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Hi.
I was a professional cook for ten years of my life. I've been a (briefly) published food writer. And as my timeline and Instagram can attest: I love food, and I love cooking.
I also endorse the shit out of this. Home-cooking every day is some sexist 50s fantasy land shit. https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/1322683749109272578
I was a professional cook for ten years of my life. I've been a (briefly) published food writer. And as my timeline and Instagram can attest: I love food, and I love cooking.
I also endorse the shit out of this. Home-cooking every day is some sexist 50s fantasy land shit. https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/1322683749109272578
And I do use "sexist" deliberately and with forethought there. The bottom line is a shitload of traditional recipes are *way* too labor intensive for anyone who isn't a full time homemaker, and guess what gender was expected to be doing all that fucking work?
Go back further in the states and there's also quite a bit that was basically only made possible because *people owned other human beings* and used those human beings to do all that labor intensive cooking. You know why so much soul food is so much work? It was cooked by slaves.
When it wasn't slaves, historically, it was peasants and servants that didn't exactly have the best lives either.
See an important detail often left out of history is that the "important" cookbooks going back thousands of years were documenting the food of the *rich*.
See an important detail often left out of history is that the "important" cookbooks going back thousands of years were documenting the food of the *rich*.
Nobody was writing down Ethel the mud farmer's boiled dinners unless they managed to catch the attention of the local lord and make it's way into the master's chambers.
And by the 20th c., shitloads of cookbooks are written by, frankly, rich people with more time on their hands.
And by the 20th c., shitloads of cookbooks are written by, frankly, rich people with more time on their hands.
Even now a lot of cookbooks are written by the idle rich (or at least middle class), because it takes time and a fuck of a lot of expense to develop a cookbook. Every line in a recipe is the work of months or even years of effort, and that means time and money for ingredients.
Most of us can't afford to blow our week's food budget getting just the perfect texture on that sauce or that bread or that cake. We make it once, hope for the best, and maybe learn a few things to try next time if we remember.
You ever blow a bunch of cash hoping to make a fancy recipe and then fuck it up, and now you're out a shitload of change and you've got a terrible dinner?
The person who wrote that recipe may well have done that dozens and dozens of times to get it "right" for the book.
The person who wrote that recipe may well have done that dozens and dozens of times to get it "right" for the book.
Also: recipes *lie*. Partly it's because chefs work in short hands and estimations that are *wildly* divergent from actual measurements. Ask Roy Choi what a cup is sometime.
But often magazine and TV recipes exaggerate how easy and fast recipes are because it makes good copy.
But often magazine and TV recipes exaggerate how easy and fast recipes are because it makes good copy.
We don't want to see or read a recipe and hear it's going to take 3+ hours. Ain't nobody got time for that. So ... the fudge things.
That "10 minute" pasta recipe will skip the water boiling time, chopping time, fudge step lengths, or just assume pre-prepped ingredients.
That "10 minute" pasta recipe will skip the water boiling time, chopping time, fudge step lengths, or just assume pre-prepped ingredients.
So, if you find yourself stressed about cooking and feeling guilty about never having enough time or energy to cook ... don't.
The standard is set against you, and you're being asked to live up to the standard of a wealthy hobbyist from 1957, not a working adult with a job.
The standard is set against you, and you're being asked to live up to the standard of a wealthy hobbyist from 1957, not a working adult with a job.
