Picky Grouchy Non-Cook
Personalities Related & Relevant to the Non-Cook

The Bad Cook

Simply put, because after all there isn’t very much to it, the Bad Cook is a person who makes food that tastes bad. Cooks who make food that is bad for you but yummy do not fit into this category.  Cooks who make food that is good for you but you think tastes bad may only sometimes fit into this category, because sometimes food that is good for you is supposed to taste that way, and you can’t really blame the badness of food that tastes how it’s supposed to taste on the cook, though it’s tempting. 

To what extent does the opinion of the eater determine whether or not the cook is a bad cook?  Some.  To some extent.  There is of course a continuum ---some bad cooks are universally acknowledged to be bad; some are somewhat acknowledged.  Some are known to be bad but never exposed, emperor has no clothes style, as in, you can’t say anything bad about so and so’s cooking; she’ll be so hurt and offended.

It is not possible to offer an exact figure on how often the cook must cook badly in order to be classified as a bad cook.  This depends.  After all, even fantastic cooks sometimes come out with a clunker.  Non-cooks obviously come out with clunkers all the time, yet not necessarily absolutely all the time. And the Bad Cook could also, technically, every once in a while, come out with something good, given a forgiving audience and a heaping measure of luck. 

But for the most part, the Bad Cook cooks badly most of the time.  The Bad Cook has a track record.  The Bad Cook has served a steady stream of badness, and probably also come out with some really exceptional doozies, the stuff of family lore and much discussion, including derision and wonderment.  As in, how can she still be cooking so badly?

What is the relationship of the Bad Cook to the non-cook? Well, Some believe that the Bad Cook is nothing but an unliberated, mis-diagnosed can’t style non-cook. Here is how it works: Many non-cooks, when they must cook, cook badly, and if you don’t see an identity as a non-cook as an option, Bad Cook may be all you are left with.  These are the wages of the lack of understanding surrounding the non-cook! In any case and happily, it is possible for the mis-diagnosed Bad Cook to come to a better, deeper understanding of herself and embrace her actual nature. Thus the liberated Bad Cook can swell non-cook numbers and do much for non-cook pride. And if you don’t like her cooking, get in line.

However, it will not do to be greedy and claim all Bad Cooks as part of the non-cook community.  Also, not to be snooty, but we have our standards. For example, what about the Bad Cooks who love to cook and suffer terrible food related delusions of grandeur? This is no non-cook. Maybe those interesting souls need a category of their very own.  But what would it be? The Deluded Bad Cook?  It’s a bad idea to start making too many categories.  It’s a better idea to just say the name of the person you are thinking of.  In my experience this would be: Marge. To me, my grandmother Marge was the prototypical Bad Cook. She knew how to make very few things and the things she knew how to make were 100 percent bad, even things one would normally not even think of as cooking.  Even the orange juice she made from frozen concentrate was wrong: weak and watery. Perhaps she could be described as a Depression Era Bad Cook.  It did seem like a large portion of Marge’s food badness arose from her attempts at thrift. But unlike those of a good cook, her gestures toward economy were misguided, poorly placed, and sure to ruin any chance the food ever had at being good, however humble or meager. What’s more, the food didn’t have to be either humble or meager, since my grandfather her husband had done well in his suit wearing days and they were living in comfortable retirement by the time I started to notice the orange juice watering down and other acts of bad cooking on Marge’s part. Yet Marge did not appear to think that she was a Bad Cook. She appeared to think she was a great cook.   Here is a question: 

If I had thought of her as an unliberated non-cook, would I have been more sympathetic to her awful food? 

Certainly in a better world Marge would have been a completely not cooking non-cook.  But that wasn’t Marge and it isn’t always a better world. 

Here is a picture of my maternal grandmother Marge. In this photo, she is in her eighties.  Marge was a complex, dynamic, and strong willed person.  She could be silly and goofy but she could also be extremely difficult, at which points my grandfather generally turned off his hearing aid. I don't know what he did before he got the hearing aid, but they had a long and seemingly happy marriage. Since I didn't have a hearing aid, I heard pretty much everything she said to me, most of which was highly opinionated and totally unedited.  Since Marge believed that she had total recall of every conversation she had ever had, you had to be careful of what you said to her: with Marge, you really never heard the end of anything. She was a person who would notice that her washing machine wasn't working right, get on the phone to the company, demand to speak to the president of the company (back then they were called presidents, not CEOs), stay on the line until she did, and then either charm the pants off the guy (she loved men) or alarm him to the extent that a new washing machine was delivered the next week. She was a beach-glass collector (winters in Florida after retirement), Sunday painter, scalding hot tub taker, periodic fainter, sun bather, mahjong player, scrabble champion and cheater, spotlessly white wall-to-wall carpet maintainer, fierce cherisher of her grandchildren, and last but hardly least: a very very bad cook.

Here's Marge again! For more about her and my non-cook/bad cook heritage, please click HERE.