What was your favorite meal, cake or biscuit (cookie), as a child? Do you have a childhood memory of an amazing home cooked meal that your mother or grandmother used to create that makes your mouth water just thinking about it? Chances are you have and you know just how different the taste is when compared to anything you might have recently sampled - and by recently I mean in the past decade or two!

Our modern convenience foods are so highly processed that the natural flavors are all but eliminated (see the Bionic Burger). Not only that but many of the common chemicals in modern foods such as preservatives, flavorings and colorings are damaging to the body, providing little or none of what we really need for good health.

So what was so good about the food our mothers and grandmothers produced? There’s a two part answer involving specific, physical ingredients and the knowledge on how best to combine those ingredients in specific ways and under specific conditions.

Now, our mothers and grandmothers may have built a vast amount of experience and knowledge of what works and what doesn’t from preparing food daily and often for a large family. They had to be creative and resourceful and find ways of extracting every ounce of flavor from the available ingredients - and weren’t the results amazing!

Unfortunately, as our loved ones passed away so did their craft as their vast knowledge and experience went with them which is a terrible shame. However, those that wanted to share their knowledge carefully detailed the ingredients and methods in recipes that combined the art and science of their craft so that if followed correctly could produce identical or similar mouth-watering results.

I’ve often used my Mother’s gingernut recipe to save money on birthday and leaving shouts at my various work places over the years and I always received rave reviews. I frequently got comments like "they taste so much better than bought stuff" or "they have so much flavor".

To actually witness my Mother baking gingernuts in her kitchen adds a whole new dimension to my understanding of her written recipe and renders it largely null and void as long as I’m baking gingernuts regularly. However, that’s not often the case so I have to think hard when following her recipe and normally end-up having to make a phone call for pointers and options when things don’t go as planned. The problem is that a written recipe is at a basic level of process communication and lacks a ‘holistic’ view of the process so can easily confuse or trip-up the inexperienced.

Videos showing a process such as baking or serving a customer are the closest thing we currently have to actually ‘being there’. You see the body language, the expressions, the emotions, the tone of voice, the full richness and depth of information that combines sound and vision in a way that closely matches how we normally experience things in the ‘real world’.

I’m fortunate to have my Mother just a phone call away when goes wrong but I’m not sure how much longer she’ll tolerate my phone calls to ask questions that for her are the most simple yet complex for me!

Jason

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