Some of them have to disappoint you. Three young women visiting Italy decided to try their hand at cooking, apparently for the first time ever.
According to Italian newspaper La Nazione, three 20-year-olds bought some pasta and took it back to their apartment in Florence, with high hopes for an authentic Italian dinner. But instead of boiling several quarts of water before adding the pasta—you know, step one on every set of back-of-the-box instructions ever—they emptied the dry noodles directly into the pot. (Sigh…)
Because spaghetti isn’t meant to be seared, it caught on fire immediately. And because people who don’t understand how to fix pasta also don’t know what to do with stovetop flames, the students had to call the fire department.
I…I mean…they can’t…OK, words fail me. How can you reach the age of 20 and not understand that pasta needs water? These are college students, they must have at least been exposed to ramen, right?
But for every act of ignorance, there must be a graceful response. The Italian reaction makes me happy.
“As a generation and as a Florentine, I feel guilty, I feel there was a strong communication deficit on the part of this city”. The patron of Cibréo and C.BIO Fabio Picchi said so. “What have we transmitted to these girls who came here to study and in a moment of rest they tried to become the most typical dish of our gastronomic culture?”. The girls justified themselves: “we put the pasta on the fire without the water, we thought it was cooked like that”. Does it make you smile? “In fact – says Picchi – there is little to laugh about. It ‘s too easy to make the joke. Instead we must reflect: why did something like this happen with the Italian dish par excellence? “Did we show the world too many fireworks?” It may be – concludes Fabio Picchi. And it is for this reason that I decided to give 4 hours of Italian cooking lessons for free to the three American girls protagonists of the fact. Together with two of my extraordinary cooks will have lunch in our restaurant. Meanwhile they will teach them the simple basics that if well done are very good. I think this can be useful to them, but also to us. Understanding is always – with simplicity and cognition – what is beautiful and necessary “.
Magnifico!
As in the immortal words of Brainfart: “where two or three come together in my name, there I will be among them.”
(Tries not to think of all the times I did something outrageously brainless.)
So THREE people made it 20 years on this earth without being taught how to cook? What the hell were their parents doing? It saddens me to think about what other skills these young adults were not taught and now will have to learn the hard way.
When I was but knee-high to a grasshopper, my folks made me and my siblings cook dinner for the family one night a week each. I’m guessing it was so Mom and Dad (mostly Mom) could catch a break, and it had the happy consequence of forcing us kids to learn how to read recipes and cook, over and over again, so we can actually do it as adults. (And sew, wash clothes, clean, repair cars, and…)
Pasta infiammare. Delizioso!
Viva l’Italia !
The first part of the story reminds me of an incident in England I read about yonks ago (from memory & paraphrasing): Two(?) young ladies were observed shopping for rice. They were eying the instant-pot type stuff, and noticed some bags of (much cheaper) rice nearby. One holding up a bag, “Like how do you cook this?” The other, holding up a pot, “Like I don’t know, but like this looks like it might be easy, like, Ok, maybe easy like.” (I believe they eventually bought the instant-pot stuff. I do hope they knew how to use a kettle…)
─────────────────────────
I know I can get quite confused by some things here in France, where for some inexplicable reason they insist on labeling things en Français. However, with exceptions, it’s not so much the instructions which baffle, but the ingredients — up to, and including, what precisely it is I’ve purchased. It usually works out Ok, the last time I can remember having something inedible was a when I decided to try a “new” brand of instant soup as a snack: Empty packet into mug, add boiling water, stir, and… YUCK! The immediate problem was I hadn’t paid too much attention to the precise ingredients, and so missed the point the stuff was excessively salty. From memory, somewhere around two grams of the stuff (WHO recommends less than 5g of salt per day (less than 2g sodium per day)). I never add salt to my cooking / food in the first place, so that übersalty instant soup, already being way over the top, was so far in excess of my tastes it could “season the curvature of the Universe” (abusing a Terry Pratchett joke).
Of course, that instant soup brand — I later checked other packets (“flavours”), and they were all “salt plus other things you’d never be able to taste due to yet more salt” flavoured — shouldn’t have been so salty in the first place. It wasn’t a selling point, the excessive salt was hidden away in the required labeling. My guess it was an attempt to disguise the taste of the other ingredients, presumably because the manufacturer wasn’t using enough (to cut costs) or using very very cheap forms (to cut costs).
What a wonderfully gracious response. And because of that, these young adults will learn how to cook and enjoy the process as well as the eating, rather than being embarrassed and discouraged from ever learning to cook.
Wife once burned rice. My pot still has the really neat mottling from the incident.
My son’s fiance does not know how to cook. She grew up in a household in which take-out/delivery food along with canned everything was normal. Boy and I are teaching her to cook.
Cooking is a skill. Like any skillset, it can be taught. And in most US schools, cooking used to be taught. Sometimes to all students in junior high, sometimes as an elective in high school. But we have to cut something from the curriculum to pay for sports — art, music, culinary arts, etc. Some pupils will get really good at it, some won’t. But the basic skills will be there.
We old people tend to assume that today’s kids grow up doing the same things we did. And we are wrong. Just like the old people who looked at me back in the 1970s and wondered what the hell was wrong with me because I didn’t have the same interests and the same skill set that the old people had.
Bravo to the restaurant for the cooking classes. Sounds to me like a real opportunity — offer cooking classes to all.
A friend of mine used to teach a cooking class for the cooking-challenged at community college.
He had to teach his students how the crack an egg among other complicated procedures. Most of his class, composed heavily of students of the community college, had never cracked an egg. And than was 25–30 year ago.
I don’t remember the details but he’ probably’ progressed to how to cook spaghetti and how to open a jar of spaghetti sauce and heat it up somewhere about mid-class. There was no way he was going to try to teach them how to make the sauce!
With the advent of helicopter parents the situation in probably worse today. I swear I saw/heard a comment a mother made last year about cutting up her 13 year old son’s meat. No indication of a physical problem necessitating this.
For that matter, how many families still do a lot of cooking together? How many families still do much if any “real” cooking?
, Italians have responded to the incident with a combination of embarrassment for the students
I believe that translates more accurately as “wild laughter” and a sense of cultural superiority.
I’d be perfectly happy to set fire to anything up to and including my own hair in exchange for 4 hours of free cookery lessons plus lunch from Fabio Picchi.
Three. Three 20-year-olds. Three 20-year-old Americans. Three 20 year-old American college students.
And not one in those three 20 year-old American college students knew that pasta doesn’t spontaneously get soft and wet when placed in a heated pot without water?
Blinking. Blinking in astonishment.
The kids were probably liberal arts majors, maybe even biology. If they’d been chemistry or physics majors, this tragedy could have been avoided.
Canned pasta. It’s a USAian thing. I believe I saw it once in England, but otherwise have not had to running shrieking from a shop (over that, at any rate, let’s not mention the canned tortillas…).
I’ve also never seen canned olives except in the States. And yes, they are as horrible as they sound.
Whilst certain specialty MUSHROOMS! are available in jars (even here in France), canned mushrooms are another USAian thing. See above about horrible.
I’m surprised they bought dry pasta in Italy. One of the best things about food shopping in Italy is the excellent selection of fresh pasta.
Reminds me of my American housemate Ryan.
To be fair, Ryan was so much of a walking cliché of ignorant US American that even the other walking clichés of ignorant US Americans were embarrassed on his behalf.
For the whole term, we tried to teach him that no, you cannot pour your leftovers into the sink.
He once tried to show me how to cook “real Italian food” because “in the USA, we’ve got the Italians!” (I guess Italy is empty now.) It was spaghetti (to his credit, he did use water), ketchup and untoasted white sandwich.
—
I think what you’re noticing here is that nowadays the young girls are as pampered as the young boys always have been.
My husband knew neither how to cook nor how to use a washing machine when we moved together and that was considered just as normal as the expectation that I know both and do it. I’m not 40 yet and he isn’t 50 yet.
He still doesn’t know how to cook, but if I do the washing once a month it’s a lot.
Callinectes@12, If they were insufficiently skilled to use water, then frying the fresh stuff wouldn’t work any better.
I concur fresh pasta — my experience is mostly S.France, not Italy — is all over the place, and quite good. It’s so all over the place you can’t move without slipping on some. In fact, I’ve got some (tortellini stuffed with parma ham), along with some fresh MUSHROOMS! and garlic, purchased just today in the morning market, to be ate as soon as I can’t wait any longer… provided I don’t slip on it first!
What actually really bothers me about young people are two things:
1. It’s not that they failed to learn X, Y or Z. It’s that they have the great big world of knowledge at their disposal and don’t use it. What would we have given as teens, in our 20s, to simply be able to look up information wherever we are? While in high school looking up shit meant going down two stairs to get my grandpa’s encyclopedia. When I graduated from high school I got an encyclopedia on CD ROM and I was HAPPY.
These girls could just have taken out their phones and said “Google, how do I cook pasta”.
2. When did I get so old that I started to complain about “kids these days”?
Emphasis here on young children. As I and others can attest, the gender-asymmetrical† early-life cooking experience does not necessarily continue on — I could certainly cook, and not just “the basics”, well before University.
† Is it gender-asymmetrical or sex-asymmetrical? Speculating, the asymmetrical early-life cooking experiences are heavily influenced by the parent’s / guardian’s perception of the child, not the child’s own perception / identity. That is, someone who physically is a girl (sex) but who self-identifies as a boy (gender), is, speculating, more likely to be treated as a girl and hence be exposed to cooking (much) earlier then if it were the other way around (whether or not the boy identifies as a girl).
(I’m probably babbling here, so I’ll shut up…)
Crispy pan-fried noodles are a much beloved dish in many parts of China. I confess that I was ignorant as to whether the noodles are always boiled first, or if some cooking methods go straight to pan. The top suggested recipes actually don’t mention boiling, but I think it’s because they use pre-cooked noodles, and think it’s too obvious to actually say so.
Suggested improvement.
My (current) favourite example: Last fall I was talking in the pub to two ships officers (captain and first mate). Both had been using their mobile phones to visit some interesting sites on the web, including the captain’s hobby, a children’s petting zoo. Anyways, we got to talking, and hair furor’s election came up, specifically losing the general but winning the electoral college. The USAian electoral college makes no sense to anybody, so these two chaps (neither from the States) were trying to make sense of it.
I gave them an outline of how it works. The hardest problem I had was in convincing them there were 50 states, they variously said 51 and 52. It was massively frustrating, they simply didn’t believe there were 50: It was either 51 or 52.
And all the while there were these web-capable mobile phones sitting there…
(I’m wondering now if what was confusing the issue is DC, which is not a state but has three electors?)
I had a roommate in college who wouldn’t eat anything but instant ramen. Not because he couldn’t afford or didn’t know how to fix anything different, he just didn’t bother.
But he cooked them in a Teflon-coated nonstick saucepan, and stirred them with a fork. The saucepan was ruined by the end of his first week, though I doubt he’ll ever have constipation again for the rest of his life.
blf
We’re talking averages. While of course there are boys raised to know their way around the household, boys who are expected to contribute, on average they are less so. Still today there is data suggesting that boys get less choreas than girls, different chores, are more likely to get paid for doing chores, get paid more for doing the same chores (yes, the wage gap starts that early).
The idea that a man would pass from the care of his mother to the care of his wife is pretty common and only retreating slowly. Still today there are many bachelors, widowers, divorcees who show up for the “menu du jour” every day because they can’t boil water.
Whenever I want to demonstrate how “equal” we are I mention that my husband does the laundry. This will get me jealous looks from the women who live with men and abhorred looks from the men.
Nowadays there’s several factors:
One of them parents who think that “doing everything for their child” is going to help their child.
The other one is related to what I talked about above: while many women have picked up on the breadwinning side, few men have picked up on the housekeeping side. A lot of the complaints about how families don’t cook any more come down to shaming women.
But when you’re struggling with your job convenience and take away are what keeps you alive.
Personally I think that school should pick up the tap: home economics for all. Make it a graduating requirement.
Giliell @15:
Or, as we saw with the young man who learned how to distil spirits, they might use it just enough to put themselves (and possibly others) in great jeopardy.
I’m also quite surprised that apparently none of these people had ever seen pasta being cooked. Movies, sitcoms? Maybe some cooking basics should be included in video games.
It’s not just water. When I was 23, living in an underground bunker in Vietnam eating C-rations, I received a package from home with a bag of spaghetti and cans of meat sauce. I filled the coffee pot with water (we didn’t have a regular pot) and put it on the hotplate to boil. Then I dropped in the spaghetti. All of it. Who knew spaghetti expanded when it cooked? I ended up with so much cooked spaghetti that we had to use our helmet covers as bowls. Handed out spaghetti with meat sauce to everybody in the vicinity.
I don’t mean to sound sexist, but like the three women in this story, I only met two female students in my 3 years in residence that demonstrated they could cook as well as I could. Most of the others limited themselves to salads or muffins, and I even met a few that seemed quite proud that they didn’t know how to cook. I always considered it a personal survival skill myself. Another one of my female friends even destroyed Kraft Mac & Cheese by adding double the amount of milk and butter specified (this was when you added 1/4 cup of each), and making a nasty M&C soup. I can only assume that the three women in the story never had to cook for themselves and were waited on hand and foot at home.
If you are trying to teach kids to cook, I suggest you start with desserts, in order to generate the interest, and then move up to real food.
@ Usernames!, #2
I can’t speak to the experiences of any of these three women, but I didn’t know how to cook at 20, either.
My father, you see, expected dinner to be on the able by the time he got home from work at 5 PM, no exceptions. My mother got home from work at 3:30PM, so there was no time for lessons. I wasn’t actually allowed to use the kitchen (or any major appliances) at all until my late teens. Since the price of disobedience was to get the shit beaten out of me, you better believe I obeyed.
There were also no cooking classes in the school I attended, as the necessary equipment had broken down long ago, and no money was available to repair/replace it.
So yeah, I have indeed had to learn how to do things the hard way. The first time I made pasta (I was around 20 or 21), I did know to put on water. I had watched my mom cook occasionally, so I had some idea of how things worked. I even knew how much, since the directions were on the back of the macaroni box.
What I didn’t know was how high to turn up the stove. I started on low. I bumped it up a notch, every little bit, as nothing seemed to be happening. After more than an hour I gave up, as my water was barely above room temperature. I got a book called How to Boil Water that Christmas, and I still use it from time to time.
It’s true that I could have looked things up online (this would have been at least 12 years ago), but I’d grown up with the mantra ‘never trust the internet’ pounded into my head by every teacher. If I wouldn’t trust the internet for a source on a research paper, then I wasn’t about to trust it for anything involving fire or boiling water.
I also had to learn how to do my own laundry, teach myself to sew (poorly), and how to clean. I know nothing about cars, since I can’t drive, but I can build furniture and plant/maintain a garden.
tl;dr- Maybe they had shitty parents. Maybe they had shitty schools. Maybe other people’s lived experiences are different from yours.
Is there anything it’s okay to criticize someone for?
Stuff that’s unequivocally their own fault, rather than the result of the arbitrary circumstances of their life.
My father tended to cook 95% of the food when I was growing up. Still does, to be honest. He actually likes cooking things, which I find weird, but I won’t deny how useful it is.
Thing is, he likes everything to be done precisely the way he always does it. And if you’re cooking something while he’s in the house he has to come and stick his nose in and tell you how to do it “properly”. If you go across the room for even a second to wash something up you’ll find he’s put something in there that you didn’t want but he thinks is essential to the food you’re making anyway (usually a whole onion, enough pepper to kill a rhino or half the garlic in the realm). Suffice to say this made me so angry every time I tried to cook something that I never learned anything about cooking from him at all.
At university I generally ate in Hall, or made sandwiches. Sandwiches are not considered a dinner food at home, so the forbidden thrill of having sandwiches for dinner was rather delightful. I didn’t have a kitchen when I was living in college, of course, so it was kind of my only option. Ever since I have only occasionally had a kitchen to experiment in, but when I have I have learned to make pasta. We never really get pasta at home, because dad doesn’t like it, so I was well into my twenties before I had to work out how one turns these hard crunchy things into edible form. I could have looked it up, but that would have taken all the fun of discovery out of life. I figured that water was probably involved somewhere, given that pasta dishes tended to look wetter than what I had in front of me, but soaking the things in cold water didn’t achieve the desired effect. After an abortive attempt to microwave the water warm I decided that maybe the kettle was a better option, given that heating water was kind of its raison d’etre. So I boiled the water and left the pasta in the boiling water for an hour, until it was cold. This achieved the desired consistency, but nobody had told me that as the starch comes out of them it sticks them to the saucepan. So I ended up with it all stuck on. Several experiments later and I realised that stirring the water prevented this from happening, and also that softness only took ten or fifteen minutes to happen, and if I put the meat and sauce on immediately I wouldn’t have to warm them up separately again. Bonus!
Anyway, now I have four variations on pasta I can cook (with bacon or chicken and covered with either passata or carbonara sauce), plus sandwiches. So I think I know enough cooking now.
My wife and I had a long-term house guest once who made fried rice. By frying rice out of the bag. It was a lot like fried gravel, but small….
So the guy sentences the three not-so-bright women in their 20s to spend 4 hours with him. Alternate read: to pick up an Italian guy burn some pasta and act stupid. Wasn’t this an episode of Three’s Company?
Aw, if Picchi isn’t going to make fun of them, I don’t think I will either. After all, they know they messed up and now they’re learning better. I wish more people recovered from their screwups that well.
The three young women have had their education broadened! Lucky them, many don’t get the chance to learn useful hand skills.
blf @11:
Canned pasta (usually spaghetti in tomato sauce) was the default when I was growing up in the UK. I have sentimental memories of it on toast. It’s still on supermarket shelves near the baked beans.
blf:
Canned ravioli (in tomato sauce ) were/ are a very popular thing in Germany since the 1960s.
Canned olives are to be had in Germany today, too. Olives in jars, olives in cans, olives in plastic packagings, anything goes.
Of course, you can buy your olives in a small Turkish/Greek shop, by weight and put extra for you into a small plastic cup. But I’m afraid these olives came to the shop in very big CANS.
wereatheist@33, The horrible USAian canned olives I was referring to are small black olives, pit removed, usually sliced, and packed in a watery liquid. (An example.) They tend to be rubbery and near tasteless. The texture can also be a bit wonky. They are olives only in the sense they presumably originated near an olive tree. They are nothing like the plastic-packed(or jars) whole olives.
I’m well aware the (usually whole) olives in the local outdoor markets may have arrived in cans (albeit locally I think many arrive in multi-litre plastic buckets?). That’s not the point. It’s that specific USAian incarnation, called “olives”, which have only a passing resemblance — including little-to-none of the taste & texture — to the Mediterranean foodstuff.
So it’s canned, sliced olives (you can get these here, too)? I have no idea what Americans use them for. Whole olives used to be put into martinis, amirite?
Sliced olives might be handy to sprinkle onto a hand-made pizza. But few Germans make pizzas. You buy them complete, frozen or have them delivered.
Ha! But Mario’s canned sliced olives is a product of Spain. And that’s not even a lie.
My wife’s original family was matriarchal (her mother was highly intelligent, the matron of a major hospital in our capital city, and an accomplished pianist; her father a humble polymath). Her mother insisted all her children learn how to cook, including her two sons, and they did so enthusiastically.
My own family was neither patriarchal nor matriarchal. The males of the family never learned to cook, and the females only later on. This was despite my father being an excellent Cook. It was actually a joy to watch him because he didn’t need a recipe and he didn’t use any measuring devices. His cooking had become instinctive and all his meals were delicious. It’s surprising we never followed in his footsteps.
So, after we got married, my wife taught me how to cook and I cooked one meal per week. And, when the four kids came along, they also had a cooking day each. They remain enthusiastic cooks. Our sons are actually better cooks than were any of their girlfriends. One is now married to a girl who, at nearly thirty years of age (much older than he is), still cannot cook.
That was my first thought. Kids these days Google everything. My son plays piano – taking after his grandmother who taught him to play and then left him her piano when she died a few years ago – and he is always googling for tunes to play and how to play them now that his grandmother is not around. He has constructed an isolation tank via Google. And recently he attached a motor to his bicycle using Google as a guide.
Our 18 year old grandson has moved into our upstairs. He’s a bit of a picky eater, but he does know how to cook what he likes for himself, and does so. He also does his own laundry.
Unfortunately, he’s not so great at washing his own dishes or cleaning his room. I don’t really mind doing the dishes that he leaves in the sink, so I do that for him. About once a month, Grandpa reminds him that we really don’t want mice and/or bugs in the upstairs rooms, so he dutifully drags a few bags of trash out of his room.
After reading about these three young ladies, I suppose we can count ourselves lucky.
@34 blf
Ah, canned black olives. How that brings back the nightmares.
You can buy them in Canada also. My mother, who was American, used to serve them on grand occasions. They are extremely nasty.
wereatheist@35, As far as I know, the damn things are used for almost any (cooking) purpose, including pizza. They’re so disgusting you “can’t” simply eat them like one does with whole olives from the market (or plastic pack). Here in S.France, whole olives (usually with pit) are a common bar-snack (there are even vending machines selling them as such), or as a hors d’oeuvre in restaurants.
The idea of using the sort of USAian canned olives I’m whingeing about in a martini is, frankly, nauseating. (Also, from memory, martini olives tend to be a green variety, which from memory tend to be sold in jars or plastic packs in the States.) Which reminds me of another thing: In the States, outside of specialist shops, olives are either simply “black” or “green”. Wandering through the market this morning, I saw specific named varieties of olives, in a variety of hues. I suspect people would look at me funny (well, funnier than normal) if I asked just for some noire or verte olives.
Here in S.France, olives on pizzas are usually whole (frequently including pits). And quite tasty(the olives, not their pits!). I’ve never seen a frozen, restaurant, or handmade pizza use anything else.
Outside of California (primarily), olives aren’t grown in the States. So I am not all all surprised Spanish-grown olives are tortured and canned. Also, did you notice how small (2.2oz, c.60g (not sure if that includes the watery liquid?)) and expensive (11$) that example can was? I currently have c.300g (estimated) of whole olives (admittedly with pits but no liquid, only a trace of olive oil & seasonings) purchased for somewhat less from a market vendor (last week?).
blf:
oh yes, I don’t drink that stuff :)
It was ca. 64g of olives (not brine). And the price was for 8 cans.
We can all laugh at the fact that 3 people somehow made it to adult hood without ever cooking spaghetti. It is mind boggling, but they can’t be blamed for the way their parents raised them.
And yes, the response from the authorities is gracious and kind. However, it does not fit the glaringly large underlying problem here.
Its just a cheap shot to make fun of them for not knowing how to make spaghetti. The real problem with these people is that they didn’t know what to do and apparently DID NOT DO ANY FUCKING RESEARCH BEFORE THROWING FOOD ONTO A FIRE. You don’t just “YOLO” something that actually has the power to demonstrate the truth of that phrase. I have watched the cooks at my work’s cafeteria cook a quesadilla in from of me a dozen times, and I still googled some recipes before I tried making my own.
Ignorance is curable, but STUPID is terminal. 4 hours of cooking lessons doesn’t fix that.
Mark,
No need for SHOUTING AND SWEARING. :)
I’m sure there’s a lot of things these three young women can do well. They obviously didn’t know how to cook spaghetti and stuffed it up further by not thinking of using Google. Also it wasn’t just one of them, but all three. Presumably they’re not the only three young women in the whole wide world who don’t know how to cook spaghetti and who wouldn’t think to google it in their situation.
NOTE: I had to look up “YOLO” :)
But, seriously, I doubt that their lives were ever in danger or that they could reasonably have anticipated such a result from the sort of activity they were engaged in.
Such as?
When they get home, can they still buy guns?
wereatheist
I can confirm that.
There are always some in the cellar for emergencies.
That I cannot confirm. While I don’t make it often (it is a lot of work and takes a lot of time if you make everything from scratch), we do make it and so does everyone I know.
Azkyroth
That probably depends on whether you, personally, are the one criticising or being criticised. I remember a similar discussion where you threw a hissy fit about people wondering why some folks cannot make tomato sauce.
Dunc
Let’s not let them off the hook that easily. Whatever the reason why they grew up like they did, and I’m assuming extreme pampering because after all they are able to go to Italy, they are not 12 years old any more. That means they have a responsibility to fix certain things themselves and cannot excuse those with “in my family we had the meals prepared by a maid*”.
Also they set shit on fire.
*In my experience it takes effort to keep kids that ignorant because most of them want to help with cooking
Well, that’s actually a fascinating philosophical question, but it’s one that I doubt we’re going to solve in a comments thread, so I’m just gonna punt. I don’t know. Make your own mind up.
Siggy @ 17: Asian fried noodles are generally boiled and then deep-fried in hot oil (for the ‘crispy fried noodles’ version). Or otherwise heated in hot water until they reach the pliable stage, and drained before being introduced to the frypan.
I’ll admit I boggled a bit about someone reaching the age of majority without knowing how to cook pasta, but then again, the first time I tried Mexican food I was in my mid-twenties (it took a while to reach Australia) and I suspect the version of Nachos I make would make any genuine Mexican from Mexico shudder. So possibly unfamiliarity was part of the problem. I suspect these young women are each going to find themselves with a bundle of (unsolicited) links to various cooking blogs and “how-to” tutorials on YouTube and so on. Hopefully they’ll retain their enthusiasm for cookery in future.
Somewhere in London, several years ago, there was a major fire in a high-rise dwelling. The men in there were trying to heat a tin of beans on a toaster. In the explosion, the whole apartment went up. Fortunately, no one died (iirc).
That one was a toxic combination of a little stupidity and a lot of poverty.
OK, I was slightly wrong: in keeping with the theme of pasta and dire foodstuff in tins, it was actually tinned spaghetti . Google cached page