Dumbing down recipes

by Nick Vagnoni, Posted Mar 20th 2006 @ 12:11PM

Last weekend, The Washington Post featured an article about the movement toward dumbing down recipes to meet the skills of home cooks in the U.S. Words like dredge, saute, blanch, fold and cream have left the vocabulary of many would-be cooks and, as a result, such words appear less frequently in recipes from the likes of Kraft Foods and The Joy of Cooking. (A new edition of the latter will include a glossary of cooking terms.) The WaPo article cites some particularly funny anecdotes by General Mills, Inc. chairman Stephen W. Sanger, who spoke of emails and calls from confused home cooks. One wondered if they could substitute peaches for eggs, another started a fire by literally greasing the bottom of a pan before putting it in the oven.

Filed Under: Trends, Newspapers
Tags: blanching, creaming, dumbing down recipes, DumbingDownRecipes, home cooking, sauteing, vocabulary

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Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

3-20-2006 @1:32PM nika said... If you dont know the difference between peaches and eggs then you truly should NOT be cooking. That is deeply pathetic.

I think that the author should use these "tough" words and then provide a glossary for the fools who dont know what dredge means.

I cant imagine being so clueless but then I tend to actually USE a book the way it was meant, i.e., look at the TOC, use the index, etc. When I see a book without an index then I know we are not dealing with someone who respects their craft or their own work.
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3-20-2006 @2:02PM Jason said... Maybe keeping the recipes complex would serve as a barrier to entry, and thus keep people from hurting themselves.

And companies should not change anything or dumb it down. You're just encouraging people that it's ok to be stupid.
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3-20-2006 @3:01PM Andrew said... Hey, if people are that stupid they deserve to burn their house down.
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3-20-2006 @3:22PM Miriam said... So pathetic. They shouldn't dumb down the books any farther, though - maybe they'd sell more dictionaries that way. I think that people seem to be interested in food, but it's in a really porny way - they like to look, but they wouldn't actually do that. I was flipping through "Cooking Light" at the market the other day, and got to about page 140 before there was any actual food content.
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3-20-2006 @4:20PM Huffy said... Virtually any endeavor/craft/profession has its set of terminology/jargon/argot, and knowlege of the basic vocabulary is certainly helpful (and in some cases essential) for the participant. But there's always wiggle room, as evidenced by the many grandmothers who were superb home cooks yet never used cookbooks. As I see it, though, the issue here is more overreaching than the difference between "braise" and "saute"; I don't necessarily think that all cooks suffer because they don't know what a "demi-glace" is.

What I find more disturbing is the number of people for whom the very idea of cooking is anathema. When I saw a coupon for the new "Hot Pockets Breakfast Biscuits" this weekend, I found myself in a funk thinking of the way we choose to nourish ouselves. Who isn't short on time? But this article points up a trend away from self-sufficiency in our culture, and I find this troublesome. Why, in "my day," most Americans could cook basic, simple meals; now, I have co-workers who marvel at my skill (nothing special, I assure you) in the kitchen.
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