The Southern School of Cooking

Because I grew up cooking in the great Southern "no measuring" tradition, I am the Zatoichi of the kitchen. I can hear when my waffles are done from two rooms away. I can feel when I've got the ratios just right in my cornbread mix or pancake batter. I can sense when it's time to turn the oven off.

It's awesome when you finally get the hang of it and can just get in there and wing it; but it is a frustrating way to learn to cook.

When my mom and grandma were teaching me how to cook, they did remember to mention that one could always consult a recipe, but for things like pancakes, cornbread, eggs, and other common staples, the conversation went much more like this:

"Okay, so you get your cornbread mix and your eggs and milk, and you do this." [Pours apparently random amount of ingredients into bowl and starts stirring.]

"Wait, what? How much do I need?"

[Grinding pausse.] "Uhh...well, you just kinda...here, this is what it's supposed to look like. You put in enough until it looks like this."

"O...kaaaaay..."

"Then you cook it until it's done."

"Wait, how long do I cook it? How do I know when it's done?!"

"When it looks done."

[My head asplode.]

I always wondered why--why cook like this? Why fly into the kitchen armed with an idea of what that bread product is supposed to look like at the end result and just ignore the plethora of gadgets and doodads and measuring utensils available to the modern kitchen? Why the heck does it seem like so many Southerners do this? From my great-grandma's Red Velvet cake (which she confessed she couldn't write out a recipe for, unless she "got in there and made one") to my mom's cornbread, it seemed like everyone was just winging it through a pretty damn complex skill set.

Then I thought about my great-grandma, sharecropping on a farm in rural North Carolina, with thirteen kids and virtually no money. If her biscuit recipe called for eight cups of flour, she might not have had it. And she certainly couldn't have just nipped around to the store and picked up some more. She would have had to make it work with what she had, no matter what she had. And if she was cooking with a wood stove, forget the fancy pre-heating timers and oven thermometers that keep our temperatures even and precise. When you live in poverty, like so many of my ancestresses have, you've gotta cook based on the end results, because if you get stuck on Step Two because you don't have enough eggs, you don't eat.

So you figure out how to substitute, stretch your ingredients, how to wing it. You can hop into any kitchen you're presented with and throw something together. You can tweak the heat of the oven and stove by feel until it gets to right where you need it. You can recognize the signs of doneness in a piece of meat or a pan of muffins and cut the heat at the right time, no matter what the timer says. You can re-create flavors, or adjust them, even when you don't have quite the ingredient called for. You end up learning a ton about food chemistry; even if you're no Alton Brown, you know what's going to happen if you use melted butter instead of softened. And there's always someone a phone call away who can explain to you why your pinto beans keep coming out tasting weird.

I must say, having learned a good deal of this slapdash way of cooking, it's very freeing. You learn to trust yourself and your instincts, you're not afraid of experimenting, and even if you lose all your recipe cards in a...*ahem*...freak accidental kitchen fire, you can at least still make beans and cornbread.