An image from a 1950s magazine advert: “My mother liked proving that a woman could work full time and still be a perfect housewife”
It’s been almost 15 years since I overheard my son’s school friend, visiting for the weekend, ask if he thought they could have scrambled eggs for lunch.
My son said, “Sure, I’ll ask my mom.”
Then the friend asked if they could have scrambled eggs with onions. There was a long, ruminative pause. Finally I heard my son say, “Actually, maybe we’d better wait till my dad gets home for that.”
This must have been the stage at which I was still cooking but drew the line at anything more than two ingredients, not counting salt and pepper. This was, I’d say, three-quarters of the way along a culinary path that led me from being an ambitious cook, poring over a puckered, sauce-stained hardcover of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, to a person whose (rare) forays into the kitchen are now as an entry-level sous-chef, shelling peas and slicing the tomatoes and mozzarella.
Along the way, I’ve made eggplant parmesan for 40 people and enough basil pesto to feed the guests at a friend’s wedding. When my sons were little, I could do a few trusty crowd-pleasers: matchstick French fries, berry cobbler. Since I failed to progress through time and change fashion as a cook, some of the things I used to make—a perfect simulacrum of neon-orange Cantonese restaurant sweet-and-sour pork—now have a vintage kitsch, food-history aspect: who would eat that today?
Now, especially when no one’s around, I’ll go for the simplest possible source of nourishment and satisfaction: corn tortillas, covered with cheese that’s melted in the microwave, then rolled into a slightly soggy but nonetheless delicious taco. Anything more complicated seems stressful and fills me with indecision, uncertainty, and annoyance at myself for generally losing track of what I’m doing or not being able to make some small household appliance work.
And yet the truth is that I’m obsessed with food. Good food makes me happy—food that is prepared at home, or in homelike restaurants. My ideal restaurant is a small-town trattoria, let’s say in southern Italy, where the grandma comes around and tells you that peas and asparagus are fresh, and that everything on the menu is a variation on the theme of asparagus and peas. Yet I tire quickly of restaurants, even the homeliest ones, and even more quickly of ordering out aluminium dishes of sag paneer or plastic trays of neatly sliced California rolls.
Fortunately, my husband is the kind of home chef who makes complicated dishes look easy to throw together. He’s inspired at combining spices, at instinctively figuring out the perfect texture and degree of crispness. No one has ever caramelised a root vegetable better. As he’s gotten progressively more confident and inventive, boning a duck for a ragu, making ravioli from scratch, baking a rhubarb pie or a pan of popovers, I’ve gradually, over the years, left all the cooking to him. He’s good at it, he loves it. Why not?
Also he’s an equipment freak who has collected and curated the tools that currently hang like stalactites from our kitchen ceiling. I’ve learned not to ask how often he’ll use the mandoline, the pizza stone, the chinois. If he has it, he’ll use it, and after a while we’ll agree, How did we ever think we could live without a mandoline, a pizza stone, and a chinois?
Long before Mario Batali, Jamie Oliver, and reality-TV gladiatorial cooking shows reminded us that most chefs are men, we used to joke about my husband writing a cookbook entitled “Cooking Can Be Macho.” It was supposed to begin with the line, muttered in a testosterone-thickened, early-Brando voice, “I kicked my wife outta the kitchen!”
It was more ironic than true. In our household there hadn’t been a hostile takeover so much as an unrecorded tectonic shift. Slowly my husband and I were able to do what we liked, to do what we did best. Division of labour and so forth. The truth is, I’d rather shop for food, help think of what we might want to eat—and write in my study in the quiet light of the late afternoon and early evening.
I’m not sure that my mother ever liked cooking. She did like proving that a woman could work full-time (both my parents were doctors) and still be a perfect 1950s housewife. She’d wake at dawn and make pear-frangipane tarts before going off to the clinic. After my father died, she started saying that cooking bored her. Sometimes she’d cook for a whole day and freeze vast quantities of food, meals to be defrosted when family or friends came to visit.
If no one in my family ever taught me to cook (I was self-taught, from cookbooks, with a lot of trial and error) it was also true, to their credit, that my parents never made me feel as if cooking was something I had to do, in order be a girl. They wanted me to be a doctor, like them. I could cook or not, if I wanted.
Not long ago, a friend was serving us a delicious home-baked strawberry rhubarb pie she’d bought at the local country grocery, a pie made by a woman who lives nearby. As she was buying it (and at the same time managing three small children) an older man behind her in the check-out line said, “Someone’s getting out of doing her baking tonight.” Her baking? When she told us the story, I silently thanked my family—and the era in which I grew up—for not making me feel that cooking was something that I, as a woman, was supposed to do, and consequently had to get out of.
Often, when my husband and I are both working at home, we structure our day around dinner; the conversation about the evening meal begins over our morning coffee. What’s in the fridge, what’s in season, what we had last night, what we’re in the mood for, what won’t cost a fortune. Alternately, I’ll just go out and choose what looks best from the farmer’s market or the corporate McGrocery, and he’ll figure out how to build dinner around what I’ve bought.
One accidental benefit of having the man of the house do the cooking is that our two sons never imagined that cooking was “women’s work.” Grown now, both of them cook. The one who told his friend to wait until his dad got home for the fancy scrambled eggs not only cooks, but has now married a woman who cooks just as well as his father. Together they offer another generation of reasons why I can leave the cooking to someone else.
Sometimes a person will ask me, Don’t you miss cooking? Doesn’t your husband ever get tired of cooking all the time? No, I don’t miss it, and as for the second question, I don’t know, I don’t think so. I never asked. I hope not. He never seems to feel as if it’s too much trouble. Besides, he loves his own food.
Just to be sure, I thought I’d ask how he really feels about being the only cook in the household. I also asked him what else I might say in this essay about “not cooking.” We were driving in the car, from the city to the country. It was a sunny morning in June.
He said, “For you, not cooking is like having your personal chef. And you get to make a lot of decisions. It works out, because the other person, me… sort of… insists on cooking. Plus I love equipment, and you don’t. If I have to use six pots I will, and you don’t want to wash six pots. ”
I couldn’t argue with one thing he said. Then he asked what I’d bought at the fish stall in the farmer’s market near our apartment. I said I’d bought clams and mussels. Maybe we should steam them and dip them in parsley butter. He said, coriander butter. I said, fine. He said, what about doing the clams with melted butter and the mussels with a Thai green coconut curry sauce? He’d have to steam the mussels and clams in two separate pots anyway, so why not do the curry?
Excellent! I said.
Would it have made me happier to prepare the curry myself? Not unless I was a cook. Not unless I enjoyed the process. Having been to the market, where the passive-aggressive fishmonger kept a long line of customers waiting for 20 minutes in the hot sun while he very slowly wiped the case and brought out more fish, I didn’t feel guilty for not doing the cooking. All I felt was fortunate and excited about the evening’s meal.
Francine Prose’s latest book is “Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them” (Union)
It’s been almost 15 years since I overheard my son’s school friend, visiting for the weekend, ask if he thought they could have scrambled eggs for lunch.
My son said, “Sure, I’ll ask my mom.”
Then the friend asked if they could have scrambled eggs with onions. There was a long, ruminative pause. Finally I heard my son say, “Actually, maybe we’d better wait till my dad gets home for that.”
This must have been the stage at which I was still cooking but drew the line at anything more than two ingredients, not counting salt and pepper. This was, I’d say, three-quarters of the way along a culinary path that led me from being an ambitious cook, poring over a puckered, sauce-stained hardcover of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, to a person whose (rare) forays into the kitchen are now as an entry-level sous-chef, shelling peas and slicing the tomatoes and mozzarella.
Along the way, I’ve made eggplant parmesan for 40 people and enough basil pesto to feed the guests at a friend’s wedding. When my sons were little, I could do a few trusty crowd-pleasers: matchstick French fries, berry cobbler. Since I failed to progress through time and change fashion as a cook, some of the things I used to make—a perfect simulacrum of neon-orange Cantonese restaurant sweet-and-sour pork—now have a vintage kitsch, food-history aspect: who would eat that today?
Now, especially when no one’s around, I’ll go for the simplest possible source of nourishment and satisfaction: corn tortillas, covered with cheese that’s melted in the microwave, then rolled into a slightly soggy but nonetheless delicious taco. Anything more complicated seems stressful and fills me with indecision, uncertainty, and annoyance at myself for generally losing track of what I’m doing or not being able to make some small household appliance work.
And yet the truth is that I’m obsessed with food. Good food makes me happy—food that is prepared at home, or in homelike restaurants. My ideal restaurant is a small-town trattoria, let’s say in southern Italy, where the grandma comes around and tells you that peas and asparagus are fresh, and that everything on the menu is a variation on the theme of asparagus and peas. Yet I tire quickly of restaurants, even the homeliest ones, and even more quickly of ordering out aluminium dishes of sag paneer or plastic trays of neatly sliced California rolls.
Fortunately, my husband is the kind of home chef who makes complicated dishes look easy to throw together. He’s inspired at combining spices, at instinctively figuring out the perfect texture and degree of crispness. No one has ever caramelised a root vegetable better. As he’s gotten progressively more confident and inventive, boning a duck for a ragu, making ravioli from scratch, baking a rhubarb pie or a pan of popovers, I’ve gradually, over the years, left all the cooking to him. He’s good at it, he loves it. Why not?
Also he’s an equipment freak who has collected and curated the tools that currently hang like stalactites from our kitchen ceiling. I’ve learned not to ask how often he’ll use the mandoline, the pizza stone, the chinois. If he has it, he’ll use it, and after a while we’ll agree, How did we ever think we could live without a mandoline, a pizza stone, and a chinois?
Long before Mario Batali, Jamie Oliver, and reality-TV gladiatorial cooking shows reminded us that most chefs are men, we used to joke about my husband writing a cookbook entitled “Cooking Can Be Macho.” It was supposed to begin with the line, muttered in a testosterone-thickened, early-Brando voice, “I kicked my wife outta the kitchen!”
It was more ironic than true. In our household there hadn’t been a hostile takeover so much as an unrecorded tectonic shift. Slowly my husband and I were able to do what we liked, to do what we did best. Division of labour and so forth. The truth is, I’d rather shop for food, help think of what we might want to eat—and write in my study in the quiet light of the late afternoon and early evening.
I’m not sure that my mother ever liked cooking. She did like proving that a woman could work full-time (both my parents were doctors) and still be a perfect 1950s housewife. She’d wake at dawn and make pear-frangipane tarts before going off to the clinic. After my father died, she started saying that cooking bored her. Sometimes she’d cook for a whole day and freeze vast quantities of food, meals to be defrosted when family or friends came to visit.
If no one in my family ever taught me to cook (I was self-taught, from cookbooks, with a lot of trial and error) it was also true, to their credit, that my parents never made me feel as if cooking was something I had to do, in order be a girl. They wanted me to be a doctor, like them. I could cook or not, if I wanted.
Not long ago, a friend was serving us a delicious home-baked strawberry rhubarb pie she’d bought at the local country grocery, a pie made by a woman who lives nearby. As she was buying it (and at the same time managing three small children) an older man behind her in the check-out line said, “Someone’s getting out of doing her baking tonight.” Her baking? When she told us the story, I silently thanked my family—and the era in which I grew up—for not making me feel that cooking was something that I, as a woman, was supposed to do, and consequently had to get out of.
Often, when my husband and I are both working at home, we structure our day around dinner; the conversation about the evening meal begins over our morning coffee. What’s in the fridge, what’s in season, what we had last night, what we’re in the mood for, what won’t cost a fortune. Alternately, I’ll just go out and choose what looks best from the farmer’s market or the corporate McGrocery, and he’ll figure out how to build dinner around what I’ve bought.
One accidental benefit of having the man of the house do the cooking is that our two sons never imagined that cooking was “women’s work.” Grown now, both of them cook. The one who told his friend to wait until his dad got home for the fancy scrambled eggs not only cooks, but has now married a woman who cooks just as well as his father. Together they offer another generation of reasons why I can leave the cooking to someone else.
Sometimes a person will ask me, Don’t you miss cooking? Doesn’t your husband ever get tired of cooking all the time? No, I don’t miss it, and as for the second question, I don’t know, I don’t think so. I never asked. I hope not. He never seems to feel as if it’s too much trouble. Besides, he loves his own food.
Just to be sure, I thought I’d ask how he really feels about being the only cook in the household. I also asked him what else I might say in this essay about “not cooking.” We were driving in the car, from the city to the country. It was a sunny morning in June.
He said, “For you, not cooking is like having your personal chef. And you get to make a lot of decisions. It works out, because the other person, me… sort of… insists on cooking. Plus I love equipment, and you don’t. If I have to use six pots I will, and you don’t want to wash six pots. ”
I couldn’t argue with one thing he said. Then he asked what I’d bought at the fish stall in the farmer’s market near our apartment. I said I’d bought clams and mussels. Maybe we should steam them and dip them in parsley butter. He said, coriander butter. I said, fine. He said, what about doing the clams with melted butter and the mussels with a Thai green coconut curry sauce? He’d have to steam the mussels and clams in two separate pots anyway, so why not do the curry?
Excellent! I said.
Would it have made me happier to prepare the curry myself? Not unless I was a cook. Not unless I enjoyed the process. Having been to the market, where the passive-aggressive fishmonger kept a long line of customers waiting for 20 minutes in the hot sun while he very slowly wiped the case and brought out more fish, I didn’t feel guilty for not doing the cooking. All I felt was fortunate and excited about the evening’s meal.
Francine Prose’s latest book is “Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them” (Union)
