Eric is Teaching Freestyle Cooking 101
"A series of educational dinner parties"
Eric @choosy_mom has long been one of my favorite twitter mutuals for his gorgeous foodpics and insightful foodposting. Now he’s teaching his fourth cohort of Freestyle Cooking 101 at Fractal in New York (if you’re there, want to learn how to feed yourself better, and free on Wednesday evenings March 5-March 26, please apply here tonight!). We talked about learning to cook and learning to teach.
There are tons of great cooking classes that teach discrete skills, techniques, recipes cuisines. Eric aims at a broader mindset shift. “Overall, what I’m trying to teach is a utilitarian philosophy of cooking. Economy, making things tasty, putting in effort when the return is worth it…at a fine dining restaurant, everything is so painstakingly prepared, for a 20% tastier product. That’s not what I’m trying to do. I want people to feel confident they can cook a meal that’s better than takeout, for less time, less money—and healthier.” You might recognize that ethos from An Everlasting Meal and Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat—two cookbooks that Eric recommends if you haven’t read them already. Or you might be thinking, as Eric says, “This is what mothers do, all the time.”
So instead of starting with a recipe, Eric starts with a kitchen. Literally, his kitchen. “I tried doing it at a larger community space, but the kitchen wasn’t set up like a real place where people live and eat.” He shows his class how to set up a liveable kitchen, how to grocery shop, where to grocery shop—all of the work around cooking that cooking classes and recipes don’t normally include.
“My students tend to be people who spend 90% of time doing stuff that they’re really good and practiced at, they don’t do stuff very often anymore that they’re bad at. The class is about having a container where you can fuck up. You’re gonna burn a bunch of stuff, you’re gonna undercook stuff, oversalt, undersalt, that’s all part of the process of building the intuition. At home, if you’re an unconfident cook, you’ll muster up the courage to try something, you’ll get ingredients, and when you fuck it up you won’t have the stuff to start again. Then you feel like a terrible cook. I’ve set up the class environment so people can recover from mistakes. If you overcook something, get a new pan, let’s start over. I am the guardrail.”
Applications for Freestyle Cooking 101 close tonight. Apply here!