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.
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!
> 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.
Weird, I've taken a couple cooking classes in the Bay Area, and this never came up.
As the sibling comment said, most Western food will include some variation on the mother sauces.
"The five mother sauces include béchamel sauce, veloute sauce, brown or Espagnole sauce, Hollandaise sauce and tomato sauce." French ones are the same: "The five French mother sauces are: Béchamel, Velouté, Espagnole, Hollandaise, and Tomato"
The techniques and ingredients you use for them are the basis for most sauces used in Western cuisine. You learn those five, you've learned all (or most of) western sauces.
"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.
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!!!
I'm a male, and I cook far more than any of my friends - male or female. I've no problem with a "mother sauce" and in fact the thought never crossed my mind.
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.
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!"
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 :)
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
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.
At least in my case I do not think cooking jargon like "mother sauces" is gatekeeping. These discussions are a great way to learn about new things and I appreciate when people share their knowledge.
The part that seemed like gatekeeping was the part where they asserted that "a million Italians [are] crying. Because of you" in response to a commenter describing different methods of making a lasagna that require varying levels of skill.
That seemed like an attempt at gatekeeping because it asserts that many people who are making a lasagna in any way besides their preferred method that relies on "mother sauces" is Wrong.
It's true, jokes are hard. I've come to the conclusion that it's simpler to take jokes in discussions like these at face value. Sometimes statements seem to be framed as jokes as much for plausible deniability as humor. And as Gilda Radner says: "Humor is the truth, only faster!"
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
