Julia Child's Kitchens | Hacker News Reader

Julia Child's Kitchens

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130 pointstintinnabula87 comments

I got into cooking via Youtube. Youtube cooks became a thing about fifteen years ago. People like Jamie Oliver started promoting first themselves and then others on Youtube and I sort of started watching that stuff to relax. The genius of this was that Jamie Oliver was of course famous but the people he promoted weren't. They were just ordinary people that pointed a camera at themselves while they were cooking stuff. Quite a few of them are still on Youtube and have successful channels now. And of course others have come along. There are many thousands of people regularly uploading stuff. These days if I want to learn how to make something, Youtube is the first place to look.

It took me a ridiculously long time to realize that I could do some cooking myself. If you are a programmer (like me), my realization was that if I can follow instructions and implement some complex algorithm, cooking is a lot easier. And even the failures can be tasty.

Julia Childs was basically doing the same thing as these Youtube chefs but about half a century earlier. You can find quite a bit of her shows on Youtube. But it's got a similar vibe to it: shot at home, very passionate about what she did, very relatable, etc. And it necessarily follows a similar format. She was funny, and no-nonsense. Very unglamorous too. And obviously very skilled. She was a middle aged woman by the time she got on TV. It was all about the food and her character.

I can't say she was a huge influence for me because I never knew she existed until some Youtube chefs kept referring to her and I checked out some of her stuff.

Anyway, I loved the bit of information about her WW II career as a high level intelligence officer. Only makes her more awesome.

Big difference being Child went to France to train as a cook and spent a long time there (she learnt French). There were techniques and recipes that simply weren't available to the English speaking world at the time. It's different nowadays, especially with English being so much more dominant. It's easy for us to find someone French doing a video in English. As of about 10 years ago there was still a bit more to learn if you learnt French, but the amount of stuff left is shrinking.

For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques. Good books like Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking dedicate many pages to this before they get into recipes (this book incidentally sets out the ingredients better than any other cooking book or website I've ever seen). Where YouTube shines is the techniques. Books do an admirable job of describing kneading, but nothing beats seeing someone do it. That's how we really learn this stuff, and must of us don't have a parent to learn from these days. So watch YouTube videos, but pay extra special attention to what they are doing, more so than what they are saying (you could have just read that part).

> For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques. Good books like Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking dedicate many pages to this before they get into recipes

Hard, hard disagree here. Learn some recipes, enjoy eating some food that you've cooked for yourself. Cook some recipes you like for 6 months and _then_ start learning the techniques and fundamentals.

I didn't say don't read or follow recipes like some kind of culinary monk. Using recipes is as important to a cook as reading programs is to a programmer. But the focus, if you want to learn to cook, should be on ingredients, tools and techniques. For a start, you will not enjoy making any recipe without a good knife. What's more, your execution will be terrible if you don't know what "finely diced onion" is supposed to be or how to make it, or how much "salt to taste" is. You won't enjoy it and will forever think restaurant/takeaway food is better than your own creations.

Recipes are always written at a particular level of abstraction. Most won't tell you how to dice an onion, but many will tell you explicitly how to make a roux, without saying the word roux. Learning the basics means you can skim and assimilate recipes at a much higher level. Plenty of people can follow recipes but few can learn a recipe from first principles as there are far too many details. To learn a recipe you need to first learn the basics, then you find a recipe is rather easy to learn. Then once you can do that you have the power to tweak them or substitute ingredients etc. as necessary and/or desired.

I will try to give an example: you find a recipe you like at first glance and try to cook it. It's from East Asia and contains tofu, so you buy tofu, and if you live in Central Europe like me there is good chance the tofu will be completely different to what should the tofu in that recipe be like. Same for the rice (and other ingredients). The result will not be ideal, to say the least, because while the recipe might have been good and you may followed it correctly, the fundamentals weren't there.

Improvisation is an art in itself. Tofu is easy, try recreating something like Osaka-style okonomiyaki with European ingredients, now that is a challenge!

You learn a recipe to eat. And you learn fundamentals and techniques to cook.

Learning a recipe doesn't give you much in terms of cooking-skills. But with skills, you can create or adapt any recipe to your own demand.

So yes and no in my opinion. First, almost all recipes are written from being cooked in gas stoves and ovens. However, many people have electric. That alone will cause you a problem. Second, tweaking or hacking a little bit of a recipe is a great way to learn what techniques and ingredients do while not breaking the bank. At some point, you will have learned ingredients, tools, and techniques and you can just "cook". You know, like your grandmother could just cook somehow. It was from practice and experience and she always had her own "secret" recipes.

Alton Brown's "I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking" is a fun intro too.

I feel much the same way about food recipes as I do about tech how-to's which describe steps but not reasons.

A simple statement of ingredients, processing, times, temperatures, etc., should get you something serviceable. But a guide which tells you what each ingredient, step, etc., is doing to the finished product is far more informative. Also those which let you know whether a value is a minimum or maximum, and how much flexibility there is to it. Much the same as a step-by-step systems admin guide works if everything goes right, but is entirely useless if you run up against a problem, in which case what you desperately need is troubleshooting and compensation/correction guidance.

For example, if a sourdough bread-making recipe gives an instruction "autolyse for 30 minutes", is there any indication that going shorter or longer is possible, or even preferable? (In practice you can autolyse for hours if you choose to do so, 20--40 minutes is a minimum.) How sensitive is dough to overfermentation? What will more, or less, salt do? How does starter change its behaviour in warmer or cooler conditions? What's too warm? Is there such a thing as too cold? How should you adjust hydration for different doughs (whole wheat, rye, spelt, einkorn, semolina, etc. --- something I'm still learning FWIW, though generally WW more, rye less, spelt about the same). How does dough change with a longer cold ferment (1 day vs. 2, 3, or more)?

A recipe is is a sequence with no flow or feedback logic to it. Techniques give you tools to control the process.

You are not wrong. Watching people on Youtube go through the process is how I absorbed knowledge. The fun thing with people like Jamie Oliver is that he is very loose and imprecise. He doesn't use table spoons, cups, and what not to measure things out. I don't print out or read recipes, ever.

It's all about techniques and ingredients.

I'll glance at recipes to figure out how something is done, when I don't know how to do it. Usually stuff that's from different cuisines that I'm used to. It's hard to e.g. invent a recipe for borscht from first principles if all you know is that it's got beets in it.

Most of my process is just cooking a dish (or an ingredient) over and over again until I've figured out to make it fantastic. It's a great way to become very flexible and learn how to work around missing ingredients.

> For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques.

For anyone who wants to learn ingredients, tools, and techniques, my advice is to start by learning recipes, preferably from a source that explains both rationale and variations (America's Test Kitchen cookbooks are pretty good for this.)

The ATK cookbooks are fantastic, not only for explaining how the recipe works, but also explaining some of the things they tried that didn't make the cut and why they thought they didn't work.

They also did a cookbook devoted to recipes for two people a while back. Love that.

Also https://www.seriouseats.com/, they cover almost everything (including kitchen equipment) and offer great explanations in their How-Tos https://www.seriouseats.com/how-tos-5118034

I have that cookbook! It's one of my absolute favorites, because my wife and I don't have anyone else in the house. And like you said, the explanations are gold.

The old _Good Eats_ tv show was great for this too. You can find most of the episodes on YouTube.

Another good source is the book Ratio, which is almost like a tutorial in how to come up with your own recipes

> a source that explains both rationale and variations

This is the key right here. Not all recipes are created equal. The terse ones are for people who already know what they're doing and just need a sketch to jog their memory. If that's not you, you need a thorough guide. But a guide that explains the why, beyond the how, is far more valuable.

If you can't find such a resource, a good backup option is to search around for a variety of recipes for the same dish. By comparing them, you get an idea of what's critical, what's optional, what is safe to fudge, what you have to get right, etc.

Knowing the why and what your end goal is also helps you adapt your methods to the tools you have on hand. Your stove and pots don't heat the same way your recipe author's stove and pots do. Your fruits aren't the same ripeness. "Cook on medium-high for 3 minutes" is not a very helpful instruction, because its precision is illusory.

> The terse ones are for people who already know what they're doing and just need a sketch to jog their memory.

The day I reached that level was a wonderful feeling.

Some of my favorite cookbooks just outright skip steps or don't bother writing down important pieces of information. You should know what to do by now, so here is some general guidelines, go at it.

Getting to that point took awhile though, and IMHO the key to doing it faster is to be mindful of all the steps that are taken while cooking. Understanding why there is a wet and a dry mixing bowl, understanding why sometimes there isn't. Understanding why glazes are used vs a marinade[1], and knowing why some things are cooked low and slow vs hot and fast, etc.

[1] As an aside, I estimate that 90% of marinade recipes in the western world are pure trash - dry rubs are useless, marinades without an acidic ingredient in them are useless, and any marinades with an acid that suggests you need more than 8 hours is wrong on the math.

IMO marinades are really fun to experiment with because you can just taste them. I cook a lot of veg proteins (tempeh, tofu, soya chunks, TVP, etc) and often marinade them. I'm pretty used to elaborate balances of salt, msg, acid, and other flavors. The way I test it out is just to stick a pinky in or use a tasting spoon and taste. You want your marinade to be heavily seasoned than what you're marinading of course. Acid is an essential component of a marinade.

Acid is important for meat marinades because w/o acid, penetration is just a few mm deep.

The real magic, IMHO, comes from how Indian food is spiced. Lots of contradictory flavors that are used in ways very different than western cooking. Also lots of steps involving dry roasting some of the spices, while leaving others as is, and which spices get dry roasted changes from dish to dish.

I do a lot of Indian cooking from scratch at home, and while I can slightly improvise recipes and tweak them to my taste, I am still a long way from being able to truly understand WTF is going on with some of the more complex reactions.

I do a lot of Indian cooking also and have for decades, and my suggestion is to just play around with tastes and smells. Dry roasting especially your nose is your friend. That or corner an established South Asian chef and talk to them about their use of spices :)

Acid is also really important for veg proteins because most veg proteins on their own have very little flavor. You can impart umami through various ways but umami without at least a bit of acid does not come across balanced on the palate, so you need to balance the acid with the umami.

The thing that gets me about how Indian food uses spices is that the flavors change so much during cooking.

If I use cumin in a Mexican or even Chinese dish, cumin will likely be a dominant flavor, it will be obvious that cumin is in the dish.

Meanwhile a similar amount of cumin in an Indian dish will get completely transformed and melded into a much more complex flavor profile.

Same goes for cardamom, I use a lot of cardamom when making American desserts, and its presence is obvious.

Meanwhile, my curries have cardamom in them and it adds levels of depth and complexity, but not in the overpowering way it does when used in western cooking.

as someone who divorced and didn't want to be the 'mac and cheese dad', I found an older edition of "Williams Sonoma Cooking at Home" a really good beginner book. It goes over basic ingredients, seasonality, cooking methods, cooking tools, proper measuring, and complementary sides before hopping into recipes. I found all of these very valuable as _tons_ of recipes assume basic knowledge of it.

A lot of the recipes are quite involved though so now I tend to go for simpler ones, or pick-and-choose.

How to Read a French Fry is the book which introduced the idea of a science of cooking to me. I'd caught a 2001 interview on Fresh Air at the time, which is available by the Fresh Air Archive:

<https://freshairarchive.org/segments/russ-parsons>

The book itself is at the Internet Archive:

<https://archive.org/details/howtoreadfrenchf0000pars>

There are far more titles and now websites on the topic, quite probably improving on Russ's effort. But the basics are sound.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic I've taken to baking sourdough bread, which is its own whole set of knowledge and experiments. Every batch is a new discovery, though all have been edible. Worst error to date has been forgetting the salt (much worse than leaving the oven temp too high).

Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking is essential if you're interested in this stuff.

> It took me a ridiculously long time to realize that I could do some cooking myself.

What were you eating before you had this realisation?

I was cooking but not very well. Or healthily.

Most folks eat microwaved food. Not cooking, just heating precooked meals.

I'm really curious about who "most folks" you refer to are; no one in my extended family does this normally, and I don't know of any friends or neighbors who do it either (we all microwave a snack here and there, sometimes a meal, but it's not how we habitually feed ourselves and our families).

Most single professionals I’m guessing

I suspect this probably applies more to certain nations. Microwave meals are a lot less prevalent in Europe as a staple.

When I was around 20, I lived exclusively on takeout. And not because I couldn't cook, I am and was a solid cook, it's that cooking for one is not that economical (specifically time-wise) and I could just eat places that would allow me to eat a days worth of food in one sitting, think lots of Indian buffets, which made feeding myself on takeout pretty cost effective.

Before that, I lived on takeout because I worked in a restaurant and it was free to take home the food that was going in the trash at the end of the night.

> Jamie Oliver started promoting first themselves and then others on Youtube

He had multiple TV cooking shows before Youtube even launched

> The genius of this was that Jamie Oliver was of course famous

The first couple of years of her TV career are fictionalized in the HBO series Julia, though a lot of it is based on her extensive written correspondence to others. Her editor and her friends were interesting in their own right, as well.

The quote of hers, "If you're alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who's going to know?" Is modified and used for anytime my family drops something.

That woman was a cultural treasure.

I call it concrete seasoning when I drop something off the grill

A friend in high school that worked at a steak house chain called it “floor spice”. He said it was often intentionally applied when rude customers demanded their steak be cooked more. Never send back food.

> Never send back food.

I like my steak rare. But if someone doesn't, and the kitchen messes it up, the correct response is to either choke it down, or leave a $65 meal uneaten on your plate?

The answer lies in how much you like the taste of floor spice.

Considering it is a teenager or young 20s person in the kitchen getting paid just above minimum wage and doesn't care about you at all ... yes?

So you rather leave a bad rating for the business, affecting everyone working there by potentially turning customers away, because of someone's ("teenager", "young person", etc. pipapo) substandard work effort?

Or, just don't be a jerk when sending it back.

The bad part about asking them to re-cook a steak (assuming it's over, and they have to start with a new one), is that you've had your bread, salad, appetizer, and by the time twenty minutes goes by and they bring you a new steak, everyone else is done eating, you're probably no longer hungry...so then you take your $65 steak home to eat the next day.

The only meal i can remember sending back was a steak I ordered rare and got medium well. It was $45 and the only thing on my plate besides some asparagus.

People make excuses about restaurants being afraid to cook meat rare. Don’t let me order it then!

Now I’ll only order steak at a steakhouse.

You said it yourself: "rude customers." You can send back food if there's a good enough reason, but no matter how good the reason, you can never be a dick about it.

Likewise even if the customer is a dick, you don't sabotage their food. Both sides are in the wrong.

It happens when a customer decides it will happen, the only nuance being that choice isn't always recognized by the one who makes it.

In theory there'd be grounds for sympathy here, but if we weep for the foolish, we'll be at it all day.

Very true, I agree. Not trying to claim the customer is always right (lol), just that when preparing someone's food I feel there should be a bit more turning the other cheek when dealing with rude customers. It certainly sucks, I've been there, but I don't think doing something to their food is a good response.

Eh. It's been a minute since I worked even retail-adjacent, but nothing I've seen leads me to believe people have learned to behave themselves better in the interim, and especially not after the pandemic.

It'd be one thing if I could blame The Youth, I suppose. But mostly what I see is people my age and older, acting in ways my mother did not tolerate in me by the age of five, nor need; I had pretty well learned my manners by then.

I could credit an argument from incapacity, although I would find it as frightening as compelling. Other than that, I see no excuse, and I also had to learn young the sovereign counterargument to a bully. To see it applied in so extremely indirect and gentle a fashion, and in cases where some response evidently is due, outrages me not even slightly.

If a customer noticed and called a cook out for intentionally dropping their food on the floor and serving it to them i think that would be the death of the restaurant. Or at least cause the local health department to get very interested. What most likely happens is the customer doesn't even realize. If that's the case, then from the customer's perspective it didn't even happen so what's the point of doing it in the first place? You got revenge on no one.

Maybe they get sick later and don't know why.

Or maybe it's a harmless way to vent frustration, and remind the cook that picky customers are ignorant pseudo-elitists.

Your friend worked there to pay bills. Was hired to fulfill certain tasks, enabling that steakhouse to provide its advertised services to its clients. Adhering to certain quality standards, to sufficiently satisfy the client-business contract.

Never provide substandard work. Your friend simply showed (or at least witnessed) bad work ethics.

Five-minute rule.

I highly recommend watching Jacques Pepin videos as well as Julia and Jacques.

Jacques Pepin is alive and well and some of his recipes are just 2 to 3 ingredients and easy to make. And yes, he is highly technical but explains things so easily to regular people like me.

My kids love this recipe: https://youtu.be/zjv_pAmiqhQ?si=63ppn2hCUBiQKiVG

Pepín is an excellent chef to learn from. Because most of his recipes focus on technique and simplicity rather than recipe and seasoning. One of the biggest mistakes that I think people make is just not cooking things to the correct doneness at the right temperatures and times. Often people think that a fancy mix of spices and seasonings is what is important. I grew up not liking chicken or pork or steak unless it was in something because I had never had perfectly cooked chicken, pork chops, or steaks it was always cooked to well done and so dry you needed steak sauce. My parents grew up in an era where everyone feared undercooked meat. especially pork. And it's such a shame because I grew up on a cattle ranch. We would butcher a cow for ourselves every year. Grass fed, but lean, and butcher to thin steaks because you can cook them to saw dust a lot quicker that way. Now, I get beef from the ranch after fattening and have it butchered to steaks at least an inch thick and I always cook with a thermometer and usually just salt. A well done vs medium rare steak is such a night and day difference. Same with pork and chicken, although I prefer them both a little closer to medium.

Well done! I mean you got out of the fire and into the fat. Sorry. Oh, I so feel for those sacrificial cows, if they knew how their corporeal selves would be so disrespected.

"I always cook with a thermometer" Not bad, not bad at all, but! I just hardwood grilled another Choice 1" thick steak cut from a full rib roast which was aged a week. Woulda done two weeks but I got hungry. I thought about the thermometer because I wanted perfect (for us 115F, burnt outside, warm inside) but the finger press worked perfect as a doneness detector. Fresh ground Telicherry pepper, salt, and a light marinade of Worcestershire Sauce made for a truly memorable meal. Had some today left over: pepper, salt, and little Worcestershire to moisten it all up. Outstanding. Still gonna go the full two weeks next time.

Now let us talk fish. Or seafood in general. Somebody like Pepín knows how to do those too, and it's quite simple: intensely fresh, cooked to barely done, which is different for say salmon and tuna or an oyster vs. grouper and flounder or freshwater bass or a lobster. No need for fancy sauces or seasonings (blackening, I'm looking at you).

When cooking for family the pork and chicken are still moist and tender, but with guests and modern sourcing they get the dry shoe and a great sauce unfortunately.

I see a lot of people focusing on Julia's videos (and videos in general) but I don't think those were her major contribution. Translating the French culinary curriculum into US vernacular measurements and sourcing, via the books, was her contribution. I stand in awe at how good they are, so many decades later.

Seconded, I learned a lot from his simple crepe recipe - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_okk5pOLp4

I mean this question sincerely: Is it normal to be handling raw chicken and then just stick your fingers into a bowl of salt like that?

I know I am a pretty poor cook, and I get somewhat nervous handling raw meat, probably more than I should be. They say always use a separate cutting board and wash your hands with hot soapy water after handling raw meat. Then I see cooking clips like this one, with experts who have just one continuous cutting board with everything on it, and this guy isn't afraid to be touching is raw meat at all.

You probably shouldn't, but most bacteria can't survive on or in a very salty environment. Realistically, it's probably not incredibly dangerous or anything.

> Then I see cooking clips like this one, with experts who have just one continuous cutting board with everything on it, and this guy isn't afraid to be touching is raw meat at all.

If everything you're cutting is going to be cooked, then you don't really need to worry IMO. Anything like veggies for a salad, or stuff that won't be cooked, should be cut on a washed cutting board though.

You have to be careful with videos of chefs cooking, because they often don't eat the exact thing that they're filming. The finished dish you see at the end or showed off might be cooked at a different time (usually beforehand) and in a far more sanitary way. What you're seeing is filmed that way for the sake of doing less dishes.

"You have to be careful with videos of chefs cooking, because they often don't eat the exact thing that they're filming. The finished dish you see at the end or showed off might be cooked at a different time (usually beforehand) and in a far more sanitary way. What you're seeing is filmed that way for the sake of doing less dishes."

I cannot emphasize this view enough: The problem with cooking videos is, "what did they edit?". If the video doesn't at least slide a little homage to the peon peeling the onions, can you trust it? If not, I don't!

I didn't watch the video but what I usually do if I need to salt meat is to pour the salt separately into a bowl and salt as needed, then use that same salt on food that gets cooked with the meat while the rest goes into the trash. With experience you don't waste much. More often than not salting associated veggies uses it up and I need more for the veggies.

Ever watched someone pour salt on a slug or an earthworm? What do you think it's going to do to single celled creatures?

"She did not dumb things down but broke them down, creating entry points for American cooks in their home kitchens"

This is an important lesson for educators, communicators, and colleagues.

Too many people think that "accessible" and "approachable" or "simple" is "dumb" or "stupid", and that things have to be hard and complex to be good or smart.

I didn't know she was so influential with regards to kitchen design and universal or inclusive design. Wonderful article with a lot of depth and much food for thought for anyone interested in trying to find solutions for this problem space.

Americans strikes me as being in crisis due to various social factors making full-time wives and moms relatively rare. Our food culture, recipes, kitchens, home design etc etc are rooted in an implicit assumption that your wife or mom is doing the grocery shopping, cooking, keeping track of your health issues and dietary needs etc when this is no longer true for most people.

There seems to be an endless stream of people complaining they either don't have time to cook or they are fat and broke from consuming takeout and an endless stream of companies trying to address the issue, such as meal delivery companies.

I like Julia Child's skepticism about the effectiveness of productizing the space as the only or prime solution. It seems likely to me we need to rethink and rework our food culture so everyone can eat adequately, even if they don't have some privileged life with a high quality kitchen and full-time wife and mom taking care of all the nutritional concerns and logistics behind that, which are substantial.

What would be the benefits? Sounds like we should prioritize family, as has been tradition for the entirety of human existence. The new approach of ‘everyone has a house/dwelling and their own independent life apart from anyone’ is the experiment.

Off the top of my head, in no particular order and probably not comprehensive:

Improved health for people not living that way.

More freedom to live as you choose. Heteronormative culture has long pressured young people to get married and have kids and told them from birth they are straight without giving them time to figure out for themselves what their sexual orientation is.

Freedom to leave a marriage that isn't working because you no longer are a prisoner of the fact that your wife knows all your health issues and the dietary restrictions they dictate and cooks better than you, so she is essentially irreplaceable because that catalog of data about you isn't readily replaced by merely marrying a good cook -- assuming you can even arrange to remarry immediately and aren't forced to feed yourself (inadequately) for months or years while looking for a wife

Fewer mental health issues from society no longer dictating to everyone "You will be straight, don't confuse us with the facts. You will fall in love with The One meant for you, never mind the overwhelming evidence this is the exception not the rule. You will fit your entire life around tasks society decided are yours at birth due to the bits between your legs."

Less homophobia, less transphobia, less misogyny, more economic stability due to more personal flexibility.

I didn't know what 'heteronormative culture' was, so I went to look it up. I found this: "Heteronormativity is the concept that heterosexuality is the preferred or normal sexual orientation." It seems to me to be a pretty radical idea that culture could not be 'heteronormative' because heterosexuality IS the preferred and normal sexual orientation since 1-babies need to be born for existence to perpetuate (this is basically the purpose of life) and 2-non-heterosexual people continue to this day (even with all the radical celebration of deviance) to be a tiny minority. That said I think it is dumb to try to pressure kids to 'be straight' (lol, you don't choose who you're attracted to). If you're saying 'to live as you choose' to mean 'to live as a single person with no familial support', then yea, you're setting yourself up for a rough time and I can't imagine how you're going to 'restructure the culture' to support this, nor why you would want to aside from attempts at self gratification.

I don't even know what you're talking about with this 'Freedom to leave a marriage' part. It seems like a smorgasbord of ideas smashed together rather incoherently, my apologies but it's after lunch and maybe my brain isn't all functioning 100%.

Ok I also don't understand what you're talking about in 'Fewer mental health isues' either. It seems like you're trying really hard to imagine a fantasy reality where non-heterosexual people can live by themselves - but with a partner if they want - but they can leave - but they should be able to leave and be by themselves and be just fine - all with regard to COOKING specifically. Am I getting in the ball park there? I don't really know what you're getting at. When you deviate from 'normal' culture, life is going to be harder for you. That's how our world works. The people that have and are trying to change that... just watch for if things are getting better in their wake, or worse in their wake.

I suspect economic stability comes more from personal responsibility than 'personal flexibility'. One must make great sacrifices, in general, to develop the character to be able to progress in most areas. What I typically see from the crowd wanting more freedoms is the freedom to be more hedonistic, where I see the people more grateful to exist and actually progressing growing their discipline and losing their selfishness.

>>> "in crisis due to various social factors making full-time wives and moms relatively rare"

>>> "It seems likely to me we need to rethink and rework our food culture so everyone can eat adequately"

How could the second work without fixing the first?

I'm a former full-time wife and mom. I got divorced and got a corporate job at a Fortune 500 company where most of the women were shocked and jealous that my sons took over most of the cooking, grocery shopping and cleaning.

I've thought a lot about this problem space and the connections I have listed are clear in my mind. If it's not clear to you and you are interested in the idea, you are welcome to do your own reading and thinking and draw your own conclusions.

Given that I met exactly one woman with children who didn't feel affronted by how I was living, I imagine my opinions and such fall far outside the Overton window -- which seems to be the story of my life.

Maybe not full time but I would still say the vast majority of women still do all the duties around the house and those regarding raising children. America has become more like countries in Asia that way where women always worked but still did everything an American full time housewife did.

This is true.

And also false.

In households with a nuclear family or heterosexual couple, women still tend to do the lion's share of "the women's work."

But people are generally marrying later, having fewer kids, more couples are having no kids, the number of households with four or more related members has plummeted, the number of households with one to three members has skyrocketed and far fewer people have someone in their life whose primary role is doing the women's work and looking out for their welfare.

People are time stressed, fatter and less healthy, etc. We point to a lot of different causes for those very well established facts and I'm saying that one common denominator that gets largely overlooked is the decline of the number of full-time homemakers.

Every story I read about Julia Child makes me admire her more and more. I also remember an NPR story about her creating shark repellent during WW2 to protect undersea mines.

That is an epic use of "protect" in a very unexpected way. Thanks.

It protects the sharks too!

> “Mastery” was not direct imitation but an ability to vary and adapt to circumstances.

compare Rombauer's epigraphic choice of Goethe:

> "That which thy fathers have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst possess it."

Just skimming so far, but this looks like a proper treatment of Child's work. Exciting! She was a genius.

I tried looking on youtube for any videos of the RISD Universal Design kitchens, but came up with a bunch of home renovation videos. Would love a link here if anyone can find them.

Not on YouTube, but here is a video I found in the RISD Archives showing the Min and Max kitchens: https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/archives_universalkitchen_vi...

I lived a couple of houses down from her Cambridge home. Was a big fan of hers growing up so it was a nice treat to shop at Savenor’s as an adult.

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