A while back, a commenter asked if I knew of any sort-of home-ec websites for adults or good books that might teach one how to cook. Susie J suggested Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for the Food (which, by the way, has a subtitle that goes "Food + Heat = Cooking", harkening back to another recent post which I wrote before I'd ever really known much about Alton Brown at all) and Shirley Corriher's Cookwise. I don't know anything about either of these books, but I can say with certainty that Sue is a wonderfully accomplished and adventurous cook (not to mention baker) and I think one might do well to heed her advice on the matter.

For my part, I went about things a little differently. One day it was decided I needed to learn to cook. I remember the day - I was a sophomore in college, living off campus with a very glamourous girlfriend in what we thought was a best apartment ever and we decided to give a dinner party. First one of us had to learn to cook something. That I am now writing this blog and she is a chef illustrates just how life-changing the conversation turned out to be.

My point is that sometimes, to learn to book means deciding that one is going to learn to cook and then doing it. I've always held that, gene splicing and hybridizing aside, there is essentially a finite number of ingredients in the world. A huge number, to be sure, but basically finite. Rule out all the things you don't want to eat - for me these include most specialty meats and I don't care what anyone says about it, some fruits and a surprisingly (to me) large number of condiments - and work with what you do want to eat. One you learn some cool things to do with a tomato you pretty much can deal with all tomatoes, no matter the variety. Figure out how to get a batch of bran muffins in the oven, and you've got corn, blueberry, cranberry orange and chocolate chip in the bag, so to speak. The same is true for roasts - beef, pork, chicken, whatever. There are nuances, sure, but the basic principle is the same.

On the way to learning to cook, you may produce some awful stuff. Eat it anyway, learn and move on. I, myself, still cannot make an omelet of any repute but I press on knowing the result will be worth it and the day I can reproduce the gruyere and duck omelet I love at the Black Lab Bistro will be a happy one for me. In the meantime, I eat an awful lot of failed omelets. I also made a lot of cakes before I figured out the basic procedure, starting with yellow cake. Now the whole operation is, so to speak, a piece of cake and I can produce all kinds of cakes in fairly short order. So, unlike, say, ice dancing, which requires some innate talent, becoming a reasonably good home cook just requires practice. More on the order of bike riding, I'd say.

One time you'll follow the directions for a basic pasta sauce of roasted tomatoes, basil, garlic and pepper and think, "Well, the texture is all right, but I think it needs less garlic, more basil and maybe some carrot or something to give it body." And you'll try that next time, and then the third time, leave out the basil but include celery and wine and keep going changing a bit each time until you have a sauce you love and can make in your sleep. Along the way, you'll use it not only over plain pasta but atop toasted bread as an hors dourve or loosened with broth as a soup. Next, remembering the tomato sauce experiments, you'll wonder if you can roast an eggplant in the same way and find out that yes! you can and not only that, but you can grill it, too and - hey! - can tomatoes be grilled? What about thyme instead of basil and white pepper instead of black? And on you go, like a good kitchen scientist, using the results of one thing to inform the next. Some stuff will suck and some will be great, but that's how life goes, isn't it?

I also recommend starting slow. Don't try to produce a four course meal for dinner tomorrow night. Make one thing and buy or open boxes for the rest. And be reasonable - starting with Vitello Tonnato is not a hot idea, but maybe a seasoned veal chop would be great. Grill a chop a few times to get a feel for how veal works for you and how it reacts to heat and your pans and your touch and, before you know it, that Vitello Tonnato is in reach.

So I think this is how you have to start, if you haven't learned in home-ec or at your mother's elbow. Take a deep breath, ignore your woefully inadequate kitchen (believe me, there are very few adequate kitchens in the world and even fewer get used with any regularity - well-outfitted cooking spaces seldom turn up in restaurants for some reason, preferring to habitate in those really big houses that get built when farms get bought up), make peace with your single mixing bowl and one knife, banish the little voice that's telling you that cooking is a pain and you never learned before so you won't learn now and, in the words of a greater writer than I, just do it. Today a baked apple, tomorrow an apple pie and next week an Apple-Rosemary Tart.