Make friends with food. Hit the kitchen

You want to learn to be a better cook? Can you do it by opening a book? Food authority and cookbook author Mitchell Davis says most people learn kitchen skills, or hone the ones they have, in different ways, including turning to cookbooks.

However they choose to learn, the most important factors are interest and desire.

But to many Americans, Davis says, the idea of learning to cook can be a very hard sell. They see food as an enemy: It can make them overweight or unhealthy.

Which is actually the perfect reason to head into the kitchen, Davis writes in his latest book: "The way to develop a healthy relationship to food is not to pretend it doesn't exist. It's to embrace it, live with it, learn about it, and enjoy it ... The easiest, most effective way to accomplish all of that is to cook."

It's the only way you'll know what you, and those you feed, are really eating.

Davis is vice president of the James Beard Foundation, based in New York. His new book is Kitchen Sense: More Than 600 Recipes to Make You a Great Home Cook.

Q. The subtitle of your book mentions a "great home cook." What does that mean? What is a great home cook?

A. It's not about impressing, about trying to outdo or trying to overdo. It's just knowing. It's about being able to put together some things that are just tasty and satisfying. A great home cook has taken some time to think about what they're going to make, whether they've been shopping or whether they've got food in their pantry. It isn't just an afterthought.

It means that if I'm invited to their house for dinner, they're going to put together a few things that are just really yummy. Maybe they've bought a nice cheese and they've bought the bread, and they've made just one really good thing. Sometimes knowing when you don't have to cook is as good as knowing when you do have to cook. And I do think everyone can do it. Especially today, when there's so much access to good things, good ingredients.

Q. Can your cookbook, or any cookbook, really teach someone how to cook?

A. People learn in different ways. Some people need to be told things, some people need to be shown things and some people can read things and learn them.

When I walk into a bookstore and I see 75 cookbooks on the shelf, I wonder why I'm doing this, why I'm writing a cookbook. It's because people just hear things differently from different people in different ways. And I think that if the passion, or the tone, of a particular author can get someone excited and want to try to cook, that's important. Because if they don't have the will to try it, forget it: It's not going to happen.

Now, it's the author's ultimate responsibility to make sure a recipe is going to work, and that if that person doesn't know anything about cooking, there had better be enough information there to help them. If they look at a recipe and don't understand it, you've lost them. They're never going to try it.

One of the things about writing a cookbook is that you realise there's a whole recipe format and recipe jargon that you, as a cook, know instinctively. But not everyone knows what it means to sweat a vegetable, or even to saute, or what does dice mean?

I paid real attention to what I would do when I was cooking so I could explain it clearly; so I could write the recipe as if, if I were standing next to you when you were cooking, this is what I would say to you.

Q. In the introduction to your book, you mention a disconnect between people's growing knowledge about food and their inability to cook it. Tell us about that.

A. My experience in New York, and I think it's true across US, is that people know a whole lot about food, but they don't know how to cook. There's this whole world of interest in food, and I think it's wonderful, but I don't think all those same people are getting into the kitchen.

One of the fundamental pieces of knowledge that's missing is: What do you do with food? How do you turn ingredients into dinner, or into something delicious to eat?

Q. If Americans are so interested in food, why aren't they cooking?

For years in America, we have made people think that they don't have to cook. When you go to a grocery store, everything's made, everything's ready to heat up, all the chickens are already cut up.

Because of the popularity of chefs, chef cooking has become very popular. But chef cooking is not home cooking. You go to a restaurant, and all the dishes are very complicated. People at home have tried to take those complicated dishes and dumb them down, instead of just finding things that would be easy to cook. We have it mixed up.

We think "easy" means it has only three ingredients, or it takes only five seconds. I just don't believe that. I have a recipe for baked beans in my book: You put 10 things into a pot and put it into the oven, and when you wake up, it's done. That's not complicated. You could look at that recipe and say, Wow, this takes 12 hours to make, I'm not going to do that. But as long as you have a recipe that's going lead to a delicious result, it's not a waste of time.

Q. What would you tell someone who wants to learn to be a great home cook?

A. Start with simple, basic recipes: Make a pasta with a simple tomato sauce and don't touch a jar. Try to make a good vinaigrette that has three ingredients. See that you can do satisfying, simple things very easily. And then from there, from pasta or salad or even a simple beef stew, you start to mess around.

Eating is part of cooking - paying attention to what things taste like.

Not everything you make is going to be good. The quality of your ingredients is important. Olive oil is a great example. Everyone goes to Italy and thinks the food there is wonderful, and they try to make it here, and it isn't the same.

Fundamentally, the difference is the olive oil. I always recommend that people use a better one. I know it can be expensive, but if you make a salad with a good olive oil and another with a bad one, it's amazing how much better the good one is. The difference between a tomato sauce made with a can of cheap tomatoes and a better-quality can of tomatoes is amazing. You haven't done anything different, and already you've improved the way you cook.

You're never just making a recipe; it's part of a process of learning to cook. You've got to pay attention. If you try a recipe and it doesn't turn out well, you don't think, oh, I did this and it didn't work. You think about how you did it before and how you'll do it next time. It's not just a relationship between the cook and the recipe on the page; it's between the cook and all the recipes you've ever made.

Everyone says they have no time to cook, but if you look at the statistics, they spend hours watching television, or playing computer games. So make it a priority, and you can find the time.

And then just have fun.