Step 2 - Reading

Modern Cooking
You are going to read a text about preparing food.

Assignment 1

 

Summary

Difficult words

Introduction

 

 

 

Paragraph 1

 

 

 

Paragraph 2

 

 

 

Paragraph 3

 

 

 

Paragraph 4

 

 

 

Paragraph 5

 

 

 

Conclusion

 

 

 

 

Modern Cooking
We all need to eat to keep fit and healthy. Young children cannot grow tall and strong unless they eat a well-balanced diet. This means a selection of foods that provide protein, fat, carbohydrates, vitamins and mineral elements.

Some foods can be digested raw, but other foods are heated and cooked to make digestion faster. Vegetables such as salad leaves, cucumber, tomatoes, carrots, and fruit do not need cooking. However, apples are an example of fruit that can be eaten raw and also cooked. Stewed apples, apples baked in the oven and apples in pies and topped with crumble are ways of eating the fruit. When food is cooked, it is heated.

Before people had electricity and gas, they cooked on wood and charcoal fires. A fairly recent addition to cooking is the microwave. This speeds up the cooking time. Fan ovens are also more efficient. Barbecue cooking outside in the garden on a warm day in summer, is very popular. In the kitchen, utensils are used to contain the food, and they vary from open pans to pans with lids, frying pans, steamers, pressure cookers and woks.

Before supermarkets sold ready cooked meals that just require re-heating, it was the tradition that men left the women in the home to prepare and cook food. Now both men and women share the tasks in well-designed kitchens. In restaurants, a few years ago, the chef was nearly always male. Today however, there are as many female chefs as men.

There has been a great revival in the way food is cooked, mainly in part due to seeing a lot of cooking programmes on television. These are often presented as competitions like Master Chef and the Great British bake-off. Also people travel to foreign countries more often and return home with exotic and interesting recipes. The availability of ingredients in the supermarkets also encourages experimentation.

The kitchen is now the 'hub' of the house. The family, friends and visitors when waiting for a meal to be prepared all gather in the kitchen and help to prepare the dishes or watch others doing the cooking. The utensils available to aid the food preparation are plentiful. Different types of knives for example. Aprons and oven gloves help to protect us from spills and heat when taking hot dishes from the oven.

Some people love cooking, planning the meal, assembling the ingredients and then preparing the food. Others however prefer to open a tin of food and heat up the contents.