Measure Free Hippie Cook

The Economy, Feeling Fit, and Slicing & Dicing

13 February 2009 by Jean Johnson

The economy’s lurking outside our doors like the big bad wolf. We want fresh ideas on thrift, yet we hope to maintain an enjoyable quality of life. It can happen. We can eat exceedingly well and tighten our belts. All it takes is lightening up and having some fun in the kitchen.

We’ve identified the problem with SAD, the Standard American Diet. These days, most know that shopping the perimeter of the grocery is a healthier, more affordable way to fill the larder than schlepping into the inner aisles for things in crinkly packages. Many more are hip to the local, seasonal buzz that has centered the delicious revolution in one’s own eco-region, if not one’s own backyard. Yet, we keep consuming more ready to eat food than our health and wealth can stand. Why?

Culinary history suggests formal recipes have put too fine a point on cooking. At the end of a long day, few of us are in the mood for doing the equivalent of a small chemistry experiment when all we want is dinner.

Besides, following rote directions from elite cooking authorities in your own kitchen isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Here they got to have all the fun of creating the recipes, and we’re pretty much relegated to being technicians. Putting on your reading glasses to make dinner? What’s wrong with this picture?

Americans only got measuring cups in the early 1900s, and everyday cooks around the world today still go with the flow. Back in the 1950s when renowned British foodie, Elizabeth David studied Mediterranean food, the Italians welcomed her into their kitchens, but they took little interest in quantities or measurements. According to David’s official biographer, Artemis Cooper (Writing at the Kitchen Table: The Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David), “David marked a jug out in both imperial and metric measurements, and on occasions ‘I stood over the cooks and simply forced them to show me what they meant by a handful.’”

The late food and wine critic who loved France so much he moved there, Richard Olney, did the same thing, but with clear reservations. In his introduction to Lulu’s Provencal Table, published in 1994, Olney writes that imprisoning the art of cooking in chilly formulas is like robbing a bird of flight.

The point is, of course, that we’d probably cook more great tasting, healthy, affordable food if we left our measuring cups behind.  That’s why I included this easy-peasy way to roast roots in Cooking Beyond Measure. They are esp good with homemade ketchup.

In other words, simple everyday cooking just isn’t that difficult and the food you’ll turn out will be right up there with Garrison Keillor’s Powdermilk Biscuits—the ones “that give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done.” That’s what cooks in the world’s great ethnic traditions who cook creatively know. That’s what our ancestors knew. And that’s what we can rediscover ourselves.

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