What is Good Cooking?

What is Good Cooking?

These two well-known methods of Chinese home cooking, ch'ao and jeng, can contribute much to the vocabulary of the Western culinary art. They help us frame a definition of good cooking.

Good cooking is the employment of the process of culinary art to produce what is appetizing to the eye, the nose, and the palate. That is, when you smell the food, you would like to taste it; when you taste it, you would like to swallow it; and when you have swallowed it, you will feel satisfied and gratified. In particular, the food is cooked to the right point (neither underdone nor overdone). It is not too rich and never greasy. It is tender when it 'should be tender, crisp when it should be crisp. Finally, it is not dominated by the taste of anything added to or cooked with it, such as a sauce or accessory (unless this is purposely intended, as in a curry), but preserves to the largest extent possible its original flavour.

Let us examine each rule in turn.

Cooked to the Right Point

Certain dishes, such as stews, should be well done. Not to be well done is to be underdone. On the other hand, a roast beef purposely left partly raw in the center is not underdone. Similarly, over done does not necessarily mean cooked to the point of being ruined. It means simply that the food has been cooked beyond that exact point at which it would taste its best-a fine point that can be appreciated, perhaps, only by a connoisseur.

For instance, when a delicate fish, such as a brook trout, is steamed beyond the right point it will taste hard. But when neither overdone nor underdone, it tastes not only tender and delicious but crisp, the summit of taste in all seafood.

Some dishes, such as roast duck, French stews, and the like, should look rich and taste rich.

Yet there is a limit. Anything that is saturated in oil or fat, though it may taste interesting, is apt to stun one's appetite and strain one's digestion. Rich also has another meaning, i.e., highly tasty. But taste, like fragrance in perfume, has its maximum decreed by nature. When this maximum is exceeded, the food ceases to be tasty and may even become repulsive.

Suppose we assume that one chicken is sufficient to make a delicious broth for six persons. If you use two or three chickens to make the same amount of soup, you will be making not proper chicken broth but chicken essence-which like any other essence, cannot be taken undiluted. The same principle applies to fried foods. When a thing is greasy, it is obviously not right. Excess grease, therefore, should always be removed.

Tender here does not mean the opposite of tough, which is obviously bad. It means the condition of a stewed meat or other food that draws the remark, "it melts in my mouth." Yet all the original taste is preserved, enhanced by the juice in which it is cooked. Certain things should taste crisp; for example, all foods deep-fried or baked.

Anything that is intrinsically good as food has its own original flavor endowed by nature, though some device to bring out this flavor at its best may be required. The device may be in the manner of cooking or in the use of the right accessory ingredients.

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