What should kids be taught to cook?
- Thread starter Cloo
- Start date
aqua
made of cheese and gin
I think you do tbhmadzone said:But my point is that as part of cooking lessons pupils will be told why they have to let dough rise, there doesn't seem to be much point in the excercise otherwiseIt'd be a bit like just adding stuff together in chemistry and not being told why they react.
Reading other replies I think I should retrain as a cooking teacher
cos what you think "should" be happening most certainly isn't in most places
we only had 1 good Home Ec teacher, and the other stream in our year got her *sigh*
It was also to make it more academic wasn't it? So they can get a 'proper' GCSE if they fancy, which counts for league tables and that.madzone said:
This was in the mid 80s, in a school that ain't there any more. It helped that it had previously been a girls' school, and so had an entire suite intended for learning how to iron yer husband's overalls and blacklead your employer's blackleadable things in domestic service.
I didn't think it appropriate to the arguement 
skyscraper101
0891 50 50 50
madzone said:
Dammn..... I need to learn to make pies that quick. When we did it at school it took absolutely bleeding ages and I'd lost the will by then
madzone
Physically unfavourable
skyscraper101 said:Dammn..... I need to learn to make pies that quick. When we did it at school it took absolutely bleeding ages and I'd lost the will by then
When I teach people to make felt it takes them all day to do what I can do ( and hopefully they'll be able to do when they're back at home) in 2 hrs. It's a totally different scenario if you're teaching 30+ people to do something. Once you're doing it on your own it takes minutes.
toggle
wobbly
madzone said:But my point is that as part of cooking lessons pupils will be told why they have to let dough rise, there doesn't seem to be much point in the excercise otherwise
Reading other replies I think I should retrain as a cooking teacher
Exactly, the home ec lessons that a lot of people got were an absolutely pointless exercise because they didn't teach any real skills other than how to suck up to the person in charge. I think we get enough lessons in that already.
The point I was trying to make with the pizza was that the actual dish that is prepared is a lot less important than starting to try a bit of cooking for yourself, making something that is done for eating, not looking at, and learning some basic skills like how to read a recipie, making a basic tom sauce, using a knife safely, breadmaking. Make it clear what they have learnt other than how to make a pizza.
AnnaKarpik
Queen of all she surveys
skyscraper101 said:
These things are cheap in the shops because they do not use quality ingredients. Without exception they also contain substances that originate in a laboratory and have been shown to be damaging to your health, eg hydrogenated fats.
If you make your own you get a vastly superior product because you leave out the buckets of sugar, sugar-derivatives, preservatives, salt and cheap fats that have to be used to make the stuff palatable. Your meat pie contains stuff that is recognisable as meat, the pastry is made of flour, butter or butter/lard. The seasonings are salt, pepper and herbs. You know what you're eating.
The argument for real food is not an economic one.
Cloo
Banana for scale
The pointlessness of our home ec lessons was that we were only taught overly complicated things that had no day-to-day applications.toggle said:
I think it would be wrong if kids were taught cookery in terms of 'LEARN TO COOK SO YOU DON'T GET FAT', as it might come out, rather than - learn to cook, it's nice, fun and much tastier and cheaper than something out of a packet.
mr steev
magic thought wizard
Jografer said:
We actually were taught how to wash up in my Home Ec lessons in the early 80's.. as hot as you you can bare, glass first, greasy stuff last.
I think we did do some stuff about budgeting and I remember making beans on toast, cheese straws and scones.
I think to be worthwhile today it must include nutrition and learning to cook has got to be a great way to do that.
I'd imagine that Health & Safety would have a field day though!
crustychick
doo-woop-de-doo
the things I remember vividly from home ec at school are making a pineapple upside down cake, which my family all ate for pudding, making french bread "pizzas" and learning how to cut an onion.
I have never again in my life made a pineapple upside down cake but I still cut an onion in the same way I was taught back then... (i did make the french bread pizzas again a number of times...)
I have never again in my life made a pineapple upside down cake but I still cut an onion in the same way I was taught back then... (i did make the french bread pizzas again a number of times...)
subversplat
writer of wrongs
Err, do you really want to send kids out into their afternoon games lessons on an empty stomach? I'm not sure the "no money, no lunch" scenario is workable.MrFalafel said:
Ms Ordinary
randompointlesschemistry
mr steev said:
I remember learning that at Brownies
.I also remember being really proud of it - which makes me wonder if the best time to learn this stuff is before secondary school, when you can feel all big & clever because you've been trusted with the hot oven & the sharp chopping knives.
Cookery should be about learning to enjoy cooking, & learning that it doesn't have to be difficult - if that means your first lesson is baking a cake because its easy & fun, what's wrong with that?
Plus if you make your own cake / biscuits, you also tend to get a feel for exactly how much sugar & fat goes into them, which has to be a good thing.
scifisam
deleted
It took us a term to do spag bol. That was all we did in the first three years of Home Ec.
Yep. Which is why pizza bases and, frankly, anything to do with flour and baking aren't good until GCSE level, in my opinion. They're not likely to make those foods often when they grow up, or at least, they'll make them less frequently than most other foods. Once you've got good at making, say, a pie, it can be very quick, but it takes a while to get to that stage, and the washing-up takes a while too. Also, lots of kids won't have the necessary equipment at home should they ever fancy trying it out.
I left school not knowing how to make an omelette, what the word 'braise' meant, that sort of thing. Recipes were like a foreign language because they presumed so much prior knowledge and presumed you had an amply-equipped kitchen. Fortunately I tried hard and learnt quickly.
Cloo said:
Yep. Which is why pizza bases and, frankly, anything to do with flour and baking aren't good until GCSE level, in my opinion. They're not likely to make those foods often when they grow up, or at least, they'll make them less frequently than most other foods. Once you've got good at making, say, a pie, it can be very quick, but it takes a while to get to that stage, and the washing-up takes a while too. Also, lots of kids won't have the necessary equipment at home should they ever fancy trying it out.
I left school not knowing how to make an omelette, what the word 'braise' meant, that sort of thing. Recipes were like a foreign language because they presumed so much prior knowledge and presumed you had an amply-equipped kitchen. Fortunately I tried hard and learnt quickly.
scifisam said:I left school not knowing how to make an omelette, what the word 'braise' meant, that sort of thing. Recipes were like a foreign language because they presumed so much prior knowledge and presumed you had an amply-equipped kitchen. Fortunately I tried hard and learnt quickly.
It doesn' have to be that way. And it shouldn't be that way.
If Louise Davies (wrote a couple of books for older people either living in small households for the first time or cooking for themselves for the first time) and Katherine Whitehorn (wrote "cooking in a bedsitter", aimed at students & young people in their first jobs) have managed to explain what "simmer" means etc, then so can other food writers. Most of it's just the writer being lazy IMHO
We used to have weekly lessons at secondary school.
We learnt to cook pizza, fruit flan, fruit salad, and some other things.
The cooking bit was to make it fun - having something to take home at the end.
The emphasis of the lessons and the subsequent recipes was that they were balanced and healthy.
We would look at the ingredients and look at ways we could make them healthier e.g. more veg on the pizza, using juice in the fruit salad instead of a sugar syrup. etc.
We also learnt about nutrition, and labelling, and designed clear labelling methods for packaging, as well as the packaging itself.
I wouldn't say we learnt any practical recipes that we would ever use on a daily basis, but we learnt how to follow a recipe, how to plan healthy meals, read and understand nutritional information, and developed confidence in a kitchen environment.
We learnt to cook pizza, fruit flan, fruit salad, and some other things.
The cooking bit was to make it fun - having something to take home at the end.
The emphasis of the lessons and the subsequent recipes was that they were balanced and healthy.
We would look at the ingredients and look at ways we could make them healthier e.g. more veg on the pizza, using juice in the fruit salad instead of a sugar syrup. etc.
We also learnt about nutrition, and labelling, and designed clear labelling methods for packaging, as well as the packaging itself.
I wouldn't say we learnt any practical recipes that we would ever use on a daily basis, but we learnt how to follow a recipe, how to plan healthy meals, read and understand nutritional information, and developed confidence in a kitchen environment.
Funky_monks
Neo-Rustic
I could actually cook by the time I got to secondary school. What a dissapointment my first 'home ec' class was.
We had to make a 'savoury snack' (ie - a butty), and then work out how many calories it contained using these massive thick books of calorific values.
We then made a 'sweet snack (fruit fucking salad)....and so on.
My mother could hardly believe it when I told her, she had assumed that every 11 year old on the planet could make a sandwich.......oh well......
(when I got to university I met 18yr olds who still couldnt make anything more complicated than a pot noodle - all boys, unsurprisingly)
We had to make a 'savoury snack' (ie - a butty), and then work out how many calories it contained using these massive thick books of calorific values.
We then made a 'sweet snack (fruit fucking salad)....and so on.
My mother could hardly believe it when I told her, she had assumed that every 11 year old on the planet could make a sandwich.......oh well......
(when I got to university I met 18yr olds who still couldnt make anything more complicated than a pot noodle - all boys, unsurprisingly)
AnnaKarpik
Queen of all she surveys
Funky_monks said:
Despite home ec lessons, when I left home I could cook bacon sandwiches, porage and toast. Oh, and things in tins. I was dazzled by newharper and his ability to read a recipe and produce pasta sauce
