November / December 2002 - Food for Thought

Editor's Note

All Things Edible My husband and I recently took a trip to New Orleans and were so smitten with the local culinary offerings, we decided to take a cooking class at the New Orleans School of Cooking. Though an obvious tourist trap - the front of the school (the �Louisiana General Store�) is a shop that sells Cajun cooking supplies alongside tee shirts and beignet mixes - the school offered a first rate cooking-class experience with a knowledgeable, though ornery, chef named Marty.

Chef Marty provided us with recipes for gumbo, jambalaya, pralines and bread pudding. He then proceeded to show us how to make each dish in a way that didn�t follow the recipes, but did instill in us a feeling for how to cook the dishes. For instance, he put pina colada mix in the bread pudding and used chicken base in the gumbo, neither of which were on the ingredient lists. The whole time, in fact, he didn�t seem to be measuring anything as he completed the dishes, yet they all turned out perfectly. (We got to sample portions of each dish - YUM!!)

In those few short hours, Chef Marty taught me more than how to cook a few Cajun dishes. He taught me that a large part of cooking is feeling. It was the same thing my mother was trying to teach me when she showed me how to cook egg noodles, a meticulous process of preparing the dough, rolling it out, letting it dry, rolling it up, and cutting it that has been handed down through countless generations of our family. She didn�t measure the flour; she knew how much flour it took, because she�d made the same dish a thousand times. And that feeling for cooking is something that can�t be captured in a printed recipe.

Good cooking, like good living, depends on creativity and flexibility. You have to be willing to stray from the recipe �just to see what happens� and then learn to love the myriad of possibilities that can result from experimentation and improvisation. Like a hearty gumbo, our Food Issue is a satisfying, spicy mix. We�ll look at the true nutritional value of dairy products in �Milk: Does it do a Body Good?�, the pros and cons of genetically engineered food in �Second Nature, and the myths of famine in �Moveable Feast.�

So, whip up a batch of your favorite dish -- whether it be chocolate cookies or cajun prawns - and sit back and enjoy reading our celebration of all things edible.

Stay Nervy,

Kristin Schuchman, Editor-in-chief

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