Big Think Interview With Mark Bittman | Big Think

Big Think Interview With Mark Bittman

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A conversation with the author and New York Times cooking columnist.

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Mark Bittman:

While he has never been a professional chef, Mark Bittman has worked as a food writer for over 30 years. He is the bestselling author of the cookbooks "How to Cook Everything", "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian", and "Food Matters", and he writes The Minimalist column for the New York Times. He also regularly makes online cooking videos for the Times' Diner's Journal blog, and often appears on television. Last year he traveled to Spain with Mario Batali and Gwyneth Paltrow to tape the public television series "Spain: On the Road Again." He lives in New York.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What are your first memories ofrnenjoying food? rnrn

MarkrnBittman: They're all jumbled. They're all jumbled together, but theyrnreally are associated with both my grandmothers. My father's mother, who died when I was pretty young, I dornremember going to her house and she lived in a walk up tenement in the Bronxrnwhere my father grew up. She livedrnin the same apartment in which my father grew up. And I do remember he making blitzes or pirogi or somethingrnlike that from scratch, making the dough, rolling it out, filling it withrncheese or potatoes and cooking them, and that was pretty incredible because Irndon’t have – my mother didn’t do that stuff, so I don’t have a lot of that butrnI have that little bit of that. rnThen my other grandmother she was the one who really did the big familyrnfunctions and would cook for 15 and 20 people at once and would scream atrneverybody I the kitchen and da, da, da and she made very, very classic easternrnEuropean Jewish food and was good at it. rnI don’t remember anything particular. I mean, I remember eating many different things. I don’t have a single memory though.

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Question: How did you first get interested inrncooking?

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MarkrnBittman: It was kind of self-defense. I grew up in New York and the food wasrninteresting, varied, not particularly great at home but out on the streets itrnwas good and in some of my friends parents' houses it was good and then I wentrnaway to school in Massachusetts where the food was abysmal and I startedrncooking out of self-defense. Irnmean it was just the only I could imagine to get half way decent food was tornlearn how to make it myself and it really began there and then continuedrnthrough a series of roommates, some of whom cooked and some didn’t, but all ofrnwhom were interested in what I was cooking. Because I was just following recipes, there was no training,rnbut there were good recipes so it worked.

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And then I had arnchild and started cooking for her and then I started writing about food. I mean at that point I knew -- it hadrnbeen eight or ten years and I knew enough about food to write a little about itrnand then, no pun intended, they fed off of each other.

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So I was writingrnabout food and I was cooking and I had to cook in order to write better aboutrnfood, so there's incentive to cook more which gave me more to write about. There you have it. I still have not ever had any formalrntraining.

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Question: What are some basic techniques thatrnnovice chefs can use?

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MarkrnBittman: Well, let'srnjust distinguish between chefs and cooks because I think this isrnimportant. A chef is a person -- Irnknow the word is thrown around a lot but a chef is a person who runs thernrestaurant. So, people who cook atrnhome are cooks. There's nothingrnwrong with that. People who likernto cook are cooks and I think that's a word that's been sadly denigrated and Irnthink it’s a lovely word. It's anrnimportant word. So what are thernmost experienced -- what are the most important techniques for shall we sayrnnovice cooks?

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Well, reading Irnthink is probably very important technique because probably the best way tornlearn how to cook remains getting a couple of decent cook books and workingrnyour way through them and paying attention to what they're asking and learningrna few of the terms and it's such an easy – it's so much easier than playingrntennis, for example, that it's just a matter of starting to do it and thenrndoing it over and over again until you kind of get it.

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