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If you shop at the farmer’s market, keep a Tupperware (or repurposed yogurt container) filled with homemade stock in the freezer, or have tried your hand making pickles or jam, you have—knowingly or not—embraced “grandma cooking.” Broadly speaking, grandma cooking refers to an approach to food preparation that is thrifty, intuitive, inherently seasonal, and delicious—the kind of food that nourishes and delights without unnecessary flash. The term has been floating around in the collective culinary lexicon for a decade or more, and was popularized in Michael Pollan’s seminal book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.
“If you think about grandmas, they are some of the most experienced cooks in the world,” said Samin Nosrat, Pollan’s cooking teacher and colleague, and author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Art of Good Cooking. She’s right. Anyone who has chased their own grandmother around the kitchen, trying to capture the secret behind her beloved apple cake or pupusas, understands their magic.
Increasingly, food experts like Pollan and Nosrat say that embracing grandma cooking also has larger importance. For generations, grandmothers (and grandfathers too, though the majority of home cooks have historically been women) literally cooked from scratch. They slaughtered and plucked chickens for soup. They grew the onions, tomatoes, and garlic that would become jars of sauce to last through the winter. They gathered together to roll and fill hundreds of pastries or dumplings for festive meals. In doing so, they gained traditional wisdom and skills that could be passed down to the next generation.
In stark contrast to the grandma cooking philosophy, today’s conventional food system typically positions itself as forward-looking—using technology and lab-made ingredients to feed consumers. As more households came to rely on canned convenience foods and microwaveable meals over the second half of the 20th century, people lost touch with cooking’s familial, communal, cultural, and ecological significances.
Thanks to Pollan, and many other influential writers and cooks, however, the tide is turning back toward deep, connected, and skillful cooking—something Food52’s community demonstrates every day. But whether you are a cooking novice or a bonafide grandma cook yourself, there is always something to learn. We turned to Nosrat and to the writings of three other expert cooks and authors—Darina Allen, Tamar Adler, and Patricia Tanumihardja—for philosophies and practical tips to bring “grandma cooking” home.
Deepen Your Cooking Instincts
The more one cooks, the more patterns begin to emerge and a culinary muscle memory kicks in. “I’ve heard countless stories of Midwestern grandmothers putting the pot of water on to boil before sending the kids out to the garden to pick corn,” Nosrat writes in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. “Just a few minutes, they’d tell the kids, could mean a noticeable loss in sweetness.”
This kitchen wisdom checks out scientifically: The sugar content in starchy vegetables like corn diminishes rapidly after harvest. But the grannies Nosrat refers to probably did not know that. They cooked by touch, by smell, by taste—pulling from an intuitive knowledge developed and refined over generations of inherited trial and error.
Novice and experienced cooks alike should consider moments at the stove as opportunities to further develop those instincts. “Smell seasoning pastes and taste coconut milk before you add it to a dish,” advices Patricia Tanumihardja, author of The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook, which gleaned wisdom, stories, and recipes from dozens of women. “Learn to listen to the sizzle of garlic or the gurgle of curry to gauge when to move on to the next step. Experiment and discover how a dash of salt or sugar can take a dish from blah to blessed.”
Plan In Advance For Your Leftovers
Most recipes begin with a list of ingredients, and end when the food hits the table. But chef and food writer Tamar Adler believes that time frame is too limited. “Cooking is best approached from wherever you find yourself when you are hungry, and should extend long past the end of the page,” she writes in her watershed book, An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace. “There should be serving, and also eating, and storing away what’s left; there should be looking at meals’ remainders with interest and imagining all the good things they will become.”
Thriftiness, both using every part of an ingredient and repurposing leftovers to avoid waste, is one of the hallmarks of grandma cooking. Begin weeknight meals with a mental or visual scan of what is in your fridge—both ingredients and leftovers—and think about how a container of roasted Brussels sprouts or leftover roasted chicken might be repurposed. Out of ideas? Go for Adler’s suggestion and make the French dish, oeufs en restes, or “eggs in leftovers,” which, true to name, takes meat or veggies from a previous meal, warms them in a pan with a little broth, and tops them with a sunnyside up egg. After dinner, end the meal by transferring whatever remains into see-through containers.
When in Doubt...Don’t Always Throw it Out
In her gorgeous cookbook Forgotten Skills of Cooking, Irish cooking guru Darina Allen writes, “I remember a time before electricity.” The co-founder of the esteemed Ballymaloe Cookery School was 9 years old before her village in the Irish countryside got electricity. So she grew up around people who shopped frequently and trusted their senses to judge when food had spoiled. “The introduction of the best-before dates on packaging started out as a good idea, but in reality this system has served to de-skill us,” she writes.
Her advice? Look past the sell-by date, which contributes significantly to the 33 million tons of perfectly edible food Americans waste each year, and get back to your senses. “Look at food. Smell it. Taste it—if in doubt, just have a small taste,” she writes. A piece of cheese with a bit of mold on the surface may just need a trim. A carton of eggs may have a month or more beyond the sell-by date before it spoils. As Allen writes, “When I was young, if we came across some mold in a pot of jam, we were told to stir it in. ‘It’s penicillin, it’ll do you good!’ I don’t know if that was true or not, but we survived to tell the tale.” If moldy jam isn’t your thing, set your own boundaries. But learn to trust yourself, not an arbitrary number on a package.
Reuse Your Cooking Water (Again and Again)
If your menu calls for, say, boiled green beans and pasta, reach for one pot, not two. You save water, dishes, and time by boiling them in the same pot, one after the other. And like a well-seasoned cast iron pan, each layer subtly flavors the one after it. “I often push the limits of a single pot of water’s utility, boiling broccoli or cauliflower, then pasta, and then potatoes, all in succession, and then use the water to make beans,” writes Adler in An Everlasting Meal. As long as you move from less starchy ingredients to more starchy ingredients, one pot of water can get you pretty far.” Use tongs, a pasta fork, or a slotted spoon to lift out the cooked ingredients before adding the next round.
Make Technology Work for You
Embracing a grandma cooking philosophy does not mean you have to shun technological or culinary advances. “You know the minute the food mill was invented, the nonnas started using it,” Nosrat said. The trick, she said, is to figure out a way use those advances to support the same traditional food values. So if your goal is to make homemade yogurt or trade in canned beans for dried ones, go ahead and flip on the Instant Pot. Or if you are committed to making baby food or preserving summer produce, there is no shame in employing a Vitamix to whirl up some roasted sweet potatoes or a heap of pesto for the freezer.
Expand Your Grandma Community
Those of us who have a skilled cook (or two or three) in our family to learn kitchen secrets from should count ourselves as blessed. But if your own grandmother is more likely to burn toast then prepare a from-scratch family meal, hope is not lost. Find a friend who knows how to bake sourdough bread or injera, or roll from-scratch linguine, and make a cooking date. (Always offer to bring wine and provide the ingredients.) Or work your way through one or more classic cookbooks. There is no reason that, with a little patience and practice, Julia Child, Edna Lewis, Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, Alice Waters, Claudia Roden, Sandor Katz, Yotam Ottolenghi, Diana Kennedy, or Samin Nosrat—to name just a few—cannot become your personal cooking elders.
Don’t Get Derailed By Perfection
Allen’s cookbook shares the secrets behind foraging for wild herbs and berries, churning butter from fresh cream, curing bacon at home, and keeping laying hens in the backyard for sunset-yolked eggs. It’s a lovely and delicious ideal she offers: grandma cooking taken to its pastoral extreme. But trying to fit butter churning into a 9-to-5 work schedule is not exactly practical. For those of us cooking in small kitchens with limited time, budgets, and outdoor space, it can be easy to get overwhelmed.
Don’t get discouraged that you can’t do it all. “There are plenty of Italian nonnas in Brooklyn and Vietnamese grandmothers in East Oakland who cook nourishing food in very small kitchens,” Nosrat said. If you have the space for a container garden, or an afternoon to apple picking with friends or family, go for it. But you do not have to commit to a 24/7 pastoral perfection to channel your inner grandma.
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30 Comments
Not everything has to be problematic. This article was meant to be joyful and nostalgic, not divisive or sexist.
In this age when "making cookies" means, to so many, getting some weird dough at the supermarket, I cherish my own need to make jam (occasionally) from wild berries - yes, while working full time. I have no need to learn to make butter or cure bacon, but I do like to know how to do the basics myself. I happen to be female, and definitely believe women have rights and command respect. I'm not sure my food values would be any different if I were male, and I know plenty of folks whose grandfathers passed down important food knowledge or recipes.
BTW- "grandmothers" is traditionally a very powerful feminist term and spiritual invocation.
I was lucky enough to inherit many of these practices from my mother and my grandmothers. Their lives certainly weren't without hardship, but I like to believe that in continuing their traditions, I'm honoring and celebrating all that they've achieved.
Applying this sentiment beyond your experience, it becomes a suggestion that we should follow our mother's and grandmothers' habits in the kitchen if we want to celebrate and honour all they have achieved. For the mothers that achieved more, this reduces their "all" to their lives in the kitchen, and if they weren't able to accomplish dreams outside of the kitchen, it celebrates their lives' restrictions.
We can celebrate practicality and tips from the past without gendering it. And we can explore familial traditions and knowledge without it becoming a universal all that ignores the diversity of experiences.
For example, Depression Cooking Clara was a beautiful exploration of her experiences, struggles, and ingenuity during terrible times. Focus on the person and their experience, and honouring women of the past flips from one that whitewashes badness to an appreciation of strength that acknowledges context.
My grandmothers and grandfather did not pass down to me any of the practices others feel lucky to have learned. Many women in my grandmothers' era did not cook because they didn't have to. It's been like that for centuries - cooking is hard, often tedious and backbreaking work. Many grandmothers and grandfathers (and aunts or uncles or godmothers, family friends, etc.) pass on other traditions and values. Instead of spending time in the kitchen, they take their young companions to the theatre or to museums and art galleries, and then enjoy simple meals at home or out -- who cooks it or how isn't really the point, but that the people who are eating it are enjoying one another's company, discussing the exhibit or play or what they've read in the newspaper or other publication, and enjoying one another's company. I feel fortunate to have received so much of value from influential people in my life, lessons that have shaped me personally and professionally and that have benefited me immeasurably. Some have come from family members, others have come from peers, many of have come from mentors of all kinds. Not one of them is derived from a "grandma" cooking experience.
And, for the record, why do we insist on using the word "grandma" instead of "grandmothers"? I don't know a single grandmother who is called that and to use it as a noun and not the diminutive that it is, after all, seems denigrating. ;o)
Funny how absolutely foreign one person's everyday experience can be to another's -- I called both of my grandmothers "grandma," as did everyone else I knew. Otherwise, my experience is similar.
I think part of what makes me bristle at this term is that it seems like a childish way to look at dynamic and resilient women -- using their acts of love (cooking, motherly actions, etc) to define their overall life. As children, it's hard to imagine our elders as anything other than the positions they hold in our lives. Our culture is riddled with jokes about children coming to terms with the fact that parents/grandparents are people -- who date, have sex, made mistakes, have secrets..
The most cherished lesson I learned from my grandmothers came long after they both passed. It was how to stop my vision of them as "grandmas," and how to see them as women and explore how their experiences dictated their personalities and actions. It's quite an eye-opening experience to look back and lift the grandmother veil.
This seems to a bit of an overreaction and projection on your part. Your perspective is not true for everyone. I feel grateful to see grandmothers (yes, grandmothers, who enjoy that term as I do and others I know) recognized and appreciated. Obviously grandmothers are humans as well, and not all grandmothers are incredible cooks or cooked by choice. But many did and do, and this is appreciating their unique contributions, stories, and experiences.
If we want to get back in "touch with cooking’s familial, communal, cultural, and ecological significances," the first thing to remember is that it is all based on archaic notions of a woman's place.
Historically, grandmas had no choice. Countless generations of women were forced to find peace with very limited lots in life. They were barred from careers. They were barred from choice. That so many woman suffered, and yet became iconic, warm "grandmas" we'd want to celebrate says a lot about their strength, and their ability to be warm and positive in spite of their histories.
Their histories include sexism, racism, great depressions, war and genocide, and the absence of so many social norms we take for granted today. There were countless women enslaved, whose ingenuity in the kitchen credited to the white people who owned them. (Michael Twitty, who has contributed here, has written extensively on the subject.)
This movement ignores how many current and recently passed generations of grandmothers grew up when the commercialization of food had already happened. Grandmothers taught by media for years that so many processed foods were better. For every story of superhero-grandma cooking, there is another of add-water feasts and grey, bone-dry roasts. Of recipe cards left behind with myriad processed foods and cheats. Of habits we should keep, and others that weren't employed out of skill, but necessity or ignorance.
Our grandmothers are not a universal one. And why are we gendering cooking in 2017 anyway? The first step to embracing the "familial, communal, cultural, and ecological significances" of cooking is to recognize the historically negative building blocks of these significances and create new systems that take the best and leave behind the interference and limitation.
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