Who's a better cook? You or your mum?

The other day my mother phoned me to ask me if she could use quinoa flakes to make a dish that clearly required just the plain old quinoa grain. I was thrilled, it was a personal victory. My mother is a brilliant cook.  She can outcook any member of my family by a kilogram of potatoes. Except me.

When she fumbled about the quinoa I knew I had her. My mum can roast the flavor into any meal, she can turn out the perfect scone and her pasta is sublime. But she kind of got stuck when she realised how good she was. It wasn’t like her skills deteriorated or that she could no longer whip up her famous culinary delights it was just that she never ventured away from them. Quinoa was never something she cooked with so it never made its way into her repertoire.

When my mother makes a salad it’s tasty and delicious but it generally doesn’t venture far from lettuce, carrots, tomato and cucumber. And even with the most spectacular dressing it is still lettuce, carrots, tomato and cucumber.  When I make a salad I also use lettuce but I add nuts or roast vegetables, or both. I put in seeds and quinoa, I even make a salad that has caramel popcorn in it. It’s amazing.

And that’s just a basic salad.  I don’t think my mother would ever rustle up sushi, teriyaki chicken or a blackened salmon for dinner.  She certainly never kept truffle oil in her cupboard or memorized the recipe for  Turkish Delight ice cream. These are all foods that I cook on a regular basis (especially the Turkish Delight ice cream).

A British study recently carried out across two generations shows that modern mothers know 25 per cent more recipes than their counterparts in the 1970s and 1980s and they are far more adept at making exotic foreign meals.

The Telegraph in the UK reports:

On average they know 21 recipes off by heart and, although they favour British cuisine, they are happy to try more difficult international dishes.

Women aged 20 to 35 serve up meals such as Mexican fajitas, Chinese vegetable stir-fry and curries to their families regularly, it emerged.

Thirty or so years ago their mothers’ staple dishes included meat and two veg, pork or lamb chops and shepherd’s pie.

The study of 1,000 mothers found that those in the 1970s and 1980s had a repertoire of 17 dishes which they knew well and cooked on a regular basis for their children.

While today’s mothers cook many of the meals they enjoyed as children, they have a more varied menu, which includes home-made pasta dishes and home-made pizzas.

Would these results translate in Australia?

A recent article in the SMH reported that 51 per cent of people say they rotate between a repertoire of five meals or fewer and 25 per cent have just three recipes up their sleeves.

I am not convinced. Is this because it is so hard to decide what to cook rather than doing the actual cooking? Do we cook a wider repertoire than our mothers did by relying heavily on recipe books and cooking shows? I do. But I’m still a better cook than my mother (although I hope she doesn’t read this because she won’t agree.)

Are you a more adventurous cook than your mother was ? How many recipes in your repertoire ?