What Can’t be Learned from a Book
Archery.
Basketball.
God.
Love.
Piano.
Salsa.
Soccer.
Writing.
Yoga.
True? I’m not 100% sure but I’m pretty sure for all of these things, you have to have a teacher and students who are like you, trying to learn and practicing. You learn all these things by doing them. After you have started learning, and you know enough to articulate parts of what you can see but do not yet know how to do, then a book may be useful as augmentation, as flotation, as diversion, as icing, as food. But you have to have a teacher. You have to go and practice the thing, supervised by someone who can tell you what you are doing (mirror) and show you what is possible (expertise).
I wonder if: you can learn cooking from a book. Until this morning, when my good planned food was so so different from what I’d expected (brave kind friend who tasted said “Definitely this would be an acquired taste”) I thought cooking could only be learned from books.
What else can only be learned not from a book and what can’t be at all, I wonder?
Related posts:
Knitting.
Card Games.
Mixed Drinks.
Grammar.
Last Christmas, my brother and I made peanut butter balls, a Young family tradition. First you mix the dough: crunchy peanut butter, Rice Krispies, margerine, and powdered sugar. Then you form it into balls and coat them in chocolate. I was getting ready to melt the chocolate and the paraffin and my brother said, “That’s disgusting. We can’t put wax in the chocolate.” I explained that wax makes the chocolate hard and shiny. My brother flipped to the candy section of “The Joy of Cooking”. You can temper chocolate: melt it and bring it up to a really high temperature, then take it down to a low temperature, and back up to high. Somehow this has the same effect as wax. So we didn’t add the wax and I got “The Joy of Cooking” for Christmas.
Now I read The Joy to corroborate advice co-workers give me. I read the section overviews in bed.
Podcasts and blogs and U-Tube and The Food Network and The Joy of Cooking are our substitute teachers. The best subs are hand-picked by the teacher.
Lovely, inpsiring blog! Thank you for stopping by mine and leaving your kind hello. I’d like to link to yours, if that’s okay…
Kat