Let’s Not Lose the Art of Homecooking

In recent years, chefs have not only become celebrities; they have become role models for home cooks to emulate. Their advice for home cooks blankets the Internet and Food TV. It is disseminated in  large,very expensive cookbooks replete with all the staging of an art show catalog, with recipes using ingredients that require a good detective to find.

Of course, they are the experts. Who better to learn from than people who have devoted their lives to the pursuit of flavor? So we watch them construct glorious meals in 30 minutes and buy their cookbooks hoping that all that expertise will rub off on our rushed and ill-planned everyday meals. “Knowing how to cook” has come to mean “knowing how to cook like Grant Achatz or Thomas Keller”. It is ironic that as people have less time to cook and few are inclined to bother, the standards for what counts as good cooking have ratcheted up.

I must plead guilty to this “mission creep”. I’ve worked my way through the French Laundry Cookbook, dabbled in molecular gastronomy, and have been known to spend the better part of a week preparing a meal. The problem is this is terribly unrealistic, and I feel less and less inclined to go to so much trouble. Fine cuisine really has become an art form but that has put fine cuisine out of the reach of time and budget-limited home cooks.

But more importantly, in adopting the standards of a restaurant chef, we risk diminishing the importance of everyday cooking. Home cooking and restaurant food have very different goals and embody very different values. Home cooking is about sustenance, family bonds, and everyday pleasures—the kind of pleasure that can spice up our lives every hour. The accessibility of everyday pleasures, their constant availability, is what is essential about them.

Restaurant food is about complexity, originality, and artful presentation using ingredients and techniques that are special precisely because they are unavailable to us at home. It is their rarity and inaccessibility that contributes to their value. We go to restaurants to eat what we can’t eat at home and be dazzled by the unfamiliar.

Both restaurant and home cooks aim to maximize flavor, both aim to please others and create an atmosphere of conviviality (although the restaurant chef will have less personal connection to diners), both take the potential of food seriously and seek to make it the center of experience but they do so in very different contexts with very different constraints. The advice of professionals is often useful when it makes us more efficient, but we need to keep in mind the differences.

This is not to say that home cooks should not be creative. But it is the practical, find-something-interesting-to-do-with-what-you-have-and-can-afford kind of creativity that home cooks need. I suppose this is the real value of amateur and semi-pro food blogs. They are a cauldron of ideas from people who must take the limits of time, equipment, knowledge, and money into account. It is they who should set the standards for home cooking, as the old family traditions of home cooking continue to erode, not the celebrity chefs that we admire but cannot emulate.