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This really isn't gatekeeping! But if you're learning to cook there are fundamental things you need to learn. This is like the simplest sentences of learning a

This really isn't gatekeeping! But if you're learning to cook there are fundamental things you need to learn. This is like the simplest sentences of learning a new language on Duolingo here, it's not some crazy term. Literally week 1 in many cooking schools, maybe week 2 after stocks. If you're trying to teach people cooking, you want to be taught the fundamental key steps to follow recipes no? How many start with butter, thicken with flour, loosen with milk? That's bechamel :)

tclancy 4y ago
Mother sauces is absolutely gatekeeping. You can get pretty far, and even know how to turn a roux into a béchamel without ever knowing it’s a mother sauce or that there are others.
- EddySchauHai 4y ago
  We're talking about a course on cooking here, how is it gatekeeping to talk about cooking 101 subjects?
  - acaloiar 4y ago
    For what it's worth, you're the only one talking about a cooking course in this thread.
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      I wish more were! That's what I was hoping parsnip.ai was. I was really excited actually.
      - mizzao 4y ago
        OP here. a16z has a thesis that education will go from 1. teaching in a class and taking a test, to 2. teaching in online videos and taking an online test, to 3. modular, choose your own adventure, at your own pace, software-supplemented, continual learning: https://a16z.com/2020/10/16/next-gen-edtech/ https://a16z.com/2020/10/16/next-gen-edtech/ That's what we're trying to do with cooking. If we succeed, it's going to be essentially replicating an apprenticeship but you don't need to find a master.
        arcticbull 4y ago
        Can't wait! I cook pretty often and I'd love to up my game and work towards some more fine dining type dishes. I'd pay for an app that did that.
  - dandelany 4y ago
    It's not cooking 101, it's at least cooking 102 or 103. I know you didn't do it intentionally, but when newbies get into a new subject they are often turned off by comments like yours which boil down to "oh noo you can't do it that way, you simply must do insert term of art or else insert negative hyperbole" - it's precisely what's meant by "gatekeeping". If I told my girlfriend a million Italians were crying because she made lasagna wrong she'd probably slap me. It also gets into the complaint about cultural specificity from the original comment. It might be Cooking 101 - for French cuisine. But to insist people learn to make the French mother sauces from scratch before eg. tacos or curry seems a bit too narrow-minded for "Cooking 101" generally speaking. I think "Salt Fat Acid Heat" has the right idea here. edit PS: there is almost always a non-gatekeepy way to say the exact same thing. "In my experience, a homemade bechamel adds an incredible homemade taste to lasagna. I'd definitely recommend learning about the French 'mother sauces' sooner rather than later!"
    - EddySchauHai 4y ago
      I do like Salt Fat Acid Heat too :) But I really didn't think this thread would go this way, it was clear to me OP knew his way around a kitchen and was from Europe so knew enough about Italian cooking stereotypes to understand the intended humor. Fwiw, you learn mother sauces after six weeks of knife skills at Auguste Escoffier in the US so you could definitely be right about 102 :)
      - royaltjames 4y ago
        You're doing a great job. Talking about mother sauces is definitely not gatekeeping, more like dropping knowledge on the uninitiated. It's the gateway to a vast (and in many ways overwhelming) beautiful world of classical cuisine. Some people go their entire lives 1. not making scratch hollandaise 2. knowing it is a mother sauce 3. adding to the mother sauce to make bearnaise, etc
      - bearmode 4y ago
        Honestly I don't know how using the phrase 'mother sauces' is gatekeeping, I think it's just really basic cooking. Might not know the term, but an app trying to teach you to cook should absolutely be teaching it to you. A big part of learning a new skill is learning the vocabulary to navigate that skill. It's weird to shy away from it.
  - lucideer 4y ago
    > Can you hear that noise? That's the noise of a million Italians crying. Because of you. Is this cooking 101?
  - astura 4y ago
    Mother sauces are "French cuisine 101", but not "cooking 101." A very large number of "regular" American home cooks have never made a Béchamel sauce.
    - bearmode 4y ago
      I'd say it definitely is cooking 101. They're the basis for a tremendous number of recipes over the last hundred years. Americans being ignorant isn't really an argument.
      - astura 4y ago
        It's basis for a tremendous number of recipes in French cuisine, which is only one form of cooking. If you are from Louisiana you'd think the Holy Trinity was cooking 101.
        bearmode 4y ago
        It's the basis for a tremendous number of recipes in all Western cuisine. >If you are from Louisiana you'd think the Holy Trinity was cooking 101. Yes, and you'd learn bases like soffritto/mirepoix/holy trinity as well. They are also a part of cooking 101.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  It's not gatekeeping. I wish I had someone teach me the mother sauces (or the base sauces of the French cuisine) because: - most of them are ridiculously easy - most of them go with most food - most of them are required for most food - most of them are the basis of many other sauces - they are better than store-bought ones Any recipe apart from maybe putting sliced cheese on sliced bread will be more complex than being able to make a sauce. How is it gatekeeping?
  - onionisafruit 4y ago
    It's more gate-opening than gatekeeping.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    > - most of them are required for most food Most foods, or most traditional French cuisine? I've never even heard the term, despite cooking pretty decent food for decades.
    - EddySchauHai 4y ago
      Most Western foods! I mentioned in another thread that recently I started learning Creole cooking which starts with a dark roux followed by stopping the cooking process with the holy trinity. This is very similar to espagnole mother sauce and a modified mirepoix (peppers instead of carrots). If you take a cooking course in almost any Western country it'll start with traditional French and Italian methods as a lot of cooking styles evolved from that. Certainly a lot of cooks in the 18th and 19th centuries trained in France (and Italy) taking their skills back home, not to speak of colonization by the French and Spanish. It's a fun way to learn history actually, following the influences of cooking techniques and trade. And the French were very influential here. The Spanish influenced Mexican cuisine when they conquered the Aztecs, and Spanish aristocratic chefs trained in France, so you can see modifications of classical French cuisine in Mexican prep edited to local spice profiles and ingredients. Etc... Just look at pan dulce! French cooking is the C of programming in many ways!
      - 4y ago
- atkailash 4y ago
  It’s one of the first chapters in Julia Childs’s book for a reason. It’s fundamental technique, that’s really not gatekeeping. And some recipes do it but don’t tell you that’s what you’re making. Mac and Cheese is basically a sort of béchamel, even the out of a box kind and I wouldn’t call that gatekeeping.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  "Mother sauces" is not gatekeeping lol, its an industry term. It's no more gatekeeping than "data structure." I don't understand at all, honestly - I see a term I don't know, I grab the googs and figure it out. My first reaction isn't to accuse the person who knows something I don't of gatekeeping.
  - klipt 4y ago
    - rfrey 4y ago
      It's because they're the very basic sauces that "give birth" to all the others. It's not because it's a sauce your mother used to make.
      - klipt 4y ago
        "Ancestor sauce" works fine for that and is less pointlessly gendered.
        smegsicle 4y ago
        wouldn't that make it pointlessly ungendered? do you feel that gender is inherently bad?
      - wizofaus 4y ago
        Which is not what GP was suggesting... Though personally it seems a silly thing to get hung up on. I'd be more worried about the fact that for many the archetypical professional cook/chef is a man, and in fact men make up something like 75% of those who choose such a career, when it's abundantly clear that there are zero biological advantages to being male as a chef.
    - scrollaway 4y ago
      I’ve flagged your comment because it’s essentially inviting a flame war, on top of being utterly irrelevant to the topic. 10 seconds on Wikipedia would have answered your question by the way. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_mother_sauces https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_mother_sauces The reason is that “sauce” is feminine in French. Une sauce. C’est tout. You want to talk about pointlessly gendered, as a French native I agree that the French language, as most other Romance languages, Slavic languages and several Germanic ones, are all pointlessly gendered. I am envious of English natives that don’t have to deal with knowing that a chair is feminine but a stool is masculine, a bank is feminine but a shop is masculine. Or that a book is masculine in French but feminine in Russian, and it’s the other way around for the unknown gender of a domesticated animal!!! Still I would invite you to learn more languages.
- mattkrause 4y ago
  It might be intimidating for a second (it's got an accented vowel!), but the concept actually seems welcoming. A lot of cooking is essentially variations on a theme. If you can make béchamel, you're now also only a step away from a bunch of other sauces (Mornay, Soubise, etc), simply by adding different ingredients. The technique for making béchamel is similar for espagnole and veloute, but with different liquids in the first step. Extracting out this general principle is, for me, a thousand times more comprehensible than memorizing that (((butter + flour) + milk) + onions) -> soubise but (((butter + flour) + milk) + cheese) -> mornay.
amluto 4y ago
Saying that béchamel is a fundamental thing you need to learn is quite specific to a range of European recipes and traditions. You can make lots of fantastic things, from scratch, even involving Italian food, without any mother sauces. I would argue that the real fundamental things for basic cooking are more like how to use a knife, how to sauté things, what happens to different veggies, meats, and herbs as they cook for various times and temperatures, etc. As for the mother sauces, they’re prepared ingredients that one might make at home to use in various recipes. There are plenty of other examples: stocks, various things that can be made out of eggs, various Asian sauces, hot sauces, various cooked garlic preparations, sofrito, etc. Béchamel is just one example.
asoneth 4y ago
I think we may be coming at this from different perspectives. You clearly know a lot about food and seem to enjoy it, which is fantastic! I do not cook professionally so the idea of me spending literal weeks in a cooking school or reading cooking textbooks sounds fun but also incomprehensibly decadent. My partner and I spend about three hours per week on meal planning and prep for our family, and we typically end up cleaning the kitchen concurrently with cooking. Because of this we end up cutting a lot of corners and incorporating meal kits and frozen food into our weekly rotation. If I could improve the nutrition and/or taste of my meals by spending an additional ~15 minutes a week I would consider it, so Parsnip seems like it might be relevant to me. But I assume that anyone who talks about "taking a class" or "reading a book" or "learning to make all the master sauces" is coming at food from a wildly different perspective that is probably wonderful for them but not particularly relevant to my life where I get home and have about twenty minutes (less if there's traffic) to figure out how to turn the ingredients from the fridge into something my kids will eat.

tclancy 4y ago

Mother sauces is absolutely gatekeeping. You can get pretty far, and even know how to turn a roux into a béchamel without ever knowing it’s a mother sauce or that there are others.

EddySchauHai 4y ago
We're talking about a course on cooking here, how is it gatekeeping to talk about cooking 101 subjects?
- acaloiar 4y ago
  For what it's worth, you're the only one talking about a cooking course in this thread.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    I wish more were! That's what I was hoping parsnip.ai was. I was really excited actually.
    - mizzao 4y ago
      OP here. a16z has a thesis that education will go from 1. teaching in a class and taking a test, to 2. teaching in online videos and taking an online test, to 3. modular, choose your own adventure, at your own pace, software-supplemented, continual learning: https://a16z.com/2020/10/16/next-gen-edtech/ https://a16z.com/2020/10/16/next-gen-edtech/ That's what we're trying to do with cooking. If we succeed, it's going to be essentially replicating an apprenticeship but you don't need to find a master.
      - arcticbull 4y ago
        Can't wait! I cook pretty often and I'd love to up my game and work towards some more fine dining type dishes. I'd pay for an app that did that.
- dandelany 4y ago
  It's not cooking 101, it's at least cooking 102 or 103. I know you didn't do it intentionally, but when newbies get into a new subject they are often turned off by comments like yours which boil down to "oh noo you can't do it that way, you simply must do insert term of art or else insert negative hyperbole" - it's precisely what's meant by "gatekeeping". If I told my girlfriend a million Italians were crying because she made lasagna wrong she'd probably slap me. It also gets into the complaint about cultural specificity from the original comment. It might be Cooking 101 - for French cuisine. But to insist people learn to make the French mother sauces from scratch before eg. tacos or curry seems a bit too narrow-minded for "Cooking 101" generally speaking. I think "Salt Fat Acid Heat" has the right idea here. edit PS: there is almost always a non-gatekeepy way to say the exact same thing. "In my experience, a homemade bechamel adds an incredible homemade taste to lasagna. I'd definitely recommend learning about the French 'mother sauces' sooner rather than later!"
  - EddySchauHai 4y ago
    I do like Salt Fat Acid Heat too :) But I really didn't think this thread would go this way, it was clear to me OP knew his way around a kitchen and was from Europe so knew enough about Italian cooking stereotypes to understand the intended humor. Fwiw, you learn mother sauces after six weeks of knife skills at Auguste Escoffier in the US so you could definitely be right about 102 :)
    - royaltjames 4y ago
      You're doing a great job. Talking about mother sauces is definitely not gatekeeping, more like dropping knowledge on the uninitiated. It's the gateway to a vast (and in many ways overwhelming) beautiful world of classical cuisine. Some people go their entire lives 1. not making scratch hollandaise 2. knowing it is a mother sauce 3. adding to the mother sauce to make bearnaise, etc
    - bearmode 4y ago
      Honestly I don't know how using the phrase 'mother sauces' is gatekeeping, I think it's just really basic cooking. Might not know the term, but an app trying to teach you to cook should absolutely be teaching it to you. A big part of learning a new skill is learning the vocabulary to navigate that skill. It's weird to shy away from it.
- lucideer 4y ago
  > Can you hear that noise? That's the noise of a million Italians crying. Because of you. Is this cooking 101?
- astura 4y ago
  Mother sauces are "French cuisine 101", but not "cooking 101." A very large number of "regular" American home cooks have never made a Béchamel sauce.
  - bearmode 4y ago
    I'd say it definitely is cooking 101. They're the basis for a tremendous number of recipes over the last hundred years. Americans being ignorant isn't really an argument.
    - astura 4y ago
      It's basis for a tremendous number of recipes in French cuisine, which is only one form of cooking. If you are from Louisiana you'd think the Holy Trinity was cooking 101.
      - bearmode 4y ago
        It's the basis for a tremendous number of recipes in all Western cuisine. >If you are from Louisiana you'd think the Holy Trinity was cooking 101. Yes, and you'd learn bases like soffritto/mirepoix/holy trinity as well. They are also a part of cooking 101.
dmitriid 4y ago
It's not gatekeeping. I wish I had someone teach me the mother sauces (or the base sauces of the French cuisine) because: - most of them are ridiculously easy - most of them go with most food - most of them are required for most food - most of them are the basis of many other sauces - they are better than store-bought ones Any recipe apart from maybe putting sliced cheese on sliced bread will be more complex than being able to make a sauce. How is it gatekeeping?
- onionisafruit 4y ago
  It's more gate-opening than gatekeeping.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  > - most of them are required for most food Most foods, or most traditional French cuisine? I've never even heard the term, despite cooking pretty decent food for decades.
  - EddySchauHai 4y ago
    Most Western foods! I mentioned in another thread that recently I started learning Creole cooking which starts with a dark roux followed by stopping the cooking process with the holy trinity. This is very similar to espagnole mother sauce and a modified mirepoix (peppers instead of carrots). If you take a cooking course in almost any Western country it'll start with traditional French and Italian methods as a lot of cooking styles evolved from that. Certainly a lot of cooks in the 18th and 19th centuries trained in France (and Italy) taking their skills back home, not to speak of colonization by the French and Spanish. It's a fun way to learn history actually, following the influences of cooking techniques and trade. And the French were very influential here. The Spanish influenced Mexican cuisine when they conquered the Aztecs, and Spanish aristocratic chefs trained in France, so you can see modifications of classical French cuisine in Mexican prep edited to local spice profiles and ingredients. Etc... Just look at pan dulce! French cooking is the C of programming in many ways!
    - 4y ago
atkailash 4y ago
It’s one of the first chapters in Julia Childs’s book for a reason. It’s fundamental technique, that’s really not gatekeeping. And some recipes do it but don’t tell you that’s what you’re making. Mac and Cheese is basically a sort of béchamel, even the out of a box kind and I wouldn’t call that gatekeeping.
arcticbull 4y ago
"Mother sauces" is not gatekeeping lol, its an industry term. It's no more gatekeeping than "data structure." I don't understand at all, honestly - I see a term I don't know, I grab the googs and figure it out. My first reaction isn't to accuse the person who knows something I don't of gatekeeping.
- klipt 4y ago
  - rfrey 4y ago
    It's because they're the very basic sauces that "give birth" to all the others. It's not because it's a sauce your mother used to make.
    - klipt 4y ago
      "Ancestor sauce" works fine for that and is less pointlessly gendered.
      - smegsicle 4y ago
        wouldn't that make it pointlessly ungendered? do you feel that gender is inherently bad?
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      Which is not what GP was suggesting... Though personally it seems a silly thing to get hung up on. I'd be more worried about the fact that for many the archetypical professional cook/chef is a man, and in fact men make up something like 75% of those who choose such a career, when it's abundantly clear that there are zero biological advantages to being male as a chef.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    I’ve flagged your comment because it’s essentially inviting a flame war, on top of being utterly irrelevant to the topic. 10 seconds on Wikipedia would have answered your question by the way. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_mother_sauces https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_mother_sauces The reason is that “sauce” is feminine in French. Une sauce. C’est tout. You want to talk about pointlessly gendered, as a French native I agree that the French language, as most other Romance languages, Slavic languages and several Germanic ones, are all pointlessly gendered. I am envious of English natives that don’t have to deal with knowing that a chair is feminine but a stool is masculine, a bank is feminine but a shop is masculine. Or that a book is masculine in French but feminine in Russian, and it’s the other way around for the unknown gender of a domesticated animal!!! Still I would invite you to learn more languages.
mattkrause 4y ago
It might be intimidating for a second (it's got an accented vowel!), but the concept actually seems welcoming. A lot of cooking is essentially variations on a theme. If you can make béchamel, you're now also only a step away from a bunch of other sauces (Mornay, Soubise, etc), simply by adding different ingredients. The technique for making béchamel is similar for espagnole and veloute, but with different liquids in the first step. Extracting out this general principle is, for me, a thousand times more comprehensible than memorizing that (((butter + flour) + milk) + onions) -> soubise but (((butter + flour) + milk) + cheese) -> mornay.

amluto 4y ago

Saying that béchamel is a fundamental thing you need to learn is quite specific to a range of European recipes and traditions. You can make lots of fantastic things, from scratch, even involving Italian food, without any mother sauces. I would argue that the real fundamental things for basic cooking are more like how to use a knife, how to sauté things, what happens to different veggies, meats, and herbs as they cook for various times and temperatures, etc. As for the mother sauces, they’re prepared ingredients that one might make at home to use in various recipes. There are plenty of other examples: stocks, various things that can be made out of eggs, various Asian sauces, hot sauces, various cooked garlic preparations, sofrito, etc. Béchamel is just one example.

asoneth 4y ago

I think we may be coming at this from different perspectives. You clearly know a lot about food and seem to enjoy it, which is fantastic! I do not cook professionally so the idea of me spending literal weeks in a cooking school or reading cooking textbooks sounds fun but also incomprehensibly decadent. My partner and I spend about three hours per week on meal planning and prep for our family, and we typically end up cleaning the kitchen concurrently with cooking. Because of this we end up cutting a lot of corners and incorporating meal kits and frozen food into our weekly rotation. If I could improve the nutrition and/or taste of my meals by spending an additional ~15 minutes a week I would consider it, so Parsnip seems like it might be relevant to me. But I assume that anyone who talks about "taking a class" or "reading a book" or "learning to make all the master sauces" is coming at food from a wildly different perspective that is probably wonderful for them but not particularly relevant to my life where I get home and have about twenty minutes (less if there's traffic) to figure out how to turn the ingredients from the fridge into something my kids will eat.