In the Kitchen

Easy breakfast stuff: Chia pudding (mix 1 cup coconut milk and ¼ cup chia seeds and let sit in the fridge overnight) topped with cherries.

I used to abhor the kitchen and all that took place in it. When I was a kid in Sweden, cooking classes were mandatory. I couldn’t stand them. All of us kids had to bike to another school for these classes, because the one we went to didn’t have any kitchens in which to work. After a year, I still didn’t know the route to this other school, that’s how much I loathed those cooking lessons.

Cooking and all that, which takes place in a kitchen represented female submission to me back then. I never saw any men cooking. No man in my family ever cooked anything, not even a pot of coffee. It was women who cooked, and women who cleaned up after the cooking, and women who did the dishes, and women who dried the dishes and put them back in the cupboards. As a result, the kitchen reeked of resentment.

Frequently, the meals tasted of anger. A teacher I once had, said you could taste when a meal was prepared with anger, and it’s true. Food was thrown upon a plate, which in turn was thrown upon a table, and someone threw the apron on the counter and shouted:

“Dinner is served!”

My mother was a great cook. She still is. She claims her mother, my maternal grandmother, was better. I don’t know. I preferred my mother’s cooking (except for my grandmother’s pancakes). I never knew my paternal grandmother or her cooking abilities. She died when I was a baby, but members of our family still remember her lemon meringue pie with fondness. Being a good cook was (and maybe still is?) important to a woman. It meant she took care of her family. If you couldn’t cook, your family would starve and die. My grandmother worried about this:
“How are you going to live?”
To which I’d roll my eyes. I was going to have this really grand, adventurous life, I was going to be too busy to cook for others. I imagined I’d live on bread and Jarlsberg cheese.

I figured that if I never learnt how to cook, I would somehow, as if by miracle, avoid the trap I saw other women caught in: Cooking and cleaning until they were blue in the face. It was the same with typing. We also had to take lessons in touch-typing, but that they could not force me to. I was going to be nobody’s secretary. I swore I wouldn’t learn how to type and I didn’t. At least not then. I didn’t learn how to touch-type until years later, as a journalist student, when I was shamed into it.

It was baking, which brought me into the kitchen finally. I am not sure why, but I suspect I wanted to copy a friend’s brownies. They must have turned out well, because soon I baked all the time. Baking was somehow different from cooking; it was a bit of a luxury, not really a necessity like preparing a meal. I became a fanatic. I didn’t make cookies or pies or cakes or anything, I just made bready stuff, bread and buns and that sort of thing. Baking meant getting a dough to rise, and I became an expert. Our fridge was filled with stuff. Especially just before an exam. Baking soothes me; I love the feel of the dough.

Once I got over the trauma of those cooking classes, I found I could actually cook. What a revelation! I used to always shake my head and say:
“I’m sorry, I can’t cook for the life of me!”

But that’s not really true. I will probably never become a Cordon Bleu cook, but I am not that bad. Since I don’t have a big family, and since my son and I are alone most evenings I don’t have to prepare huge dinners all the time. This means, that when I do make them, it’s a pleasure. Over the weekends, my husband and I often cook together and it’s a lot of fun. And I’m teaching my son the secrets to making a good dough.

The kitchen doesn’t have to be a horrible place after all.