- most of them are ridiculously easy
- most of them go with most food
- most of them are required for most food
- most of them are the basis of many other sauces
- they are better than store-bought ones
Any recipe apart from maybe putting sliced cheese on sliced bread will be more complex than being able to make a sauce. How is it gatekeeping?
Most foods, or most traditional French cuisine? I've never even heard the term, despite cooking pretty decent food for decades.
It's a fun way to learn history actually, following the influences of cooking techniques and trade. And the French were very influential here. The Spanish influenced Mexican cuisine when they conquered the Aztecs, and Spanish aristocratic chefs trained in France, so you can see modifications of classical French cuisine in Mexican prep edited to local spice profiles and ingredients. Etc... Just look at pan dulce!
French cooking is the C of programming in many ways!
Weird, I've taken a couple cooking classes in the Bay Area, and this never came up.
"The five mother sauces include béchamel sauce, veloute sauce, brown or Espagnole sauce, Hollandaise sauce and tomato sauce." French ones are the same: "The five French mother sauces are: Béchamel, Velouté, Espagnole, Hollandaise, and Tomato"
The techniques and ingredients you use for them are the basis for most sauces used in Western cuisine. You learn those five, you've learned all (or most of) western sauces.
I don't understand at all, honestly - I see a term I don't know, I grab the googs and figure it out. My first reaction isn't to accuse the person who knows something I don't of gatekeeping.
It also gets into the complaint about cultural specificity from the original comment. It might be Cooking 101 - for French cuisine. But to insist people learn to make the French mother sauces from scratch before eg. tacos or curry seems a bit too narrow-minded for "Cooking 101" generally speaking. I think "Salt Fat Acid Heat" has the right idea here.
edit PS: there is almost always a non-gatekeepy way to say the exact same thing. "In my experience, a homemade bechamel adds an incredible homemade taste to lasagna. I'd definitely recommend learning about the French 'mother sauces' sooner rather than later!"
But I really didn't think this thread would go this way, it was clear to me OP knew his way around a kitchen and was from Europe so knew enough about Italian cooking stereotypes to understand the intended humor.
Fwiw, you learn mother sauces after six weeks of knife skills at Auguste Escoffier in the US so you could definitely be right about 102 :)
Some people go their entire lives 1. not making scratch hollandaise 2. knowing it is a mother sauce 3. adding to the mother sauce to make bearnaise, etc
The part that seemed like gatekeeping was the part where they asserted that "a million Italians [are] crying. Because of you" in response to a commenter describing different methods of making a lasagna that require varying levels of skill.
That seemed like an attempt at gatekeeping because it asserts that many people who are making a lasagna in any way besides their preferred method that relies on "mother sauces" is Wrong.
Someone could also claim the opposite that the “easy” version is cultural appropriation.
Jokes are hard nowadays.
1. teaching in a class and taking a test, to 2. teaching in online videos and taking an online test, to 3. modular, choose your own adventure, at your own pace, software-supplemented, continual learning: https://a16z.com/2020/10/16/next-gen-edtech/
That's what we're trying to do with cooking. If we succeed, it's going to be essentially replicating an apprenticeship but you don't need to find a master.
If you are from Louisiana you'd think the Holy Trinity was cooking 101.
>If you are from Louisiana you'd think the Holy Trinity was cooking 101.
Yes, and you'd learn bases like soffritto/mirepoix/holy trinity as well. They are also a part of cooking 101.
Is this cooking 101?
A lot of cooking is essentially variations on a theme. If you can make béchamel, you're now also only a step away from a bunch of other sauces (Mornay, Soubise, etc), simply by adding different ingredients. The technique for making béchamel is similar for espagnole and veloute, but with different liquids in the first step.
Extracting out this general principle is, for me, a thousand times more comprehensible than memorizing that (((butter + flour) + milk) + onions) -> soubise but (((butter + flour) + milk) + cheese) -> mornay.
Mac and Cheese is basically a sort of béchamel, even the out of a box kind and I wouldn’t call that gatekeeping.
I would argue that the real fundamental things for basic cooking are more like how to use a knife, how to sauté things, what happens to different veggies, meats, and herbs as they cook for various times and temperatures, etc.
As for the mother sauces, they’re prepared ingredients that one might make at home to use in various recipes. There are plenty of other examples: stocks, various things that can be made out of eggs, various Asian sauces, hot sauces, various cooked garlic preparations, sofrito, etc. Béchamel is just one example.
You clearly know a lot about food and seem to enjoy it, which is fantastic!
I do not cook professionally so the idea of me spending literal weeks in a cooking school or reading cooking textbooks sounds fun but also incomprehensibly decadent. My partner and I spend about three hours per week on meal planning and prep for our family, and we typically end up cleaning the kitchen concurrently with cooking. Because of this we end up cutting a lot of corners and incorporating meal kits and frozen food into our weekly rotation.
If I could improve the nutrition and/or taste of my meals by spending an additional ~15 minutes a week I would consider it, so Parsnip seems like it might be relevant to me.
But I assume that anyone who talks about "taking a class" or "reading a book" or "learning to make all the master sauces" is coming at food from a wildly different perspective that is probably wonderful for them but not particularly relevant to my life where I get home and have about twenty minutes (less if there's traffic) to figure out how to turn the ingredients from the fridge into something my kids will eat.