Cooking Is a Chore

Laura, a woman in her mid-fifties, lives on a farm in rural New England. Originally from Rhode Island, she moved in her thirties from an urban area to live on a small family-run dairy farm. She is a knowledgeable cook, primarily self-trained, and frequently relies on her intuition. Her kitchen is a large open room, although the "work area" is just in one corner. There is a freestanding refrigerator along a wall that also has a large built-in set of cabinets, open shelves, and a counter; on the shelves sits a large collection of cookbooks. To the right of the stove stands a counter that is cluttered with reused glass jars (filled with maple syrup, honey, etc.), bread, bowls, and other items, including a KitchenAid mixer. Over the counter hangs a set of three wire baskets that are full of a variety of dried spices. Behind the work area is a round table.

Although Laura's active cooking space is fairly small, the old farmhouse kitchen permits an ambling approach to cooking. She does not have all her ingredients set out and ready to go before she starts preparing her meal; rather, she constantly moves around the room as she cooks. Her active cooking takes place at the stove and the small counter immediately to the right of the stove. She picks up the ingredients as she reads through the recipes. While making bread dough, she moves from the counter to the cabinet to get measuring cups and spoons, goes back to the counter to cut butter into a glass measuring cup, and then puts it in the microwave — which is placed on top of the refrigerator — to melt. Meanwhile, she gets another glass measuring cup from the cabinet, takes the milk out of the refrigerator, pours the milk into the measuring cup, bending down to accurately read the measurement, and then puts the milk into the microwave along with the butter, explaining: "If you put them in together from the start, the butter does not melt well."

Laura prepares two dishes that she has made many times before: dinner rolls and a black bean soup. She checks both of the recipes often, but she also has many "tips" or "adaptations" that she has developed over the years, such as those to melt the butter and warm the milk, as described above. She is not a planner, but she is a good reactor. At another point in the meal preparation, she goes hunting for the right spices to put in the soup. Her hanging baskets are full of spices — some in clear glass bottles, some in small brown bags, and others in clear plastic bags. She looks for the dry mustard called for in the recipe by rustling through the spices in all three baskets. No luck. She goes over to the far cabinet — success. But when she opens up the jar, she sees that the mustard has caked and cannot be used. Off she goes to the refrigerator for wet mustard. She says, "This is not ideal, but the soup needs the mustardy taste." She moves back over to the hanging basket and rummages around looking for cumin, but she comes up empty-handed. So she substitutes cardamom, saying, "This is the closest." Laura's cooking is like an improvised dance.

Her engagement with cooking has waxed and waned over the years, influenced by the many obligations of raising a family and running a farm. Necessary and mundane, food always requires attention. As she puts it, "The biggest challenge [of cooking] is losing track of what I'm doing. There is so much going on in the house all the time." When she explains her relationship to cooking, she often talks about her mother. In explorations of the lived experiences of home cooks, the stories of people's mothers inevitably emerge, as they did while Claire was making butternut squash soup and as they do now as Laura cooks. Often, such memories of home cooking turn to stories of the mother's feelings about the necessity of making meals. These associations are automatic; when cooking is categorized as a type of care work, the quality of the food is directly connected to the maker of the meal. These are complex connections, however, involving the person who shopped and chopped and stirred but also this person's affective role in the family (however "family" might be defined). It appears that for most women, these are ties that bind. In her study of social inequality and commensality, sociologist Alice Julier notes that "associations between caring and food are long-standing, particularly in terms of gendered labor on behalf of families." This point is echoed in anthropologist Megan Carney's work with women from Mexico and Central America. These women, who were vulnerable due to both their undocumented status and their poverty, placed great emphasis on their effort to make meals for their families, which was seen as a form of "caring labor."

Laura does not remember her mother as either a good or enthusiastic cook; as she puts it, "I am afraid she cooked." In particular, her mother did not really think about whether or not the food tasted good or was pleasing to her family. Laura remembers that the vegetables were always overcooked:

She would do things like take fresh green beans, they always had a garden. ... She would bring the green beans in and scrub them and tail them and cut them up and put them in a pan of cold water and set it on the back of the stove. And then she would make something like a pot roast. After she got the meat going, she would turn the beans on and boil them in copious amounts of water until they were like canned green beans. She would serve [certain meals]; if it was Saturday night, it was beans and franks. And it was always — well, they didn't have much money — but it was always the absolutely cheapest ingredients and sometimes it was really awful.

In contrast, while Laura is cooking the black bean soup, she points out that she is using olive oil and mentions that her in-laws introduced her to using it in cooking. Then she elaborates: "I never would have found [it] in my mother's house."

Laura did learn from her mother that one way to manage the chore of cooking was to have a method:

On Sundays, we generally had a roast, usually a pot roast, so Monday was sliced leftover pot roast with gravy, heated up in the gravy, with boiled potatoes. Tuesday night was usually American chop suey or spaghetti. It was a pasta dish, except we didn't call it pasta, we called it macaroni. Wednesday night varied a little bit. I'm trying to think what we had on Thursday. ... Oh, Wednesday was usually tuna and noodles.

With the passage of time, Laura realizes that her mother's rigid approach to meals must have helped her cope with a daily task that she did not enjoy, but Laura still seems to wish her mother had been a better and happier cook.

Social obligation has long defined domestic cooking for the Americans who have dominated as home cooks: women. Learning what it takes to make a meal has historically been women's work and so, to a certain extent, it...