Where Does a Love of Food Begin?
Posted by Mark Busse on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009Tags for this Article: cookies, Easy Bake, memories
Lauren and Chloe enjoy baking cookies in their new Easy Bake oven.
This year we gave a Betty Crocker Easy Bake oven to our young niece Chloe, who has been baking cookies in it like a fiend ever since. A regular baker! And during the holidays my young nephew Landon and I spent some quality time working on his knife skills as he helped me prepare various dishes for Xmas dinner. This got me to thinking where my love of food began and what led me to this fixation when so many others find food uninspiring—some even finding eating an inconvenience!
I have early memories of my dad showing me how to cook in “his kitchen” (he was the alpha cook at the Busse house). I vividly remember walking through China Town and the smell of dried mushrooms and the flavour of my first coconut bun, still warm from the oven. I remember enjoying the cooking and baking components of Home Ec. when my friends were taking “cooler” electives. And the first time I was brave enough to try sushi changed all the rules for me, forever leaving me with a pallet longing for more.
What are your earliest culinary memories? What conspired to make YOU a Foodists?
Growing up in the UK I had very typical English food and it was GOOD. Both my mum and gran were great cooks and especially great bakers. I started experimenting with food making birthday cakes at the age of 12(ish). Birthday cakes, motherday cakes whatever reason I had to bake. It was a fun creative play time for me, I made green cakes and blue cakes, chocolate cakes, funny shaped cakes and no one died from eating them.
I’m a latchkey chef. Both my parents worked, so at 12 when I could take care of myself at home, I was the first person in the door. If I wanted to eat, I had to cook.
I started simple, but somewhere along the way I adopted a “no fear” attitude to cooking. My mother was raised Mennonite and her mother, my grandmother, was an excellent cook. But my mother escaped rural German village life to the big city of Berlin, and with it, cooking. She learned to cook but she wasn’t adventurous (then).
So, I’d pick things out of magazines or conjure recipes out of thin air. I’d often be the one cooking when guests came over, and often cooking something for the first time. My mother was sometimes concerned, but there weren’t TOO many disasters.
One experience I distinctly remember is the first and last time I made bouillon from scratch. It took 7 hours and used a ton of pots and pans. It was a really delicious broth, of the 1/2 a cup each person got.