Excuses

My dog ate my homework. My computer crashed. There was traffic. I don’t have the time to make custard, because I’m a busy person. What do these sentences have in common? They’re all excuses, for one, but more importantly, **they are all lame**. Custard isn’t all that difficult to make, but people don’t make it, for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that jello pudding is seventy nine cents and takes thirty seconds to make. Is the ten minutes needed for custard really that long, or is it that it pales in comparison to the boil-water-and-stir of the jello? This question leads us to the larger problem that people don’t realize the difference. The food revolution we are in the midst of came after an equally extreme food revolution: the era of canning and processing. Better living through chemistry and all that crap. We, as a society, don’t really know what food is supposed to taste like anymore. If we’re serious about a food renaissance in the country, the way to it is not Rachel Ray. It’s Edna Lewis.

Edna Louis, if you’re unaware, is a cook, cookbook author (they are two very different things), restaurateur and old-fashioned American cook. She is from a place called Freetown, VA, a colony set up by freed slaves, where she grew up on a fully functioning, self sufficient farm. She knows what food tastes like. Reading her book In Pursuit of Flavor is to walk with her down to the ice-cold stream, looking for watercress growing between the rocks. It’s cooking great mounds of cabbage for the migrants helping thresh the wheat. Reading her book is like walking alongside the Ghost of Christmas Past, able to look in on a moment that you know to be forever gone.

Back to our pudding. When was the last time you had a real, eggs and milk custard? If it’s been a while, go make one. Look up the most basic recipe they have in the Joy of Cooking and make it. And for god’s sake, if you don’t know how to cook then *follow the directions*. The other part of this equation is that people don’t know how to cook, but that will be a whole separate article. For now, let’s concentrate on flavor, because eating and cooking are two completely different tasks.

The eggy custard is rich, luscious on the tongue and floods all of its vanilla glory throughout your mouth. Jello pudding is thick and yellow and tastes starchy, like corn sugar (dextrose: thank you, conAgra). And it’s not just ersatz, but on its own- without the context of the egg custard- is pretty bad. Why do people eat it, then? The answer is that they don’t, by and large, know what they’re missing.

Salad dressing is another excellent example. What the hell are those square red things swimming around in the “Italian Dressing?” When people taste a real vinaigrette, they say things like “I wish I could make this at home.” To which, of course, the answer is, “YOU CAN MAKE THIS AT HOME. IT’S OIL AND VINEGAR.” Why do we need to have guar gum to stabilize our salad dressing that’s loaded with salt, preservatives and corn syrup already? The hardest part of making an excellent vinaigrette is having decent oil, not the machine oil they use in most of that processed garbage. Oil, vinegar, salt, pepper- mustard if you want to go crazy. This isn’t hard, people just don’t know.

Remember a few years ago when the idea of putting chocolate chip cookie dough in ice cream was really novel, because they only way to get said dough was to make it? Now, every stoner in America can go to the Piggly Wiggly and get a tube of disturbingly bad chocolate chip cookie dough at any hour of the day or night. Of course, it has a bunch of shit in it that nobody can pronounce, but it does save you those six minutes it takes to make the dough. Oh, you say, but it’s so much simpler to slice the cookies than drop them. Well, that’s retarded, but if you insist, there is, in fact, no law against taking some plastic wrap and making a log out of the dough you make yourself.

I can go on and on, but I think you get my point. Stop wondering why things don’t taste as good as your grandmother made them: you know why. Go make that custard. Whisk up that vinaigrette. Roll those cookies. Make sure you know what you’re missing before you decide it’s not worth the time.