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Radical Muddling
What does a cook look like?
The one interesting, tangentially-Greenblade-related moment this week came last week over the lunch table. I was eating pasta with homemade marinara sauce, and homemade applesauce, and my coworkers were flabbergasted that I made these things, that I "really cooked." They could wrap their minds around me boiling the water for the pasta and opening the jar of sauce, but the idea of "really cooking," of making these things from scratch, surprised them. My coworkers couldn't let this go. They wanted to know if this lunch was unusual, or if it was the norm. They wanted to know where I found the time, the desire, the ingredients.
I get this response, the "You cook?!?" response, more than I'd expect, and have heard it most in the past few years. I wonder if it's because I'm unmarried, and folks are making the (ridiculous) assumption that because I don't have a partner or kids to cook for, that I don't cook at all? Or maybe it's the fact that I'm young: people of my generation are supposed to eat pre-packaged snacks from a tube? I wonder also if it's the working woman thing, the idea that cooking isn't something that I should have the time for or interest in?
Maybe it's all three, or maybe it's something that I'm missing. Does this stem from the fact that we Americans are so disconnected from our food that it's an anomaly to be connected to what one eats? And if I am -- apparently -- society's very picture of what a person who does not cook looks like, who is my opposite? What/who do we assume a "person who cooks" is?
Comments
LiZ, as someone who is a few years older, married and with kids, I still have people (most recently, mothers from Sabina's preschool) who are amazed that I cook something like applesauce from scratch. I don't want to make enemies, but applesauce is probably about the simplest thing I make on a regular basis - peel and quarter a bunch of apples and throw them in the pressure cooker, bring it up to pressure, then turn of the gas. How much of it is the marketing and supermarket displays that make people feel like it isn't worth it to take that extra time out of their day? That Wegman's applesauce is made from the same fresh ingredients you would use and look, it is already prepared with no pots to wash? Sadly, I wonder if anyone assumes that people cook at all these days outside of those celebrity chefs who everyone knows has a team of sous-chefs doing all of the work? (Which is another reason to love those Greenblade dinners - on Friday we had two homemade soups (cherry-sauerkraut and white bean), homemade soft pretzels, homemade mushroom focaccia, and a tangy roasted pepper bruschetta. Nobody marveled that these foods could be made from scratch in your own kitchen! And we also knew that it would be hard to find such a scrumptious meal anywhere else!)
LiZ and Stephanie, I get this all the time, too. Just tonight, I had a friend over for a spontaneous post-kickboxing class dinner: leftover French vegetable white bean soup and curried acorn squash with coconut milk over quinoa, and a mixed green salad with oranges and walnuts (I figured that because Stephanie was recalling our drool-worthy Greenblade dinner on Friday night, I'd do the same ;).). Her eyes got really big when I told her what I had in my fridge. "Do you cook like this all the time?" she asked. And the answer is, more or less, yes, although dissertation-writing has definitely increased my tendency to cook fairly time-consuming dishes. This particular friend and I talk all the time about CSAs and the nuances of food; she isn't a "pre-packaged snacks from a tube" kind of gal. In this case, as is often true, I think, when I get this question, people are amazed that I take the time to do All This For Myself (which isn't entirely true; I do invite friends for lunch and dinner on a fairly regular basis). For me, cooking and praying are closely intertwined: creative, nourishing, meditative, and equally (though differently) meaningful when performed in solitude and community.