Category — the unlikely cook

My upbringing made me an unlikely cook. Mom worked long hours, and Dad is famous for his ability to live for a week on a bag of potato chips, a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and maybe an apple pie. Homecooked meals in my house were erratic, infrequent. Mom could do justice to a pot roast, don’t misunderstand, but the expenditure of her time on something as easily replaceable as cooking was a luxury. Our freezer was often filled with tv dinners and frozen waffles, not whole chickens.

We are bakers. Mom and her best friend penned themselves in the kitchen for days at at time during the holidays, making no less than twenty different kind of cookies in huge batches and packing them into tins for neighbors, teachers and anyone lucky enough to make the list. I got to hand out those coveted tins, walking through the halls of the school on the last day before Christmas.  As I got older, I got in on the assembly line, and I beamed whenever I could hand out a tin and say “I made the Grasshoppers myself”.

Cooking and writing are eerily similar. The process holds untold joy in its own right, but true redemption lies in the reviews. If you’re lucky, you can love the process and believe in your ability enough to keep confidence in an offering even if it isn’t well accepted. But if you’re really honest with yourself, a part of you is always chasing praise, acceptance, fulfillment. I had figured out by the time I was six years old that I wanted to wield the power of creating magic in those tins- the power to delight people.

But I didn’t learn the finer art of actually feeding people for nearly twenty years.

At some point I realized that I was just whoring around with baked goods and candy. I got strung out on cheap, easy love and decided that I needed something more substantial. I found myself in a cramped apartment kitchen, paying rapt attention to some cookbook while navigating such lessons as covering chicken breasts with clear wrap before pounding them thin and learning to taste an unproven sauce before drowning said chicken in it.

Cooking, much like anything else in life, is one part experience and two parts confidence. In my typical fashion, I pursued that experience with a brooding intensity. There were some fantastic failures: undercooked poultry, cornbread dressing made with sweet yellow instead of buttermilk mix, the soup that the barley ate, the mahi mahi shriveled up into some premordial existence. Tripping on my apron once in awhile was a fair trade, though, for the rush that came with turning out an incredible dish.

Feeding people well sends the stunningly clear message: you’re worth my time and effort. I want to bring you joy. I want to know that you’re taken care of. This is why accepting food offerings is a basic requirement of passable manners in most cultures; turning your nose up at such a gesture is the highest insult to those of us that write love letters in the kitchen. The secret to cooking well is loving the food as much as you love the people you’re cooking for; the best dishes are sonnets to the ingredients  as well as the audience.

Cooking is a powerful part of my femininity. Growing up with the shining example of the modern liberated woman, I longed for some moderation. Perhaps I sensed the ache Mom bore in her bones to spend less time climbing paper mountain at a behemoth corporation.

To command the kitchen, to bring in bags from the grocery store and turn out a meal that is not just eaten, but enjoyed- is to me the essence of real feminine power. The ability to meet a very basic need with such exquisite care that it inspires loyalty and affection; a silken strength that does not move mountains, but makes their relocation possible and sends out a well fed crew.