Culinary mysteries

All things in life have a learning curve.

I can pinpoint the very day that my culinary education began. Well, maybe not the day, but the occasion and the year. It was 1967 and our family had moved to New Zealand a few months earlier. I was eleven years old and I think I had nursed a hankering to cook for some time, but my only experience prior to this had been making butterfly cakes for a Brownie badge. Butterfly cakes are a staple at any English child's party and I loved to eat them. If I recall correctly, I mostly watched while Mum made them. I don't think she really knew how to teach her skills to someone else. I always felt a bit guilty about that badge.

I digress.

For some reason, Mum relented and let me make dinner.
Actually, it was probably Dad's idea. I can hear him now: Else, just let her try!
Mashed potatoes, good New Zealand sausage, peas, and gravy was on the menu.
My favourite foods.
I remember well the feeling of satisfaction when dinner was finally cooked and ready to serve. To coordinate the preparation of all of the dishes so that they were ready to eat at the same time seemed a task of monumental proportions.
Do you recall that feeling?
Do you still ever get that feeling?

Over the years, there have been a few mysteries in my kitchen.
The first one was beans.
My only exposure to beans for the first twenty five years of my life was what we English call baked beans. Pork and beans to you Americans.
Beans on toast.
I ate it for lunch almost every day during high school.
Some innovative Kiwis, back when pizza parlours were new to the country in the 70's, put them on pizza.
I thought it was delicious.
Canned spaghetti was another favourite topping.

Fast forward to the second year of our marriage.
I received a Betty Crocker Cookbook  as a wedding present and I used it frequently. I discovered that a) Jeff loved refried beans and b) you could make your own.
In my defense, it was before the word  Rosarita entered my vocabulary.
In our early days of extreme poverty, my darling husband would eat a plateful of my homemade refried beans and call it delicious.
Then, my best friend gave me some white beans. I boiled and boiled and boiled them and they would not soften. I mashed them anyway and Jeff ate crunchy refries for a while.
Never complaining.
I discovered later that old beans just never do soften, no matter how long you cook them.
They make good filler for bean bags, but seriously, how many bean bags can one person use?
Lesson #1.
Don't accept gifts of old beans, no matter how good a friend offers them or how broke you are.


The second problem with beans happened to me a couple of times before I figured out it out. For some reason, the beans again would not soften. This time, though, it was because I had added tomatoes while cooking them. The acid had caused the seed coating to toughen and the beans never got tender.
Lesson #2.
Never add salt, acid, or molasses (calcium) to beans before they are fully cooked.


My latest little quandary occurred last night. I started some potatoes cooking before I started piano lessons in the afternoon so that Jeff wouldn't have to wait very long for his dinner. I brought them to the boil and then covered the pot and turned off the element, thinking that by the time I was ready to finish the corn chowder the potatoes would be mostly cooked. To my dismay, when I came back to finish the soup I could not get those little diced potatoes to soften. We finally ate the soup with slightly crunchy potatoes. I dimly recalled having the same problem at least once before, so I decided to do a little research.
Google to the rescue!
"Potatoes won't cook" yielded the answer.
Slight heat pulls the starch from the potato and sets it on the surface of the vegetable, preventing any further cooking. One way to get around this is using red potatoes, which have less starch than other varieties.
Lesson #3.
Don't parboil potatoes.


Now, if you want to read a rippingly good culinary mystery, try Diane Mott Davidson's Goldy the Caterer series. Nice clean stories with delightful characters, lots of murder and mayhem, and terrific recipes to boot.

And if you want more information on cooking beans, because there is more to it than meets the eye, go here.

You can thank me later.