CREAM, BLANCH, FOLD, DREDGE….The Washington Post reports that we are all now idiots when it comes to cooking actual food:
At a conference last December, Stephen W. Sanger, chairman and chief executive of General Mills Inc., noted the sad state of culinary affairs and described the kind of e-mails and calls the company gets asking for cooking advice: the person who didn’t have any eggs for baking and asked if a peach would do instead, for example; and the man who railed about the fire that resulted when he thought he was following instructions to grease the bottom of the pan ? the outside of the pan.
OK, sure, but anyone who’s worked retail or manned a tech support line can offer up an endless supply of anecdotes like this. Like the guy who came into my Radio Shack store once and wanted to know if some electrical device would work if electricity had to flow upward to get to it.
Anyway, the gist of the story is that no one can follow cooking instructions anymore, and they even have a little test to see if you can follow cooking instructions. Unfortunately, the test is no good. I got all five questions right even though I only really knew the answer to one of them, which just goes to show that making up the wrong answers in a multiple choice test is harder than it looks. Test creation is apparently a dying art too.
