\nPeople talk about the superiority of home cooking but like, my mother’s mother learned cooking in the Betty Crocker era when people didn’t live on farms and cook all day over a solid-fuel fire anymore and that generation had to learn what to do with modern stuff from scratch
my mom ::waves hand eeeh:: picked up those recipes indifferently, and there are a few she can’t do anymore because they don’t still make food that processed, and with the exception of one Beef Stroganoff that takes her like 4 hours to make, Trader Joe’s heat-in-oven stuff reliably tops her
people in my parents’ generation typically despise all traditional mid-atlantic food. i assume some of that is late-modern homogenization, like the destruction of the traditional american dialects, but some of it is that their parents never knew what to do with okra or scrapple, both of which are much harder to cook than anything in the Home Cooking Revival genre of “bung meat in contraption, add vegetables chopped with capital-investment-ass knives and throw half your affordable-global-supply-chain-ass spice rack at it”
and that’s without getting into how everyone in the 28-45 demographic owns an instant pot and a toaster oven and knows someone who has a air fryer, a sous vide machine, a dehydrator…
“Knew what to do”. I mean the thing with any “traditional cuisine” is it isn’t really aimed towards creating tasty meals so much as nutritionally sufficient meals within a particular ecology and economy, and only really goes for “tasty” as a secondary goal within those constraints
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