Cooking: Let’s Talk About Food

“Food is so pleasurable and powerful that it plays an essential role in creating a home that works. For your home to feel solid, meaningful, dignified, and warm, you must have the means and skills to produce good, nutritious food, to dream up pleasant menus, and to set the table and serve the food in an attractive manner that is familiar and comfortable to guests.

Characteristic, familial styles of cooking and dining, foods that “taste like home,” are central to each home’s feelings of security and comfort and to its sense of itself as a unique and valuable place. Cooking at home links your past and future and solidifies your sense of identity and place. When a home gives up its hearth, which in the modern world is its kitchen, it gives up its focus. (The world ‘focus’ is Latin for ‘hearth.’) And the people who live there lose theirs too.

If you start out begrudging the time you give to cookery, you are going to create a false contest between cooking and enjoying yourself.

Whether you cook alone or with others, this becomes a special time of the day that you soon find you cherish and do not want to miss.”

-Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelson

Food is one of the most magical and most mundane things in our homemaking. It is both only a biological process and the bringer of comfort and the hedger of family culture.

Every child leaves home with a built-in list of food that only Mom can prepare properly. Every man comes into a marriage with a desire to be fed. How many marriages have come about through feeding? In the South, a woman is often judged by her ability to make a good chili, bake a pecan pie, or her biscuits and gravy. Cooking is both a necessity and art. Every culture has specific flavors and textures they’re identified with. Every home does too.

I firmly believe, if possible, that the daily, ritualistic, multiple times of dependently eating should be embraced and not just robotic. It is easy to be frustrated with this specific part of our work. You create a mess, it’s consumed in less than 10 minutes, you clean up the mess, repeat that 3, 4, 5 times a day. It is overlooked, unappreciated, demanded, and filled with constant decision-making. No wonder so many women loathe this job. This is why we often see men who are great at it and women slapping another PB&J on the table. Many men aren’t doing this over and over and over and over and over…they’re doing it here and there. They can afford to be artistic, this isn’t the fourth thing they’ve prepped and cooked and cleaned up today, and it’s only lunchtime.

(Sometimes I think this is where the joke about women not knowing where they want to eat comes from. Look, I’ve made hundreds of decisions about food this week, the best thing you can do for me is just to pick a place so I don’t have to make one more decision about food.)

So with all this acknowledged, how do we keep our attitude in the right place? How do we avoid frustration, anger, and lashing out?

Cooking every day is weaving together a tapestry of nutrition, comfort, and culture. And, I promise you, based on personal experience, that if you love cooking your food tastes better. If you hate this job, it shows. Your attitude is more important than your ability. You can learn how to cook and level up your experience, but without love, it will always be bad.

“Love. You can learn all the math in the ‘verse, but you take a boat in the air you don’t love, she’ll shake you off just as sure as a turnin’ of the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down, tells you she’s hurtin’ for she keens. Makes her home.”

-Firefly-

If you have a good attitude you will want to grow in your ability. If you have a bad attitude, you’ll never be motivated to strive to do something beautiful.

Take a PB&J: if you love, you will take care. The peanut butter will be evenly spread and to the edge. The jelly will not run over, creating a sticky mess. You care, it shows. If you don’t, you’ll just slap it together, throw it on a plate, there, done, get out of my life.

A PB&J made with love delights children and creates a warm atmosphere for all its normalness. A PB&J thrown together is just biological consumption and possibly a way to get everyone to shut up. A contentious wife is a continual dripping. Think about that with food. Are you constantly complaining? Is your family always in the way? What!? You want more food? Ugh!!! (Excuse me while I go do some repenting.)

Food has been a bastion of HearthKeeping from the dawn of time. Men are the breadwinners, but women are the bread makers.

We need to stop and check our attitudes. It may not increase our abilities, or change our physical menus, but it will warm our tables. It will infuse our homes if we battle complaining and seek to love our work. Not for the sake of the work, but for the people. (And wouldn’t you rather be doing something you love? Then choose to love what you do!) We do this for the people in our homes, playing our part in God’s plan to feed human beings, daily bread. We have to accept responsibility for this task, instead of looking at it as some random interruption.

I think that many of the health issues and obesity issues we deal with in our country are exacerbated, if not directly caused by no one cooking solid, nutritional meals anymore. Women are kicked out of the kitchen entirely, or we are taught to cut every corner so we can do what we want. We consume junk, processed foods, huge restaurant meals, and microwave everything. We’re taught we don’t have souls by evolution, we’re chemicals and electrical impulses only. We have lost the soul side, the family culture side, of food.

Cooking, especially cooking from scratch, forces us to slow down.

It forces us to say ‘no’ to more things and go abide in our kitchens. This is good for us. When I started cooking more from scratch and not using the microwave so much, I was floored by how much time it took. It requires planning and lots of time. Oddly, I found that restful. It’s restful to chop, simmer, roast, measure, and prep because it’s both my responsibility and it sets a tone for the rhythm of my home. (I’m not saying it’s a sin to use the microwave, I’m thinking through my personal journey.)

Cooking is also a good time to pray. I had never thought about praying for my cooking. Praying that the Lord would give me grace and wisdom and use the work I’m doing to keep me and my husband strong in our work. I hadn’t thought about this until I read a pagan book on homemaking/gardening that talked about preparing soup and praying to a ‘hearth god’ asking for it to bless the family. I was like wait…I know the One, True God who commands me to pray about my daily bread and I don’t pray over my food while I’m cooking! *Lightbulb Moment*

There is a bit of home cooking resurgence in our culture in the form of ready-to-cook meal subscriptions. That’s good. I’m thankful for that. Use it. It’s a good tool. But it’s not a good fit for everyone, and I would still venture to guess that cooking is good for us women on a spiritual and psychological level. We were created to feed our babies from our bodies, so why can’t we find joy in feeding our families from our hearts, minds, and hands?

We need to have the courage to take responsibility for the cooking. Owning. When we owned our own business our best employees were the ones who took ownership of their work. It wasn’t just a retail job. They worked it like they were the owners. They were dependable. They sought to understand the spirit of the law, not just the letter. That means they could effectively suggest changes and knew when to break the rules for the good of those around them. They embraced the culture of our boutiques. They were trustworthy. We should be like this in our homes, and specifically with our cooking. What times are meals? What is everyone’s favorite and why? What are our dietary needs? What parts do we love and enjoy as the homemaker? What isn’t working? What needs to be tweaked? What is coming that will upset the normal routine? How can we get better? What foods make us happy?

Take responsibility and ownership of the food in the home like you would any work. Be purposed and intentional. Start small and grow your skills. Choose to love this work.

Oddly, and I laugh at myself, getting real cookbooks helped. For a long time, I teased my MIL about how no one needs cookbooks anymore. (She has a huge collection.) Why would we? We have Pinterest. But when I started using a cookbook, my cooking changed dramatically. The recipes are informational without scrolling through someone’s life story about where they came up with it. The recipes build on each other. When I learn a skill for one, I apply it to another. And they use many of the same ingredients. I learned so much going from Pinterest to an actual cookbook of main meals, sides, desserts, snacks, dips, and drinks.

Maids, I’m going to sound old, but here is the truth, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. A wise man knows beauty will fade, but a good cook will always be a good cook. Learn to cook. Embrace it. Learn to meal plan, shop, cook, and share. If you don’t get married, you can take care of yourself and bless others. If you do get married you can take care of a family and bless others. We all gotta eat. Learning to cook is a must-have skill for life.

Matrons, it is really easy for us to get lost in the demanding mundaneness of this job. We can so easily grow resentful, to the point of being unable to accept compliments for a well-cooked meal. We must stay on guard, man our posts, and work on our attitudes. On the other hand, don’t let this become a source of pride. Yes, learning to bake bread and make a magical pie dough is a marvelous skill. Be thankful, not proud. Get purposeful and intentional about this work. We must not allow it to be just something we slap on the table.  We must learn to take our time and embrace the rhythm of food.

Crones, you know what this work is like. You know how soul-crushing it can be. Speak in ways that lift us up. Encourage us. Don’t perpetuate the lies that this is not valiant work. And bake and cook for other women. You know what it is like to have to make these choices day in and day out. Cook for your daughters and daughters-in-law. They will love you for it. Cook for your church family. I don’t know a woman in the world who wouldn’t just die to have someone take the burden of just one meal. You can be that burden lifter.

Ladies, we must take ourselves to task. We must not buy into the evolutionary lie that what we eat doesn’t matter. We must not buy into the lies of our hearts that this is pointless and demeaning. Being the bread maker, literally or metaphorically, is a blessed role to play. Yes, this is a hard, hard, hard job. It requires decision making, wisdom, and it never ends. It’s the same thing on repeat for our whole lives. But we can decide to love this job, or not. And honestly, if I’m going to be doing this for the rest of my life, then I am going to decide to love it. I don’t want to spend my whole life doing something I hate. Let’s not age into bitterness, but bloom in grace and kindness.

Now, get in that kitchen, take a deep breath, and feed your family, again.