
The Wretched Table: How Dinner in America Became an Ordeal - pepys
http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/wretched-table-dinner-america-became-ordeal-79459
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jtchang
Why do people say it only takes 10 more minutes to make the food? They never
factor in the time it takes to mentally prepare what you are going to make, go
out and get ingredients, prep the food, then clean up afterwards. It is never
just 10 more minutes.

~~~
brandonmenc
> go out and get ingredients, prep the food, then clean up afterwards

Plan food for the whole week. Buy the ingredients in one trip. Clean as you
cook.

Take one day a week to pre cook and freeze as much as possible. Cook three or
four nights a week and eat leftovers for the remainder.

Build a repertoire of around ten meals you train yourself to bang out quickly
and without thinking.

If you're cooking for your kids, make them help with the cooking and the clean
up. (This is how I learned to cook.)

It's not rocket science.

~~~
whistlerbrk
Seriously. CLEAN AS YOU COOK. It drives me insane that people don't get this.
When I'm done with a meal I have a few plates to clean and maybe one pot.
That's it though. Everything goes away when I'm cooking. Scraps constantly
thrown in the compost. It makes you much more mentally organized.

It's an obvious source of fluster and stress for my friends who don't. They
never seem to figure it out either. Even when I do it for them.

Plus. Stop determining what you want to eat first. Look at what you have in
your fridge and learn to work with it. Have a few proteins and a few cheeses
and kitchen basics and you can improvise many things.

~~~
mhink
I figure the main difficulty lies in the "economics" part of "home economics".
There's a huge efficiency difference between "cooking every day" and "only
cooking occasionally". The only way to benefit from cooking at home is if you
accept the ongoing cost of keeping essentials stocked. Then, you have to
accept that you're going to waste a considerable amount of money and time
while you're learning to cook. When I started, it sometimes took an hour or
more to get food on the table because I hadn't figured out mise en place.
Then, when I did, I ruined more than one dish because I lost track of things
and something got overcooked or burnt. Finally, I've had a certain amount of
food go to waste because of bad planning- perhaps I bought too much for the
week, and then went shopping the next week without keeping the existing
"stock" in mind.

These are all huge stumbling blocks- especially when it's so easy to just
order take-out, which will at least be consistently edible, with the added
bonus of not resulting in wasted ingredients.

What ultimately turned it around for me was when my girlfriend and I decided
to fully commit to cooking at home, and went and spent $150 on groceries- but
instead of buying ingredients, we bought _pantry essentials_. Flour, sugar,
baling powder, baking soda, cornmeal, table and kosher salt, seasonings,
potatoes, rice, pasta, and so on. Not to mention an initial stock of
perishable basics: onions, garlic, lemons, limes, milk, butter, eggs, and
cheese.

While it left a dent in our wallet at the time, it turned out to be a game-
changer. We found that it was immensely easier to plan meals, because we
already had half the ingredients of any given recipe.

This is a huge societal problem, in my opinion. I'm a pretty privileged dude
when it comes down to it, and I was able to absorb the inefficiency of not
being able to cook at home while still eating pretty healthy food.
Furthermore, I was able to get over the hump of figuring out how to cook on my
own, because I had the resources to absorb the inefficiency of learning how to
do it.

What about the folks that can't?

~~~
Symbiote
Don't wealthier Americans learn these skills at college?

I learnt how to cook properly at university (UK). I'd watched my mum a fair
amount growing up, and in the final few weeks before I left she showed me
things like how to shallow fry chicken, or check it was cooked.

I ate takeaway on the day I arrived, since everyone was too drunk, but on
Sunday I paired up with people living on the same floor and cooked with them
for the rest of the year.

It cost a fraction of what takeaway food would have cost, and we weren't
trying to be super cheap.

~~~
morgante
> Don't wealthier Americans learn these skills at college?

No. The vast majority of college students I know don't cook. They either eat
in dining halls or get take-out.

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moron4hire
Every single one of the opinions in this thread, as well as that of the
original article, are completely alien to me.

Dinner in my household is not difficult or fussy or unhealthy or expensive or
bland.

We don't buy food every day, but we also don't buy processed food. We eat
fresh meat and vegetables, with small servings of simple carbohydrates, going
to the grocery store once a week. Our trips come out to about $100 total,
which is about $2/meal per person.

I make dinner from scratch almost every night. I design it to leave leftovers
for lunch the next day. It takes no more time to make four servings than two
for most things. This means that the time I spend on dinner saves time on
lunch.

Once a week, I make a meal designed to leave a LOT of leftovers, like a roast
chicken or tacos or chili. Roast chicken takes a long time to cook, but takes
almost no prep-time. Tacos take a little prep time, but almost no time to
cook. Chili takes a lot of prep time, a lot of cooking time (if you want to do
it right), but makes so damn much that we freeze half so we don't burn out on
eating it for the entirety of the week.

And don't get me wrong: we don't eat the same thing every night. I'm somewhat
of a fussy eater. I don't mean there are only a few things that I will eat, I
mean I am very intolerant of poorly prepared food. We eat _extremely well_ in
my house.

Oh yeah, there are nights where I say to myself, "damn, I'm just too tired to
make anything special". That's when we eat the leftover, frozen chili. Or I
dice up the leftover chicken from the roast and make a chicken salad out of it
and we have sandwiches. Or we have tacos a second night, because we freakin'
love tacos (I could eat tacos for every meal, and I know this because I have
done it before).

Eating well doesn't mean complexity, it doesn't mean expense. Simple food, the
right symphony of spices, and the correct cooking method. It's no different
than programming.

~~~
Idontagree
So you have someone to do the dishes? Not everyone has children or someone
else around to do it for them. There's also the extra laundry it makes if you
don't use paper napkins/placemats. It's nice to have the time to do it, but
it's not the quickest thing you can do in an evening.

~~~
douche
Perhaps I'm revealing my ill-breeding, but people actually use _placemats_ on
a regular basis?

If you don't feel like doing the dishes every day, you can just stack them up
and do them once a week...

~~~
rtpg
That requires having 7 times the number of plates your need for a meal....

~~~
moron4hire
Or washing one set of plates immediately before needing them, because you're
waiting on the roast to finish roasting.

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parennoob
Completely anecdotal, but I suspect some part of this comes from modern
Americans' desire to have a meal that has a specific name and must be made
with an oddly specific recipe that uses the exact ingredients. Apparently
"thing of tomatoes and eggplant with some bread" is not acceptable – but when
some chef puts the same recipe in a magazine and labels it "rustic
Mediterranean bruschetta", people are all over it.

~~~
henrikschroder
My pet peeve in discussions like this is that people insist on looking up or
following recipes, slavishly, as if that's the key to making a good meal.

It's not. If you don't know how to cook, buy a _cookbook_ , one that has the
fundamentals in it, one that teaches you about meat and bread and vegetables
and starch and sauces and fish and condiments. And once you've learned the
basics of "frying meat" or "cooking pasta", you can easily start to combine
what you've learned into meals, and you can more easily follow recipes for
variations or ideas on how to spice it or prepare it or present it.

~~~
wj
I really love Ad Hoc at Home for this. It is Thomas Keller's most accessible
book and in addition to recipes contains instructions for things like piecing
out a chicken. I've bought the book as a gift at least a half-dozen times.

But, I do believe as you allude to in your last sentence that nothing takes
the place of practice. I think a lot of people get overwhelmed looking at a
list of ingredients. With experience you know what ones are critical to the
dish and what can be left out or substituted as you have learned tastes and
can intuitively understand measurements.

~~~
henrikschroder
Yeah, what recipe collections don't tell you is that you need a lot of
practice to be able to follow them, I've found that the hardest part of
cooking is getting the timing right, and that just takes a lot of tries to get
right and understand.

And to circle back to the article, I think a lot of young people in America
simply don't even get to try cooking for themselves the way society is
organized.

When I started university and moved out of my parent's home, I didn't move
into a dorm with a cafeteria, instead I moved into a small student apartment.
If I wanted dinner each night, it was completely up to me. Frozen pan pizza
gets kinda boring, so I had to start cooking for myself.

------
moron4hire
If you want to eat better without breaking the bank and without wasting food
to rot: buy the cheaper, bulk packs of meat. Optimize for price per pound.
Pork loin, chicken thighs, beef roasts, in as big of packages as you can find.
When you get home, split them into single-meal proportions and repackage them
in good quality ziplock bags, remembering to squeeze as much air out as you
can. Put them straight in the freezer.

Then, when you want to have a meal, fill your kitchen sink full of hot water,
maybe half-full, and throw one of those ziplock bags in. In 15 to 30 minutes,
the meat will be completely thawed and you can cook whatever you want.

Given the right recipe, you might even be able to work the thaw time into the
vegetable prep time.

EDIT: There are three other options for defrosting meat: in fridge, on the
counter, and in the microwave, in order of speed from slowest to fastest. In
the fridge takes extreme pre-knowledge: you practically have to do it the
night before, and I am too fussy of an eater to know what I will want to eat a
day ahead of time. On the counter is same-day, but has to be done in the
morning, plus some people might be squeamish about leaving meat out at room
temperature for several hours. Using the microwave takes 15 to 30 minutes, but
is imperfect and often ends up cooking the meat to a certain degree. In short,
the waterbath method is the most convenient defrosting method.

~~~
dingaling
> when you want to have a meal, fill your kitchen sink full of hot water,
> maybe half-full, and throw one of those ziplock bags in.

Meat should only be thawed in a fridge or, in an eemergency, in a bath of cold
water.

Plunging it into hot water is heaven for bacterial growth.

~~~
barry-cotter
This is the sort of comment that makes me aware of how alien even very similar
cultures can be. I'm Irish and I grew up there. I had never defrosted anything
in a fridge before moving to Shanghai. It was all either countertop defrosting
or hot water. I wouldn't defrost fish in hot water because it'll cook or let
it defrost at room temperature for more than an hour which should be plenty
for most fish. If room temperature where you live is above 20 or so degrees
you probably shouldn't counter top defrost unless you can check it regularly
to see if it's done and

Hot water isn't really that bad for bacterial growth. Lukewarm water is the
enemy but even that's fine as long as you cook the meat within half an hour of
taking it out of the fridge for defrosting. If you're taking longer z than
half an hour that's a substantial cut off meat and you really should be able
to plan a day ahead.

------
pjc50
This isn't about the mechanics of cooking. It isn't really even about food.
It's about social expectation, and the unreachable perfection of TV
lifestyles, and family, and the end of passing down certain skills
matrilinearly while they are not yet taught equally to kids. It's also about
time and money.

------
rdl
None of this seems to apply if you don't have children. I've never had this
kind of stressful meal (on a recurring basis) with friends, housemates,
colleagues, conference friends, customers or other work people, or significant
others. Sure, maybe one-off unpleasant conversation or something ("we need to
discuss the production outage which affected our site last week"), but not on
a repeated basis.

Whether you cook from scratch, make some kind of prepared food or leftovers,
have take-out/delivery, or go out to eat seems irrelevant by comparison.

------
Spooky23
As as society, we're all agitated about dinner because we're trained to be by
billions in ad spending. Part of that is a self loathing of one of the key
elements of the dinner meal -- culture. Nothing is good enough.

My sister is a good example of this. She picked up a crazy, pain in the ass
fad diet, has two kids and high powered corporate gig. Her husband is in a
similar gig. The kids are in care from 7-7. So yeah, even buying a vegan,
glueten free burrito is a pain in the ass. I worry about her, as she's going
to have an anxiety attack someday.

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tsotha
The "Norman Rockwell dinner" is definitely doable - my family did it when I
was growing up. But my mother didn't work outside the house, so she could shop
during the day and thaw frozen meats and what not while working mothers are
still trying to get away from the office.

That, I think, is the key. It's not reasonable to expect a big production
dinner when both parents have full time jobs, particularly professionals who
have to work late on occasion. That takes a level of organization most people
just don't have.

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brandonmenc
> At home one night after my meal with Ochs, as I labored to make pasta sauce
> from scratch while a child wailed at my feet

Everyone knows you start the gravy (aka sauce) in a big pot on Saturday
morning, make the kids stir it all day long, then heat it up for quick dinners
throughout the week.

------
WalterSear
The comments by the parents to their children made me cringe.

It's hard to read this and come away from it feeling that the problem is
anything more than willfully ignorant parents (healthy eating information
isn't hard to come by), indolently wallowing in their lack of self-awareness
and inconsistencies.

In other words, normal people.

~~~
shaftoe
The spaghettios and burritos comment rang true, however. Particularly for
families with both parents working.

I get how some people derive great pleasure from making a meal from scratch,
but for people in a great hurry, it's one of many checkboxes. And time spent
stirring a pot or slicing vegetables is hardly quality family time.

~~~
bobloblaw02
> And time spent stirring a pot or slicing vegetables is hardly quality family
> time.

Invite your kids into the kitchen. Teach them how to cook. Cooking can be some
of the best quality family time if you make it a priority.

~~~
shaftoe
Totally agreed, but the fish sticks come out because dinner has to happen
every single day, no matter what else has come up.

As an example, I take my kids camping a few times a year. I show them all
kinds of things, like how to stake a tent, how to make a fire safely, etc.

If we had to do these things every single day just to cook and go to sleep, I
suspect it would quickly devolve into running through the chores as quickly as
possible while they stand to the side and poke at ant mounds with sticks.

We do make healthy quality meals and involve the kids with what we're doing,
but this is certainly not an every night thing. Often, it's much easier to
simply find a way to solve the problem and move on.

~~~
moron4hire
If you had to do these things every day, you'd get better at them and the kids
would get good enough at them that they could do some things without your
direct supervision all the time and you'd get used to them that they wouldn't
be a significant distraction from your day.

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eimai134
There is a big problem in America with people not knowing how to cook anymore,
especially from scratch. I wasn't taught very well as a child and had to learn
myself in my 20s. Now I spend a small amount of time cooking and trying out
recipes, and have gathered a huge notebook of things my family loves. We do
lots of soups which take very little time to make and can last for several
days.

