Kitchen, Chemistry and Cooker

Cooking is fun..!

Ahh, my mother may not agree with me, spatially after those totally no-fun hours she had to endure during her valiant effort to make me interested into kitchen chemistry (FYI, I am enjoying it pretty much..at least it does not involve pointlessly mixing up weird, sometimes even foul smelling solids, liquids and gases only for obtaining various bright coloured some-oxy this-nitro that-chloride which we used to cook up in the lab in our undergrad days..no offense, my chemist friends).

Hey, here is a question - why a person who cooks is called a cook? A person who loves is called a lover; somebody who reads is called a reader. Shouldn't a person who cooks be called a cooker? Instead, they named a funny looking cooking-bowl as the pressure-cooker, which operates using the change of boiling temperature due to pressure and eventually whistles loudly. I can whistle too, even without pressure! If I use an amplifier to increase its loudness, should I not be called a cooker? I am not claiming the prefix, as pressure has nothing to do with my cooking.

I asked my mother about this shortly after she started training me, and received a very nasty look. Curious minds always face difficulties in this curious world.

I am having other difficulties as well. For instance, picture me sweating all over in the kitchen with a new preparation in the making (and I am sweating not for the heat but for my huge effort to remember the step-by-step instructions my mother threw at me before going to watch the 19:00PM TV soap). At that very moment one of my seven aunts (like the seven dwarfs, I have seven aunts - my mother's seven sisters) brusquely walked into the kitchen and without much farther ado started examining my work..
'Did you add this and this?'
'Yes I did.'
'Did you stir it a little before adding this?'
'Yes, I guess..'
'Did you add this and this before adding that, or after?
'err...'
'See, you forgot! Well, no harm done.. add this right now.. you were supposed to add this after that anyway..'
'umm.. OK!'

And the rest was history.

I stumbled upon a line (thanks to Google, of course) which reads, 'the kitchen is a great place for people to connect and work together while achieving a common goal'. Surely a kind of kitchen chemistry that does not involve boiling and does not work for me, my mother and my aunts..