Chefs, cookbook authors and home cooks share invaluable cooking wisdom passed down from their grandmothers.
It’s a comfort we could all use right about now.
“What I learned from them was to always bloom your spices.
Chef Seamus Mullen, acclaimed chef, restaurateur and cookbook author, with his grandmother.Photo: Photo by Colin Clark; Design by Tyrel Stendahl
Put the spices into fat to release flavor, and then crush or grind them.
It extracted an incredible amount of flavor, and now I teach the same technique to my students.”
Then, she would fry it up in a cast-iron skillet.
Pictured, clockwise from top left: Baker Jocelyn Belk Adam’s grandmother (photo by Chuck Olu-Alabi); EatingWell fellow Alex Loh’s grandmother Mary; EatingWell digital content director Penelope Wall’s Granny Dot; Wall’s grandmother Mama Sonia; Nellie Wong (photo by Pat Tanumihardja); EatingWell senior digital editor Victoria Seaver’s Grandma Mary.Design by Tyrel Stendahl
To this day, this is how I fry fish or chicken.
His grandmother Mutti on his maternal side taught him the importance of acid.
“I normally can’t stand them, but they were so good in that recipe!”
Izon’s grandmother Sylvia Naimo was Italian-American and grew up in New Jersey.
So there would have been a lot of grapes/raisins around!"
“At the time I didn’t understand what she meant.
you could get so many different flavors from the same ingredient.
I realized, holy crap, this is at the core of almost every throw in of cuisine.”
“When making pickles, she taught me how to slice and feather cucumbers,” she explained.
“(Nellie Wong photo courtesy of Pat Tanumihardja.)
Try it in this recipe forVietnamese-Style Coconutty Brussels Sproutsby Andrea Nguyen.
She used a tiny amount of hard-boiled egg whites.
They went right into the meat grinder.
Her grandmother grew up in the South.
She would blanch them two to three times in boiling water, changing the water each time.
