March 21, 2002

Lady at a dance in the community center the other night explained being late because she'd been grading papers for her fourth grade substitute teacher job at Mertzon. She said she announced the first day she wasn't going to teach arithmetic as she didn't want to cause the class to lose ground. The band played too loud to catch the full story. One part hit, however, when she mentioned that fourth graders study "improper fractions." I bet improper fractions were what we had in the fifth grade so many years ago.

All mathematics was improper for me. I learned fractions by cooking after I finished school. Measuring spoons and cups replaced a blackboard and tablet. Look how easy it is: a third of a cup of milk fills one of the three parts of a glass measuring cup. If you need to know the other two-thirds, look in the space above the fluid line to the top bar. You don't need to subtract or call in a logarithm table. Just pour it in the recipe real quick before someone tries to explain what is left from three thirds take away one third.

Sometimes I can field questions on cooking by being comfortable with fractions. Last month, or maybe two last months ago, a fellow from Pecos wrote that his drop biscuits were so heavy, he was afraid one might roll off the board and injure his foot. He wanted to know a remedy. I told him to check his family tree to see whether he might descend from my maternal grandmother, Eulena Hodge Lackey.

Grandmother made biscuits so heavy, one placed on the top of a wood stove weighed enough to tilt the stove lid. She used a biscuit cutter, but the dough dropped anyway from being so dry. My grandfather made lots of water cornbread for his dogs, but as time passed, the dogs had to split with us if we beat Grandmother getting up in the morning.

I studied his case. If he was making a mistake in the measurements it was probably measuring the shortening. I don't know the right method, but I know the easy way to find half a cup of shortening is to put one half cup of water in a measuring cup, then add shortening until the water rises to the one cup bar. Persnickety cookbook writers denounce the water displacement method in favor of packing shortening or lard into a measuring cup to the point where your fingers and shirt cuffs are encrusted in grease.

The way to catch one of these kitchen scientists is to look for a sanctimonious section indexed "how to measure for this book." Slash dash old gals and boys who cooked for a family deadline of stock shows and PTA programs don't need to know how to measure. All we need is time to throw the meat in the pot, and when the steam drops, decide how much room is left to add the carrots and onions to the hash.

Gourmet Magazine

lays out a holy writ of level teaspoons, sifted measurements to the last speck of flour, humidity allowances, temperature estimations and granular counts of the sweetening that'd make Einstein's final equations for splitting the atom seem as slouchy as a college boy's laundry list. (Follow Gourmet recipes and you will be spending more time hunting for Turkish bay leaves and Armenian pepper pods than you spend cooking or eating. I lost patience with that magazine 20 years ago over a lousy restaurant they recommended in New Orleans.)

Instead of telling the guy at Pecos to try using fewer solids and more liquids, I told him the one thing I'd learned about baking using sourdough. I felt I was safe on sourdough as a subject because the smart-alecks today casseroling canned fish and using mushroom soup as basic foodstuff don't know how to skim the fruit flies off a sourdough crock, much less use starter to bake bread. And what I'd told him was to use King Arthur's flour. Throw King Arthur's in the sourdough starter, use King Arthur's to flour the breadboards, and use King Arthur's to bake bread.

The way my luck has ran of late, I don't have advice to spare. I cooked a baking hen after Christmas tempered by time. I marinated her in a strong saline solution overnight. Baked her four hours in a 400-degree Fahrenheit oven. She was still so tough Sunday morning I double-wrapped her in aluminum foil, tied her up in a coffee bean sack, swung her on the back bumpers of my pickup, barely touching the ground, and fagged her around the block in Mertzon until she was tenderized. I learned that trick in an offbeat way. Old man Burro Miller used to tie his jack hard and fast to the bumper of his pickup on the days when the burro tested his patience. Miller's jack ended up having the best disposition of any four-legged animal in town.

But I can't pass on that method to strangers. He may need a lighter finger on the flour can or perhaps a more refined lard. As long as I can stay away from fractions, I might solve his problem. Yet if fractions are improper, it might not be my fault for being so blind to numbers...