Up From Dummyhood

Are you a cooking dummy? Your reaction to the following story may tell the answer.

A few years back, Marion Cunningham, cookbook author and Times Home Cook columnist, had lunch with a friend who brought along a young man looking for cooking advice. It seems he’d had a bad experience in the kitchen and wanted to know where he’d gone wrong.

As the lunch progressed, the man described how he loved apple desserts, loved watching Julia Child on television and even bought one of her books and tried a recipe from it: tarte Tatin. The directions said to peel and core the apples, then toss them in the bowl with some lemon and half a cup of sugar. The man proceeded to peel and core the apples, then he put a bowl on one end of a large table, stood on the other side and tossed the apple slices across the table and into the bowl along with the lemon and the sugar. He got a mess.

“When he told me that,” Cunningham recalled, “I said, ‘What were you thinking about?’ He said, ‘Well, I thought maybe everything needed to aerate or something.’ When I told the story to Julia she said, ‘Tell him never to go in the kitchen again.’ ”

The problem is that too many people have one bad cooking experience, then really do never set foot in a kitchen again--unless it’s to store the takeout boxes in the refrigerator.

Now Cunningham has made it her mission to take the fear out of cooking for even those who have never made a single meal in their lives. For the last year and a half, she’s invited several non-cooking adults into her Walnut Creek ranch home for a series of cooking classes in preparation for her next book, “Learning to Cook With Marion Cunningham,” which is to be published by Knopf next May.

As she nears completion of the book, you could say that Cunningham has learned a thing or two about dummies in the kitchen.

Of course, she would never call her students “dummies.” She prefers the term “beginners.” And she knows that it is precisely the fear of being called a dummy that keeps so many people out of the kitchen.

Still, there are stories she tells from the trenches that show just how bad things have gotten in too many American kitchens. Two women in her class, for instance, were happy to report that they had used green onions before: They’d cut off and thrown out the white part and chopped the green part. They are, after all, green onions. (Dummy alert: It’s the white part that is normally used.)

Another student saw that a recipe called for soft butter so she went to the store and was dismayed to find there was no “soft butter” to be found. (The butter should simply soften at room temperature before being used.)

When one student ran out of flour in the middle of a recipe, she thought cornstarch would be an acceptable substitute--it looks a little like flour--and ruined the dish. Another novice cook, upon hearing the Canadian rule for cooking fish 5 minutes per inch of thickness, went home and cooked a piece of salmon for 40 minutes because it was 8 inches long--the fish was so overcooked it set off the fire alarm.

“I understand their mistakes,” Cunningham said this weekend by phone from Vermont, where she is going over changes in the book with her editor, Judith Jones. “I say this because I flunked my computer, you know. When you don’t have any background or knowledge on a subject, when it’s totally new, you grasp and cling to the literal words.”

Cunningham did eventually make cooks out of a core group of students who stuck with her during the writing of the book. It was a task she found more difficult in many ways than her previous project: teaching kids to cook for her 1995 book “Cooking With Children.”

“Children have no fear of failing,” Cunningham said. “They plunge in and they do whatever you ask. But I tell the adults to put a packet of yeast into a bowlful of warm water and they want to know: What do I mean by warm? Should it be a specific temperature? Do I mean exactly five minutes? They’re afraid of failing and looking dumb in front of other people.”

At each class, the group would make three recipes with Cunningham. She would hand them the recipes then ask them to go over each one and talk about every term or phrase they didn’t understand. It was this process that led her to cut the words “sear” and “blanch” from the book’s recipes.

She found that beginner cooks hated cluttered cookbooks in which the pages were decorated with boxes and sidebars (which is, ironically, how all the “Dummies” and “Idiot’s” books are designed); they like their information straight and to the point. She also discovered that her non-cooks were as fearful of supermarket shopping as they were of cooking--many didn’t know how to choose or buy produce so they avoided the grocery store altogether.

In addition, teaching the class showed Cunningham the joys of Pyrex cookware for beginners because it’s inexpensive, sold just about everywhere, even in grocery stores, and it allows the cook to see what’s happening during the cooking process.

“The thing I kept talking about was the need for them to constantly taste as they cooked, even if they thought they didn’t have any judgment. After a while, they began to see that they did know how to taste. We did four or five very simple soups; baking powder biscuits, which were incredible to them because they couldn’t believe they could bake; roast chicken, which was a huge, smashing success.

“They love things in the oven because they don’t have to look clumsy in front of their friends; it’s in the oven and it’s baking away and they know it’s OK.”

Entertaining turned out to be a big motivator for getting the non-cooks into the kitchen.

“Most of these people didn’t entertain, yet they yearned to mix with other people. They’d tell me that if they could learn to cook, they could invite a friend over. A lot of people just don’t realize how awful it feels to not know how to cook.”

In teaching her students to cook, Cunningham also taught many of them how to enjoy eating. After the recipes were finished, the group would sit down together and share the meal they had made together.

“It’s such a civilizing ritual to sit and share a meal with other people,” Cunningham says. “It seems an essential part of a functioning society.”

For her core group of students, sharing a meal with Cunningham has become an essential part of life. She was going to have a graduation dinner for six of the students not long ago but found that the group didn’t want to graduate.

Says Cunningham: “They’re coming for dinner in a week or two.”