Henrietta Hay's Column

"Cook: To prepare (food) for eating by subjecting to heat as by boiling, baking, frying, etc." Webster is quite accurate, but not very imaginative. Me too! It is amazing how easy it is to get out of the habit of "cooking" and into the habit of "fixing something" as the size of your family decreases and your doctor says "Hey, lighten up a little on the fat."

I'm sorry to confess that I have taken the path of least resistance and declared the kitchen off limits except in case of emergency, which is to say that I eat the proper foods, but don't spend a lot of time fixing them. Before Thanksgiving, purely from reflex, I bought a small turkey although I was not planning to have Thanksgiving dinner at home. So there I was with a turkey in my freezer. Now I could let it sit there until spring, or I could find the incentive to cook it. So I took a deep breath, invited friends in, and actually put a turkey dinner on the table. Much to my surprise, I still knew how to cook, I really enjoyed doing it, and my friends were almost speechless with shock. I even made a pie. But I must be careful not to let it become a habit.

Most women of my generation are - or have been - good cooks. Our mothers saw to that. That was the only real career for which we were trained. But as I try to remember my distant childhood I realize that our eating habits were quite different then.

I don't think anyone had heard the word cholesterol. Probably that particular bane of modern living had not been isolated yet. Fat was a word we used to describe some people. Bread came out of the oven instead of out of a plastic bag and was probably loaded with all sorts of good stuff like vitamins and minerals. What vitamins we got we ate without knowing it. At my house whole milk was delivered very early in the morning in bottles and the top three or four inches consisted of pure cream. On cold winter mornings, before we got up, the cream often froze and expanded above the bottle in a beautiful column of creamy ice with the cap sitting jauntily on top. My mother would let me have it for breakfast.

We had real cream on our oatmeal, and bacon and eggs. Cream sauce lived up to its name. It was made with cream. Red meat was a daily staple. I was middle aged before I discovered that it is legal to eat dinner without meat and gravy. I'm not saying it was better, but simply that that's the way it was.

So cooking was different. My mother was a wonderful cook and took great pride in the meals she served, but she spent a lot of time in the kitchen. There were, of course, no shortcuts - no mixes or pre-packaged anything, or frozen foods. What we call cooking from scratch was the only kind she knew about.

And I cooked and baked and entertained and thoroughly enjoyed it for a lot of years. But gradually, cooking got to be less fun, as we all learned that we really shouldn't be eating most of those wonderful things anyway. Andy Rooney commented that, "The two biggest sellers in any bookstore are the cookbooks and the diet books. The cookbooks tell you how to prepare the food and the diet books tell you how not to eat any of it." So I have found that cooking is less interesting to me than writing and playing with my computer and reading and walking and all the other entertaining things that little old ladies do.

All too many of us have let our cooking skills rust, but fortunately there are some among us who are still going full speed ahead. I have one friend of my generation who often entertains at sit-down dinners for 16 people or more. That is absolutely beyond my comprehension, but she loves it. I have another one who can't wait to get her "work" done so she can get into the kitchen and start baking up a storm. And I am very fortunate to have neighbors who either from pity or culinary enthusiasm bring me all sorts of goodies. I feel slightly guilty but not very, and have only minor twinges when I return their plates empty.

I love to eat. I just don't like cooking very much any more and that does make for a complicated situation. I wonder whether I can teach my computer to cook.