*noddles* Actually, I'd be surprised if most people weren't aware of the fact that you can - in principle - bake and cook at home, even if they wouldn't know how to do it themselves; after all, there must be a reason why we have cookers and ovens in our homes (and there also must've been a way to cook and bake things before processed convenience food entered the market).
I don't doubt that there are also some who are not aware and genuinely believe it is literally impossible to bake things yourself (unless you use ready-made mixtures, anyway), but a priori at least, I'd be surprised if they were representative, in the majority, or even all that common.
And, at least in the developed societies, we are now at a point where two or three generations have lived off processed microwaved food or take out fast food all their lives, so they had no opportunity at all to learn cooking even if they were interested.
I can't speak for the USA, but in Germany, I doubt that's true, either. My grandparents' generation definitely knew how to cook, and my parents' generation also still learned how to do so, both at home and (as far as I know) in school; microwaves certainly didn't become commonplace until in the mid- to late 80s.
Of course, for the current generation, it does seem to be true. Myself, I actually attended cooking classes in school, but that was just a voluntary after-hours thing (and to be honest, although it was fun, I didn't learn anything there, either); I've been wanting to learn a bit more about cooking, too, but it seems that most resources suffer from two problems - first, they usually mostly focus on the technical side of things (e.g. "how do you successfully prepare choux pastry dough?") rather than the "flavor" side (e.g. "what ingredients go well together?"), and second, they often involve a lot of hand-waving (usually masked as "relying on experience"). I imagine that this is a reason why I generally find (sweet) baking to be easier to pull off than cooking, too: with cakes etc., it's much easier to find things that go together well, and the technical side of things is usually where the problems lie - but that can be explained quite well, obviously. With cooking, it's the other way around; it seems to be easier (although not easy) from a technical perspective, but figuring out WHAT to cook and how to actually end up with a well-rounded dish that's more than just a mish-mash of disconnected ingredients is much harder.
This is a fundamental problem for me, too, one that runs deep enough to make most resources - books, courses, web pages etc. - irrelevant, as they fail to actually address the right question. (And of course, here's a third problem with most resources, too: there's such an overabundance of information - often contradictory information, too - that for a beginner, it's often impossible to make sense of it all. Too many cooks spoil the broth.)
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branchandroot
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Date: 2009-09-20 12:50 pm (UTC)*noddles* Actually, I'd be surprised if most people weren't aware of the fact that you can - in principle - bake and cook at home, even if they wouldn't know how to do it themselves; after all, there must be a reason why we have cookers and ovens in our homes (and there also must've been a way to cook and bake things before processed convenience food entered the market).
I don't doubt that there are also some who are not aware and genuinely believe it is literally impossible to bake things yourself (unless you use ready-made mixtures, anyway), but a priori at least, I'd be surprised if they were representative, in the majority, or even all that common.
I can't speak for the USA, but in Germany, I doubt that's true, either. My grandparents' generation definitely knew how to cook, and my parents' generation also still learned how to do so, both at home and (as far as I know) in school; microwaves certainly didn't become commonplace until in the mid- to late 80s.
Of course, for the current generation, it does seem to be true. Myself, I actually attended cooking classes in school, but that was just a voluntary after-hours thing (and to be honest, although it was fun, I didn't learn anything there, either); I've been wanting to learn a bit more about cooking, too, but it seems that most resources suffer from two problems - first, they usually mostly focus on the technical side of things (e.g. "how do you successfully prepare choux pastry dough?") rather than the "flavor" side (e.g. "what ingredients go well together?"), and second, they often involve a lot of hand-waving (usually masked as "relying on experience"). I imagine that this is a reason why I generally find (sweet) baking to be easier to pull off than cooking, too: with cakes etc., it's much easier to find things that go together well, and the technical side of things is usually where the problems lie - but that can be explained quite well, obviously. With cooking, it's the other way around; it seems to be easier (although not easy) from a technical perspective, but figuring out WHAT to cook and how to actually end up with a well-rounded dish that's more than just a mish-mash of disconnected ingredients is much harder.
This is a fundamental problem for me, too, one that runs deep enough to make most resources - books, courses, web pages etc. - irrelevant, as they fail to actually address the right question. (And of course, here's a third problem with most resources, too: there's such an overabundance of information - often contradictory information, too - that for a beginner, it's often impossible to make sense of it all. Too many cooks spoil the broth.)