Follow the Cook

Follow the Cook

The trouble with some recipes is that they are too hard to follow without visuals. Whenever I am baking something brand new, I want to follow the recipe to the letter, just to make sure that I get it right. After the first attempt, I’m more willing to adapt the recipe to my needs, having succeeded or failed. 

Pictures and videos do help to know the steps and what things should look like. But I should caution you, the pictures that are in cookbooks and magazines that represent the finished product are not what you are going to achieve most of the time. 

In my late teens and on into adulthood. I got interested in cooking some of the things that my mother used to make.

  One problem with my mother’s recipes was that they were not written down, nor from a cookbook, they were all in her head. The only way I could learn was to watch her do it. I would write down what she was doing hoping to recreate the dishes when she was not there. This worked some of the time.

Another problem with my mother’s cooking was that she rarely used measuring devices. She had a feel for how much salt, or sugar, or flour went into the preparation of the foods. Cookbook recipes don’t usually tell you to add enough baking soda until it feels right: there are clear measured quantities. (Granted, sometimes they will tell you to salt/pepper to taste.) So when watching my mother make foods I had to estimate what the actual measurements were when I wrote them down. This, again, sometimes worked. 

Two dishes my mother made which were my favorites were Fruit Fritters and Cherry Soup.

Fritters are pretty simple to make in terms of ingredients: 4 eggs, 1-8oz. Cottage cheese, 1-8oz. Sour cream, 3 cups of flour, 1 cup sugar, 1 tsp. Baking powder per cup flour, and fruit (with my mother that would be apple, banana, or blueberry). Like other fritters you might get at restaurants or bakeries, these fritters were not deep-fried in oil, like doughnuts. They were cooked like pancakes. I once wrote down the recipe for our Synagogue’s Cookbook. I attaching my mother’s name to the recipe. After listing the ingredients, the first line in the instructions I wrote was, “Mix the ingredients to glop type consistency.” I’d never seen pancakes being cooked before since my mother didn’t cook them, so I had no frame of reference for what the consistency of the batter should be other than what I saw. “Glop” sounded like the right word to use. I also wrote down one incorrect ingredient. Instead of Baking powder, which is the correct ingredient, I wrote Baking Soda. I have no idea how that changes the recipe, but luckily I was never around when anyone tried to make it from the cookbook. I still make fritters for my family. Usually during the summer and fall months when the fruits are fresh. I’ve added peaches and strawberries to the fruit ingredients and none of the fritters I make use of only a single fruit. Strawberry/Banana and Blueberry/Peach are our favorites. 

Cherry Soup on the other hand I was never able to master. The recipe calls for sour cherries (at the time usually found in cans, different from when my mother made it back in the day with real sour cherries), water, lemon juice, cornstarch to thicken, 4 egg yolks added while the soup was hot, and beaten egg whites mixed in when it was cold. This was served cold usually as an appetizer prior to meals or afterward as a dessert. It was delicious. I could never master the cornstarch in cold water and then add to the boiling sour cherries and water part. I never could get the right consistency for the finished product. My version tasted about the same as my mother’s did, however where her soup was a fluffy, light, just short of a pudding consistency product, that looked very inviting, my end product looked like vomit. Trust me, no matter how good a dish that you make tastes, if it looks like vomit, no one is going to want to eat it. 

The days of watching my mom make meals and desserts are passed. Though I still have my sisters to go to when I question how something was made. Together with my sisters, we manage not only to recreate those foods but improve upon them. I’ve even developed the feel as to how some things are done without having to measure accurately. It’s the only way to cook.