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How Nintendo Taught Me to Slice and Dice
I love video games and I love cooking. So when Cooking Mama for the Nintendo DS handheld—a video game about cooking—arrived last September, I beat it within a week. The only reason it took so long was because of, you know, sleep and the need to eat real food. Which is ironic, because it wasn’t long before I brought Cooking Mama recipes and skills into my own kitchen, turning my Nintendo DS into a virtual Joy of Cooking.
When Cooking Mama debuted in May 2006 at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), four months before its release, it got sparkling praise from both industry professionals and fans. More than 244,000 copies have sold in the U.S. since its release, according to NPD, a marketing-research firm that tracks game sales. Leading gaming website IGN called it Most Innovative DS Design of E3 2006. The clamor for Mama even helped its publisher, Majesco, nearly quintuple its revenues in 2006, raking in $21.5 million.
In Cooking Mama, you are an apprentice cook under the watchful eye of ace chef Mama herself. Each time she throws a recipe your way, you slide, tap and spin the stylus on the screen in order to slice, chop, mix, mince, grate, knead, etc. (For the skeptical, there’s a video of the game in action here.) For example, in order to mix ingredients, put your stylus in the middle of the bowl and start spinning. Mama offers advice on the direction of your mixing strokes. If you perform perfectly and on time, you get a gold medal. Make a couple mistakes and you get a silver. Make more, and you get a bronze, along with a fiery look from Mama.
According to Office Create, the Japanese developers’ inspiration for the game was taking the typical situation of a mother cooking at home with the help of her child and turning it into a game. Or at least that’s the impression I got using their description and my newbie Japanese reading skills.
When Cooking Mama Gets Real
Cooking Mama starts you off with 15 recipes to learn and play with. As your slicing and dicing improves, you can unlock more of Mama’s cooking secrets for a total of 76 recipes, from instant ramen to cabbage rolls, all adapted from real Japanese and American recipes. I am not the biggest foodie in the world and Giada De Laurentis I am not. But as I was playing, a spark went off: I could use these recipes in real life!
IGN reviewer Craig Harris disagrees. “It might have the side effect of giving you the idea of how particular meals are prepared, but it’s doubtful that you can apply any skills learned in Cooking Mama to real world cooking.” I sought to prove him wrong. Raiding ingredients from my own mama’s kitchen for a little experiment, I decided to pit Cooking Mama’s Japanese style potato salad recipe against an old standby, Masaki Ko’s Japanese Kitchen.
It’s on. Mama orders me to peel five carrots in 30 seconds. Next, she wants me to chop them into crescent wedges. Then boil them with some potatoes, a process that Mama breaks down into seven idiot-proof steps. I cheat in parts (when Mama asks me to peel a potato while hot, I burn my hand and drop it; so I just use tongs. Genius!). Next, Mama walks me through some specific cutting instructions (potatoes into wedges, diagonally sliced cucumbers into thin circles) and because it’s Japanese style potato salad, I use a Japanese mayo, which is sweeter and thinner than regular American mayo.
A lot of transferring Cooking Mama’s recipe into reality was pretty standard guesswork, like deciding how long to cook the potatoes and carrots (it takes significantly longer than the 15 seconds in the game).
And The Winner Is...
The biggest gripe I had about the real life recipe? Uh, none. The Japanese Cookbook recipe turned out pretty well and it’s difficult to mess up since each step is meticulously outlined for you.
But what about the taste? Mama’s recipe was much simpler, but the Japanese mayo I used, which (I assume) Mama also uses, made the salad taste much sweeter, and each veggie’s flavor and texture stood out. The flavors from the cookbook recipe were more unified as most of the veggies were cooked together in stock, rice vinegar and sugar. Both certainly tasted the way I thought a chilled potato salad should taste. I can’t really say one is better than the other because both were equally yummy. It would just come down to what kind of potato salad mood I was in.
The most fun discovery I had with this small experiment was it made Cooking Mama a virtual recipe book for me. Yeah, there’s some guesswork involved, but the recipes can be followed through each step. Little children aspiring to be a famous chef or just like mom (or dad) in the kitchen no longer need to start with Play-Doh and a plastic kitchen. Just give them their very own Cooking Mama.
