Home Cooking Disclaimer

I feel the need to make this disclaimer now, before things get messy. This disclaimer applies to parents, grandparents, and others who bore the burden of cooking dinners for their families.

From time to time, foodies will criticize home cooking. Sometimes it is to mock the mistakes of others' parents and caretakers. Most often, though, they are directing their attention to their own memories, to the foods, fair and poor, of their own youth. Naturally, these foods have embedded emotions in their chefs as well as their "customers," and so can arise the defense of these foods as a sacred category, unable to be assaulted.

However, these home cooked meals cannot be held faultless, for ill or for good. The foods that each of us grow up with shape us as people, shape our attitudes toward food and its ingredients, direct or turn away our attention from cooking and culinary arts. The kitchens of our youth are the hearths of our hearts; we remember fondly into our age our favorite meals, the times we were honored to help in the kitchen. But likewise, we also remember with disgust the meals that went wrong.

It isn't that we are expressing hate for their creators. We have created dishes of our own that we have hated, and have not hated ourselves in the process. In my own experience, I can recount many things that I found distasteful in that memory of the kitchen and its products, but I remember the care of my mother in cooking them with fondness. I do not hold her to blame because she had no harmful intent. But the dishes were what they were, good or bad, and can be judged independent of their creators.

So if you read something in this blog, or elsewhere, that points negative attention to a home cooked dish, do your best to restrain your defensive emotions. Food is personal, and we are entitled to our opinions of those dishes. If we wish to assault the chef, we are witty enough to do so - and in home cooking, we are rarely wont to.