Comment by dandelany | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dandelany | Hacker News Reader

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It's not cooking 101, it's at least cooking 102 or 103. I know you didn't do it intentionally, but when newbies get into a new subject they are often turned off by comments like yours which boil down to "oh noo you can't do it that way, you simply must do insert term of art or else insert negative hyperbole" - it's precisely what's meant by "gatekeeping". If I told my girlfriend a million Italians were crying because she made lasagna wrong she'd probably slap me.

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!"

I do like Salt Fat Acid Heat too :)

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 :)

You're doing a great job. Talking about mother sauces is definitely not gatekeeping, more like dropping knowledge on the uninitiated. It's the gateway to a vast (and in many ways overwhelming) beautiful world of classical cuisine.

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

Honestly I don't know how using the phrase 'mother sauces' is gatekeeping, I think it's just really basic cooking. Might not know the term, but an app trying to teach you to cook should absolutely be teaching it to you. A big part of learning a new skill is learning the vocabulary to navigate that skill. It's weird to shy away from it.

At least in my case I do not think cooking jargon like "mother sauces" is gatekeeping. These discussions are a great way to learn about new things and I appreciate when people share their knowledge.

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.

Yes, that WAS the joke. The easy recipe isn’t “real” Italian food. Italian people are often very prideful about their cuisine.

Someone could also claim the opposite that the “easy” version is cultural appropriation.

Jokes are hard nowadays.

It's true, jokes are hard. I've come to the conclusion that it's simpler to take jokes in discussions like these at face value. Sometimes statements seem to be framed as jokes as much for plausible deniability as humor. And as Gilda Radner says: "Humor is the truth, only faster!"

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