either in spite of or because of this, I had little natural skill for cooking myself. Once I moved away for college, my diet largely consisted of Subway, Chipotle, Thai carryout, and frozen chicken breast tenderloins expertly dried out on a George Foreman grill before being slathered in bottled Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce.

(Oh, and White Castle, if it was after 4am and there was someone sober to drive.)

There’s no bolt of lightning moment where I discovered the joys of a well-crafted meal, no Julie & Julia-esque journey of parasocial apprenticeship under a respected figure in the food world, no cartoon rat under my toque turning me from a clumsy cook to a celebrated celebrity chef.

No, if I can pinpoint it to anything, I started in this direction thanks to a recipe from Rachael Ray.

The now-seemingly-ubiquitous television food personality burst into the public eye in 2001 with her Food Network cooking show 30-Minute Meals, offering up simple (some might say simplistic), quick-and-easy recipes for an audience of unskilled home cooks.

She received a good deal of public scorn from some more-accomplished chefs, including some I admire a great deal like Martha Stewart, Emeril Lagasse and the late Anthony Bourdain. Some later criticism might have been fair, considering Ray’s aggressive expansion into brand partnerships that would see her endorsing decidedly non-chef products such as Triscuits, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, and even her own brand of dog food.

But mostly, it seemed as though the cool chefs hated the idea of a home cook.

I suppose it’s not surprising that those well-credential chefs, all with long careers in fine dining, might bristle at a bubbly young cook offering up recipe like “taco pockets”, “five-minute fudge wreath”, and “Rigatoni with Manny’s Manly Meat Sauce”, but watching 30-Minute Meals on my ratty secondhand couch in my drafty, occasionally-cricket-infested and long-since-demolished off-campus apartment, I realized that I might actually be able to cook for myself and have it taste good.

One recipe from the 50th episode of the show’s first season—“30-Minute Veggie Feast”—seemed especially accessible: a pumpkin-and-black-bean soup. The recipe barely requires what I might now consider “cooking” at all. Save for dicing a single onion and some optional chives, the whole dish could be made with a pot, a can opener, and a spoon—but for an inexperienced cook, it felt like challenge enough. The ingredient list is written with the skill level of its audience in mind, with clarifications like “3 cups vegetable stock (found in soup aisle)” and “Two 15-ounce cans pumpkin puree (found often on the baking aisle)” that I probably did utilize when shopping for it, and the instructions total a mere 64 words:

Heat a soup pot over medium heat. Add oil. When oil is hot, add onion. Saute onions 5 minutes. Add broth, tomatoes, black beans and pumpkin puree. Stir to combine ingredients and bring soup to a boil. Reduce heat to medium low and stir in cream, curry, cumin, cayenne and salt, to taste. Simmer 5 minutes, adjust seasonings and serve garnished with chopped chives.

The first time I made it, I dutifully followed the steps, opening cans of beans, tomatoes and pumpkin and dumping them into my pot, then frowned as I beheld the sloppy reddish-brown mess I’d made. I brought it to a boil, wondering what I’d done wrong. Then, I stirred in the cream and spices, and watched as the ugly mess suddenly came together, taking on the perfectly-smooth orange color I’d expected in the first place. It felt like a child’s rudimentary science experiment, but I was delighted, and the finished dish was better than anything I’d cooked to that point. I ate it happily, and then ate it for three more days, because I lived alone and it made a lot.

The recipe wasn’t complex, but it was a confidence booster; it helped unlock a nascent ambition for trying things in the kitchen that would only grow as I slowly but steadily expanded my skillset, palate, and future arsenal of kitchenware—a rudimentary but very-necessary step on the path toward making fussy 72-ingredient recipes from The Food Lab or conjuring up my own original creations.

Now, more than two decades later, I often struggle to find the right level when developing recipes to share in this newsletter. I obviously love a big, complex, messy undertaking—the sort of thing that makes use of all of those accumulated kitchen gadgets and gizmos, something that takes two days’ advance preparation and leaves the kitchen a shambles afterward¹, but delivers a brag-worthy showpiece to ooh and ahh over as it’s set on the table. Those recipes are a blast, and they serve a purpose, but often they end up as a poor man’s version of those fancy cookbooks on my curated shelf—display pieces that few people will deign to cook from themselves.

Instead, I consider it the greatest compliment—the greatest personal success—in those times when I craft a recipe and soon thereafter see photos of other people’s home renditions of it. (Often, I must admit, improved renditions.)

The best recipe is one that someone actually wants to make. My culinary education first took off when I found one I was excited and unafraid to try, and that’s a lesson I try to heed as I attempt to share my food with others.

Also, stirring in heavy cream always makes food look better. That one’s still useful.

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)

1. I promise you that I clean up my own messes.