Mom would blanch over cookbooks' dumb down

WASHINGTON — At Kraft Foods, recipes never include words such as "dredge" and "sauté." Betty Crocker recipes avoid "braise" and "truss." Land O' Lakes has all but banned "fold" and "cream" from its cooking instructions. Pillsbury carefully sidesteps "simmer" and "sear."

When the country's top food companies want to create recipes that millions of Americans can understand, there seems to be one guiding principle: They need to be written for a nation of culinary illiterates.

Basic cooking terms that have been part of kitchen vocabulary for centuries are now considered incomprehensible to the majority of Americans.

Despite the popularity of Food Network cooking shows on cable TV and the burgeoning number of food magazines and gourmet restaurants, today's cooks have fewer kitchen skills than did their parents or grandparents.

To compensate, food companies are dumbing down recipes, and cookbooks are published with simple instructions and lots of step-by-step illustrations.

"Thirty years ago, a recipe would say, 'Add two eggs,' " said Bonnie Slotnick, a longtime cookbook editor and owner of a rare-cookbook shop in New York's Greenwich Village.

"In the '80s, that was changed to 'beat two eggs until lightly mixed.' By the '90s, you had to write, 'In a small bowl, using a fork, beat two eggs,' " she said. "We joke that the next step will be, 'Using your right hand, pick up a fork and ... ."

Even the writers and editors of the "Joy of Cooking," working on a 75th anniversary edition to be published by Charles Scribner's Sons in November, have argued "endlessly" over whether to include terms such as "blanch," "fold" and "sauté," said Beth Wareham, Scribner's director of lifestyle publications.

"I tell them, 'Why should we dumb it down?' When you learn to drive, you learn terms like 'brake' and 'parallel park.' Why is it OK to be stupid when you cook?"

So far, the "Joy of Cooking" editors have compromised by including a detailed glossary explaining cooking terms.

At a conference in December, Stephen Sanger, chairman and chief executive of General Mills, noted the sad state of culinary affairs and described e-mail and calls the company gets asking for cooking advice.

There was the person who didn't have any eggs for baking and asked if a peach would do instead. One man railed about the fire that resulted when he followed instructions to grease the bottom of the pan — and slathered the pan's outside.

Janet Myers, senior director of global kitchens for Kraft Foods, has been creating and testing recipes there for 30 years. "Food companies have to acknowledge that there used to be a level of teaching in the home by moms and grandmas that is not as evident today," she said.

Lisa Bernstein, 31, an employment-law attorney in Washington, D.C., said her mother was too busy to teach her much more than how to make spaghetti with sauce from a jar. Tired of microwaving frozen dinners, she signed up two years ago for lessons with veteran cooking teacher Phyllis Frucht.

"I watched some of the Food Network programs, but it's not the same as having someone in the kitchen with you," said Bernstein, who now can make her own pasta sauce for baked ziti and homemade biscotti for dessert.

Some of these skills used to be taught in mandatory home-economics courses in middle school. Most of the classes ended about 20 years ago, said Pat Lynn, a Springdale, Md., high-school teacher.

But in some schools, including Lynn's own, home economics has been reconstituted under "family and consumer sciences" to include electives in cooking, parenting, fashion and training for jobs in the food-service and hospitality industries.

Despite laments about the end of home cooking, more than three-fourths of all dinners are prepared in the home, with women doing most cooking, according to the latest figures from the research firm NPD Group.

Interest in food is undiminished, as measured by magazines devoted to the subject (it's the No. 2 topic behind crafts and hobbies for magazines launched in the past three years, said Samir Husni of the University of Mississippi) and in sales at gourmet cookware chains such as Williams-Sonoma and Seattle-based Sur La Table.

Still, in test kitchens at food giants such as Kraft, the goal is terminology that is "simplistic, and very literal, to make it easy to understand," Meyers said. Where 20 years ago a recipe for chicken might have said, "dredge the chicken in flour," today it might say, "coat the chicken in flour."

At Land O'Lakes, the 85-year-old Minnesota farm cooperative known for its cheese and butter products, former test-kitchen director Lydia Botham said cooks in their 40s and younger are high-tech oriented when it comes to using the company's Web site for recipes and customized advice but relatively unskilled when it comes to baking.

In 1935, for example, a Land O'Lakes butterscotch-cookie recipe directed cooks to "cream together thoroughly the butter and sugar." Today, Botham said, "we don't use the word 'cream' anymore. People don't understand what that means. Instead, we say 'Using your mixer, beat the butter and sugar.' "

A survey by Betty Crocker Kitchens in 2004 showed adults don't realize how cooking-challenged they've become.

The national survey of 1,500 adults found that 70 percent rated themselves "above average" in cooking knowledge, even though only 38 percent scored above average on a 20-question cooking-skills quiz.

While 98 percent knew the abbreviation for teaspoon, only 44 percent knew how many teaspoons were in a tablespoon. Even fewer, 34 percent, knew how much uncooked rice is needed to yield one cup of cooked rice.

(Answers: 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon; one-third cup of uncooked rice yields 1 cup of cooked rice.)