Serious Eats
Weekend Cook and Tell Round Up: What I Learned in Home Ec
Photograph: Life Magazine
Last week we chose a Cook and Tell that didn't involve all that much cooking. Instead we wanted to hear about your formative cooking experiences in Home Ec Class. Classroom projects ranged from apron-sewing to bed-making with plenty of useful and not so useful cooking lessons thrown in and of course, plenty of helpful life skills such as how to properly wash dishes and form a fruit-studded Jell-O mold. Let's take a look at some of your fondest adolescent Home Ec adventures.
Airedalelover's six years of Home Ec sounds more like a culinary school program with lessons in food safety, menu planning, and budgeting. Working as a team, Airedalelover's class would organize a menu, place a food order, and prepare and eat the meal as a group.
MissBrownEyes came away from her class with the important lesson that chocolate chips have no place in pancakes. She also learned that the quickest way to get rid of the offending pancakes was by stuffing them into a floor vent.
soozm32's Home Ec should have been called Salad Skills 101. soozm32 learned that the quickest way to core a head of lettuce is to slam the base on the counter. soozm32's teacher, better known as Mrs. Cauliflower, discussed the advantages of cutting lettuce with a non-metal knife and using a salad spinner.
ell.victor was lucky enough to learn the finer points of baking pizza dough, drop biscuits, and cookies. Thanks to Home Ec, ell.victor became the official family pizza-maker for most of high school.
How times have changed since nique jim took Home Ec. His children are enrolled in a culinary program that has them cooking restaurant caliber food like blue crab and roasted corn chowder and filet mignon. The class is available to cater private events—really!
Two of the most important lessons that millede took from Home Ec: how to properly set an attractive table and perhaps even more important, how to suspend pineapple slices in Jell-O.
Photograph: Life Magazine
baltobetsy 's Home Ec class took an international turn come senior year. Each week the class would make dishes from a different country including a veal stew made with wine smuggled in a peanut butter jar.
The thought of Home Ec still has MMinNYC a little upset—too many memories of cutting uniform cheese cubes. It is fascinating that MMinNYC's New York City version of Home Ec had a chapter devoted to "apartment"—every school had a fake apartment built into it so that the students could learn how to clean and maintain their New York digs.
None of us have fond memories of school lunches but duncan1205's Home Ec lunch of Cream of Potato Soup and Molasses Cookies would send any of us running for the cafeteria line.
TheKitchenWitch's menu involved some unexpected dishes including crêpes, Beef Stroganoff, and caramel sauce but, the characters from her class sound even tastier. Head over to The Kitchen Witch to read all about her Carmen Miranda-esqe teacher and a crush worthy troublemaker classmate.
Thanks to everyone who journeyed back to high school for this week's Weekend Cook and Tell challenge. Be sure to head over to Talk and read about next week's challenge: Edible Hand-Me-Downs.