TITLE: Dumbing Down Recipes
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 25, 2006 10:12 AM
DESC:
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BODY:
As a part of seeing my wife and daughters
off to Italy,
I cooked a few special meals for them on Sunday and
Monday. One friend suggested that I needn't have
bothered, because they will encounter much better
food in Italy, but I think that an unusual meal
prepared by Dad is still a nice treat -- and my wife
loved not having to think about any meals for the last
couple of days of packing and preparing. Besides,
I'm not too shabby in the kitchen.
I like to cook. I'm not an accomplished chef, or
anything of the sort, just an amateur who like to work
in the kitchen and try new things.
While blanching asparagus for my last and finest effort
of the weekend, I remembered an article that ran in our
local paper last March under the headline
Cookbooks simplify terms as kitchen skills dwindle.
It discusses the dumbing down of cookbooks over the last
couple of decades because Americans no longer know the
common vocabulary of the kitchen. These days, recipes
tend not to use words like "blanch", "dredge", or even
"saute", "fold", and "braise", for fear that the casual
reader won't have any idea what they mean. Cookbooks
that buck the trend must provide detailed glossaries that
explain what used to be standard techniques.
In some ways, this is merely a cultural change. People
generally don't spend as much time cooking full meals or
from scratch these days, and women in particular are less
likely than their mothers to carry forward the previous
generation's traditional culinary knowledge. That may
not be a good or bad thing, just a difference borne out
of technology and society. The article even implicates
the digital computer, claiming that because kids grow up
with computers these days they expect everything, even
their cooking, to be fast. Who knew that our computers
were partly responsible for the dumbing down of America's
kitchen?
I sometimes think about connections between cooking and
programming, and between recipes and programs. Most
folks execute recipes, not create them, so we
may not be able to learn much about how learning to
programming from learning to cook. But the dumbing down
of cooking vocabulary is a neat example for how programs
work. When a recipe says to "fold" an ingredient into
a mixture, it's similar to making a procedure call.
Describing this process using different terms does not
change the process, only the primitives used to describe
the process. This focus on process, description, and
abstraction is something that we computer scientists
know and think a lot about.
In a more general teaching vein, I chuckled in my
empathy for this cookbook editor:
"Thirty years ago, a recipe would say, 'Add two eggs,'"
said Bonnie Slotnick, a longtime cookbook editor and
owner of a rare-cookbook shop in New York's Greenwich
Village. "In the '80s, that was changed to 'beat two
eggs until lightly mixed.' By the '90s, you had to
write, 'In a small bowl, using a fork, beat two eggs,'"
she said. "We joke that the next step will be, 'Using
your right hand, pick up a fork and...' "
Students probably feel that way about programming,
but I sometimes feel that way about my students...
... which bring me back to my day job. I have reason
to think about such issues as I prepare to teach CS 1
for the first time in a decade or so. Selecting a
textbook is a particular challenge. How much will
students read? What kinds of things will they read.
How well can they read? That seems like an
odd question to ask of college freshmen, but I do
wonder about the technical reading ability of the
average student who has questionable background in
math and science but wants to "program computer games"
or "work with computers". Colleagues complain about
what they see as a dumbing down of textbooks, which
grow in size, with more and more elaborate examples,
while in many ways expecting less. Is this sort of
text what students really need? In the end, what I
think they really need are a good language reference
and lots of good examples to follow, both in the
practice of programming and in the programs themselves.
It's our job to teach them how to read a language
reference and programs.
My selection of a CS 1 textbook is complicated by the
particular politics of the first year curriculum in my
department. I need something that feels traditional
enough not to alienate faculty who are skeptical of
OO, but true enough to OO that Java doesn't feel like
an unnecessary burden to students.
Postscript: Many recipes require that vegetables be
blanched -- scalded in boiling water a short time --
before being added to a dish. Blanching stops the enzyme
action, which allows them to stay crisp and retain their
color and flavor. Here is a
simple how-to
for blanching. I didn't lear this from my mom or any
of the cooks in my family (including my dad); I learned
it the old-fashioned way: I ran into the term in a recipe,
I wanted to know what it meant, so I looked it up in the
cookbook. If we could give our programming students the
right sort of reference for looking up the terms and ideas
they encounter, we would be doing well. Of course, some
students of programming will be like some students of
cooking and try to fake it. I don't recommend faking
the blanching of asparagus -- it's a temperamental
vegetable!
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