cyberiot
Rimtas žmogus
Today, there are much better books and cooking shows than there were in the late 60s when Julia Child was the rage. Her version of French cooking contained many steps, some of which just weren't doable for unskilled cooks. One of her recipes for duck had a solid two pages of steps, as I recall.
If my mom had been able to watch youtube or even America's Test Kitchen, she would've improved immediately. That was her other problem: she couldn't follow written instructions all that well. Never did her mother. They mostly lived on sandwiches when another cousin wasn't around to cook for them.
I'm guessing that both my mother and grandmother missed the basics in home ec. I know that both went to high school, and that was a required class for women. I'm not sure what happened.
The cooking instruction in Home Ec was less than sterling at my middle school. The rule was that you had to eat what you cooked--if you ashcanned your food, you flunked. I remember making French toast so bad and ugly it was beyond inedible. When the teacher looked in the trashcan to verify it got eaten, she didn't recognize it.