Until it’s done

Neither my grandmother nor my mother loved to cook the way I do. Nevertheless, as a farm wife, my grandmother was required to feed the family and was not able to send for takeaway or go to a restaurant, so she learned how to cook and learned well. Most of her cooking was done without recipes, but she did write down some family recipes for me when I got married as a young college student. She took the time to list quantities of ingredients and a short paragraph on how to make the dish. The instructions were not exactly detailed, however. For one recipe, there was no time indicated on how long to cook a stew. I telephoned my grandmother and asked her how long I should cook it. “Until it’s done,” she replied in a tone that indicated she thought it was obvious, and that I was not the sharpest knife in the drawer for asking the question.

I was reminded of this incident when I spotted a humorous Twitter thread on people asking their moms or grandmothers how to make a particular dish. Some of the replies had me laughing out loud. One woman texted her daughter “There is no recipe. You need skills not recipe. You don’t have the skills.” Ouch.

Another reply I found humorous involved a particular piece of equipment. The recipe in question “relies on you having a certain coffee cup as the guide for all the measurements. If you don’t have the cup and ask what that cup equates to in grams you get, “the cup is the cup, you use the cup.”

One person posted a photo of their grandmother’s stuffing recipe. The instructions were all but missing, and the ingredient measurements were less than precise: “a lot,” “some but not too much” or “not much.” Seeing those posts makes me thankful that my grandmother used standard cup and teaspoon measurements…although when I think about it, maybe that was because she didn’t think I had “the skills.” I am not going to ask her about it.