As I was scrolling through Facebook, this week, I came across a video from a food and cooking magazine I follow.
One criticism of many food magazines is that they can be too high-brow; the food in the glossy pages and highly curated Instagram feeds rarely resemble dishes the average home cook will make. Apparently, in an attempt to fix this perception, the magazine rounded up 40 random New Yorkers to ask them if they cook, and if so, why?
The answers were mostly what you’d guess: budget, enjoyment, tradition. It did make me think about why I like to cook, and why many of the people in our community cook.
There’s no strong culinary tradition in my family. My mom’s a good cook, my dad isn’t (ask me about the time he burnt the cardboard package onto the bottom of a frozen pizza), but our family doesn’t come from a culinary tradition. There are few family recipes, and neither side of my family feels particularly connected to our heritage.
I learned to cook a little, growing up, here and there, but I wasn’t good at it and it certainly wasn’t something I enjoyed.
Naturally, when I moved to university and lived by myself it was awful. I couldn’t cook for beans. I ate a lot of Kraft Dinner. Once, I made a casserole out of the leftovers. It was terrible and I cringe upon remembering it.
The next year, I got a roommate who liked to cook. She was a health nut, and in grad school (strapped for both the time to cook and money to do it with). In many respects, she was the ideal person to learn to cook from. She did everything from scratch, whether it was yogurt or bagels. While I still have some favourite family recipes, most of my day-to-day cooking skills came from her.
Last summer while I was putting together an article about local Doukhobor culture, I attended a few cooking classes for Doukhobor youth in the community. The kids learned how to make bread at the museum and lapsha noodles at the USCC. I was also at the USCC while the ladies were preparing pyrahi. As I was chatting, many of the ladies talked about passing the recipes and knowledge down to their kids and grandkids. One woman said that the surest way to get kids interested in the culture was through the food.I really can’t blame them on that - the food was delicious.
Now, cooking is one of my main hobbies: it’s the thing I do to relax, for fun and to impress. While cooking doesn’t have a strong element of tradition for me, I can certainly understand why it does: there’s something about making a recipe that has been made for generations. And anyone who has lived in Grand Forks for any time will tell you, there’s no borscht as good as Baba’s.