What Should be Taught in School Cooking Classes (Assuming They Should Be Reinstated Which I Doubt)
In January I put together a tentative syllabus for a school cooking class directed at early teens. I thought then it might seem ridiculous so I did not post it. Now circumstances have changed.
Reservations about school cooking classes
Let’s get this out of the way. I am not sure that cooking should be taught in schools. The syllabus is crowded already. Students really need to learn subjects such as math and science. Cooking say some is a survival skill but so are lots of other skills. It’s very possible to teach oneself cooking when the need arises, given all the aids now available. Moreover, unlike the early twentieth century when there was something of a consensus among the ruling classes about what national cuisines should look like, those days are over.
Considerations in designing a school cooking class
I’d want to make the class engaging to all students whatever their economic, social, or ethnic background. No food snobbery, which creeps in so easily. I’d want to start the students on sizing up supermarket offerings and making full use of processed as well as ‘natural’ foods. I’d like to give them some sense of how foods get into the supermarket. I’d like them moreover to understand that foods have been created from raw materials by millennia of experiments with breeding, cooking, fermenting and other techniques. I’d want them to know that no group owns either ingredients nor dishes but that these have been passed from one group to another throughout human history. I’d slip in some nutritional information but I suspect most students have some idea about calories, carbs, etc. All this in one semester.
So I would not have any written recipes (though the students could take notes). I would have show and tell as well as hands on cooking. I would have the simplest of modern kitchens: an electric ring, a microwave, a refrigerator with a small freezer, and the most minimal of equipment. No oven because much of the world still does not use ovens and, besides, they are energy hogs.
I imagine six units. If a seventh could be squeezed in, I’d add eggs, cheese, tofu.
I imagine younger groups of the university students I am most familiar with–Whites, Asians, and Hispanics (ugh for the names but they’ll have to do). Different mixes of students might have lamb (or chicken or ground beef) instead of pork, squash instead of cabbage.
Here goes. In haste and not thoroughly worked out.
Unit one: Instant mastery of something sweet and delicious
Making candies or cookies is a traditional entry into cooking for children. No ovens though, and here not even much cooking. Milk in one form or another is now more or less universal as children’s food.
Acid, sweet (and fat). Miraculous transformations.
Show and tell. Milking. Unhomogenized milk. How to make milk safe and preserve it. Fermenting. Condensing. Drying. UHT.
Equipment. Cans condensed milk. Lemons. Knife, perhaps lemon squeezer. Can openers, bowls, wooden spoons, freezer containers.
Experiment one. Lemon cream or mousse. Open can, scrape milk into bowl. Taste. Cut lemon in two. Add lemon juice (hand squeezed or with simple squeezer). Stir. How much makes a nice firm lemon cream?
Experiment two. Lemon ice cream. As above but add equal quantity heavy cream and put in freezer.
Variants. Other acid fruits. For ice cream, a variety of flavorings. Condensed milk on crackers, fruit, in drinks. Depending on time and interest and student body, curdling for cheese and fermenting to yogurt.
Treats. We can’t live on treats alone. On to
Unit two. The element of substantiality. Pasta
Staple foods. Everyone needs them. Pasta now found world wide in different forms including ramen noodles so students should have different ideas to contribute.
Show and tell. Major grains and roots (wheat, rice, maize, yams, potatoes, cassava). Try eating as is. Boiling and grinding. Flour. Bread and pasta in various forms. More miraculous transformations.
Salt, water, flour/pasta–basics of human food. Carbohydrates.
Equipment. Saucepan with lid, frying pan, thin/angel hair spaghetti, salt, cooking oil, bowls, spatula. Variety of toppings.
Experiment One. Boiled pasta. Heat water. Adding salt to taste. Cooking and draining pasta. Pasta in soup. Pasta with topping (many of these can be prepared foods from the store, cheese, tomatoes, butter, etc etc). Pasta salad. Pasta with milk and sugar.
Experiment Two. Boiled pasta fried. Heat cooking oil in saucepan. Add cooked pasta to make crispy cakes. What might top this?
Experiment Three. Fried pasta boiled (prepared store foods such as stock, tomato). More prepared toppings.
Now to more about additions and sides, particularly vegetables.
Unit three: Vegetables. Cabbage
Vegetables. Something to liven up those staples and contribute different nutrients. Brassica one of the most widely spread of all vegetables in the temperate world.
Show and tell. How humans have bred an unassuming plant so that leaves (kale and various cabbages eastern and western), flowers (broccoli and cauliflower), stems and roots, and seeds (mustard and oil) can all be used for food. Miraculous transformations.
Vegetables, knife skills.
Equipment: Head cabbage, onions, knives, spices and condiments.
Experiment One. Preparing, coring, shredding cabbage. Steaming or stir frying.
What can you do with this? Various dressings for salad. Adding to different soups. Stir fried. Steamed. Fillings for stuffed dumplings, rolls etc..
Experiment Two. Salting, fermenting cabbage to sauerkraut or kimchee. Magic preservation.
Experiment Three. Separating leaves to use as containers.
What can you do with these? Varieties of stuffed cabbage. Cabbage as cooking container.
Unit four: The magic bean
Beans as the great protein reserve of the world, plus much more.
Show and tell. Beans from around the world. The soy bean–fresh, dried, condiments, soy milk, tofu etc, TVP. Amazing.
Equipment. As in other experiments. Food processor for demonstration.
Experiment One. Beans as green vegetables. Preparing, steaming, stir frying.
Experiment Two. Beans as body building. Boiling dried beans.
Beans with pasta, beans with meat, beans in soup with cabbage, beans as salad, refried beans, bean cakes.
Experiment Three. Sweetened beans. Making peanut butter, halvah type sweets.
Unit five. Meat. Pork butt or belly.
One of the world’s most versatile meats. Modify this to chicken, beef, or lamb depending on student make up.
Show and tell. Pasturelands, woodlands, and urban environments. Variety of meats humans have eaten. Discuss why meat is such a controversial food. Dried meat. Salted meat. Smoked meat.
Equipment. Ground pork, shredded pork, thin sliced pork, cubes of pork.
Experiment one. Making and seasoning sausage and meat balls. Uses.
Experiment two. Stir frying pork. Use with cabbage.
Experiment three. Breaded thin sliced pork from tonkatsu to milanesa.
Experiment four. Braised pork. Varieties of ways of seasoning the braising liquid.
Unit six. What can you make with pasta, beans, cabbage and pork?
Over to the students here. Allow in rice and bread and tortillas. Albondigas with refried beans. Sausage and lentils. Minestrone soup. Cabbage with pork over fried noodle cakes. Stuffed cabbage leaves. Baked beans with pork and cabbage salad. Choucroute. Pork vindaloo with dal on the side.
And for dessert. Vanilla, walnut, lemon, or other condensed milk ice cream. Or halo halo.
Conclusion
Hopelessly too much for both the students and the teachers. Oh well . . .
- Food in World History: A 1995 Course at the University of Hawaii
- In March, of All Months, Americans Went Food Shopping to Shelter in Place
It’s a good template (and perfectly reasonable for home teaching of children, as well) though I have two questions/qualms…
1. Ovens are bad? It’s true that there are a lot of humble cuisine homes that don’t have them, though they often fake it with dutch oven-style cookware, but are they really that inefficient?
2. Is pork really the best meat for this? A lot of cuisines globally shun it, there’s more questions about the pollution it causes as a mass-produced meat than any other than I’m aware of, and honestly it’s the meat about which I have the most vegetarian feelings (because of the high intelligence of pigs compared to other common meat animals).
On ovens. In the US, they only consume 4% of the energy of the household if I remember. But that’s because we have such huge refrigerators and plentiful domestic heating. I am mindful of (1) growing up in fuel rationing where the oven was turned on once a week (2) my early cooking days in a bed sitter with a single gas ring (3) discussions with food friends many of whom grew up without ovens and who still rarely use them except for storage (4) the many stories I read about the poor even in the US living in lodgings with only a ring and/or a microwave. I’d put oven cooking in the second stage of instruction. On pork. I entirely take your points. It’s a judgement call and depends on the background of the students.
Rachel, Of course your syllabus should be required in every school. Too many youngsters and not only, order or eat out and have no idea what cookery is all about. And the history and sources of our modern victuals is also important! A wonderful idea! Maybe the course could be elective, but required definitely preferred. I think this is a good time to bring it back, nutrition being trendy these days. Go for it and detractors be d…..!!
Sounds like a great course that would be of great value to young people. My daughter had no interest in learning from me how to cook until she was in college and living off-campus; then there were long instructive phone conversations, where she asked me to help her make simple things that she had enjoyed eating at home. Given the vicissitudes of normal individuation and adolescent rebellion, a cooking course taught by someone who was not her parent might have engaged her while she was still in high school. I get the impression that young people are much more interested in food and cooking than previous generations were. One suggestion–in your lemon desserts, it would be helpful to emphasize the use of citrus peel for flavor, by macerating large pieces of lemon peel in the cream prior to being used for curds, puddings, or ice creams. Or incorporation of grated zest that remains in the finished product. Lemon juice doesn’t impart enough lemon flavor, on its own. And as long as you are using whole lemons, it would be a shame not to make use of the peel.
Hi Zora, As I say I am not a fan of teaching cooking in schools. Like your daughter, I only wanted to learn when there was a good reason to do so. Agreed about lemon zest and lemon peel. Not there because (a) I dashed this out in a hurry and (b) I’m already cramming so much into each unit.
LOL
Haven’t the horses fled the barn and the barn is going up in flames as well?
You’re assuming that anyone at all is interested in this at all. Academics are rather cute and I speak as a former academic myself.
The US already has a social policy. It’s called McDonald’s and the only goal is to make sure that the French Revolution doesn’t play out over here.
You’re appealing to the middle classes and above – people who attend college with student loans – and they might have a need but it seems rather expensive to get this expensive and pay for it over the next thirty years.
Sure and I am fiddling while it all happens. And I expect when all this is over people will be going back to eating much of their food away from home which doesn’t worry me. Right now though they have to make do at home and condensed milk and cabbage are a lot more likely to see them through that some of the suggestions I’ve seen up on the web.
Very well then.
Try Indian cooking then – you don’t need pork. You just need a ton of spices.
Specifically Gujarati Jain cooking if you’re going down that route – not only is it vegetarian, it would work in the current highly constrained environment. Plus it’s delicious and has all the complexity of French cuisine.
Shouldn’t an academic historian have mastered this sort of thing before spraying their words into the air?
To quote Churchill (apocryphally) without changing the gender, “He is a modest man and he has a lot to be modest about.”
I like this. I saw a documentary about young people from minority neighborhoods getting cooking classes in high school.
Those students, both male and female, who were interviewed loved the classes. They seemed to be engaged as students. I think if the kids like it, it is worthwhile.
For one thing, nutrition impacts health throughout a lifetime. This is a valuable skill for the individual student and for that student’s future family.
As to the borrowing between cultures, I agree with you that over time, cultures blend. I am a historian and I am familiar with the history of the Roman Empire in the West and the Chinese empire and the Mongol Empire in East Asia, to say nothing of the mingling of cultures along the sea routes of the Maritime Silk Route in Southeast Asia. Fusion does not begin to describe the blending of influences, spices, ingredients, flavor profiles.
Rachel, you have created a fantastic class.
Thanks, Diane.
One more thing. As to the pork issue, I think the students could have a choice of the protein they wish to work with. I think this might go by region of the U. S. Also, today’s students are likely to be vegetarian or vegan, so this class could teach plant protein as well. Issues of sustainability come into play with seafood, of course.
I’m easy on this. I think the animal protein should be selected with the particular students in mind. I am personally just so tired of chicken breasts and ground beef though they’re flying out of the grocery stores right now. Beans are my gesture towards plant protein.
What would you say to creating an online cooking class?
A great idea to be added to my enormous list of ideas. Life is short.
For reduced use of energy in cooking, you might consider a demonstration of making a stew on a stove top by heating the pot to a boil, turning off the heat, then wrapping it in some kind of insulation (blanket) and allowing it to cook several hours with the residual heat. I had a Russian friend, who told me about making Russian cabbage soup (shchi) that way. She lived through the siege of St. Petersburg as a child. She said “I can remember the taste of grass.”
Or hay boxes, which I remember from my youth. Thank you for picking up on the idea that there are many circumstances when fuel is one of the major constraints on cooking. In today’s America, water, salt and fuel, three of the great constraints of the past, are used as if there was no tomorrow.
You mentioned Asian students, but I think your food choices are very European-centered, especially in regard to pasta. The Chinese developed a wide variety of noodles using both wheat and other grains, beginning thousands of years ago. The Japanese adopted many of these items and in the 20th century invented the instant noodle preparation that most kids are familiar with — ramen noodle cups. Asian noodles other than ramen also can be cooked quickly (or just soaked), making them good for hands-on classes or demos.
Interesting ideas. Too bad most of the kids in the world have been sent home from school this month.
Be Well… mae at maefood.blogspot.com
Hi Mae, that was not my intent at all. I should have explained better that one of my reasons for choosing pasta/noodles is that they have been widely used across the northern hemisphere for a long time and in the second half of the twentieth century went global. I did have a mention of ramen I think. I chose thin spaghetti though because (a) it is available in supermarkets and (b) it can stand in for some Asian noodles and for the fideos that are so basic to Mexican home cooking, thus covering three different important cultures in the US.
And you stay safe too.
Hi Rachel: I am surprised that you do not have a unit of one of the most basic, sustaining foods, universal to all cultures: Soups
Teaching young people the nutritional as well as easy-on-the wallet benefits of learning to make hearty, yet thrifty soups, using all manner of vegetables, legumes and meats would, in my opinion, be one of the primary
elements of a school cooking curriculum.
Thanks for all your posts – I enjoy reading them.
I couldn’t agree more, Tina, that soups are wonderful and should be part of everyone’s repertoire. I’m sorry that I wasn’t clearer that all these ingredients except the condensed milk can be made into delicious, usually easy, and nourishing soups. If ever I revise this, I will highlight that fact.