I've always had a conflicted relationship with cooking. From the time I set the oven on fire at age 14 (incinerating a bunch of chocolate-chip cookies and triggering a visit from the fire department), I realized the domestic arts did not come naturally. Still, I liked to eat. So I learned the basics.
Then came Julia Child, raising the stakes. She made it necessary to master the art of French cooking. Some women rose to the challenge, but I did not. I would labour away all day in my little kitchen, concocting Julia's boeuf bourguignon for my guests. This involved peeling an entire pint of tiny white pearl onions, among other thankless tasks. Just when I thought I was on top of things, I would encounter an instruction like, "Add three cups of veal stock (see page 379)." By the time the guests showed up, I was hot and sweaty, the kitchen was a disaster zone and I wished they'd all drop dead. So much for the joy of cooking.
Lately, there's been a lot of discussion about how oppressive cooking is for women. Modern standards are so high that women cannot possibly live up to them – especially busy working women who get home at 6 to face a cranky, hungry, picky household of ungrateful whiners. "Cooking is at times joyful, but it is also filled with time pressures, tradeoffs designed to save money and the burden of pleasing others," conclude a bunch of sociologists in a recent, much-discussed research paper. They blame the stress of cooking on foodies and public health officials, whose "idealized vision of home-cooked meals" has made cooking "fraught."
Well, maybe. In fact, cooking has always been as fraught as you want to make it. I had a grandmother who was so paralyzed by the thought of cooking Christmas dinner for all the relatives that she started having nervous breakdowns every year. One famous night, we didn't eat till well past 10.
The truth is that our cooking woes are largely self-inflicted. Sure, we're time-challenged. Sure, we're stressed. Much of the time, planning and shopping and putting meals on the table day after day is just a chore. But nearly anybody can acquire enough basic skills to feed the family reasonably well a reasonable amount of the time.
I happen to be married to a man who doesn't cook. (It just worked out that way. He does other useful things.) So I get dinner nearly every night. Sometimes I spend a lot of time on it, and sometimes not too much. Whoever thought up salad in a bag should get a Nobel Prize. If you have a roasted chicken and a salad in a bag, you have dinner.
We're often told that healthy food is too expensive for lower-income people, which is why they eat so much junk. As the authors of this study assert, "The ingredients that go into meals considered to be healthy – fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains and lean meats – are expensive." According to them, even families with higher incomes feel the pinch. "Even though they often had household incomes of more than $100,000 a year, their membership in the middle class was costly. While they did not experience food shortages, they were forced to make tradeoffs in order to save money – like buying less-healthy processed food, or fewer organic items than they would like."
Oh, please. Have these people never been to Foodland? Healthy food is cheaper and more abundant than it's ever been in history. It's well established that organic food is no better for you than the regular kind. Frozen vegetables are just as good for you as fresh, although sometimes not so tasty. It's not the foodies and the public health officials who worry me; it's the sociologists.
Contrary to what we're constantly told, you can make a healthy meal for less than the cost of subway fare. Here are the main ingredients for a tasty Mark Bittman recipe that takes only a few minutes to assemble: A can of chick peas, a can of tomatoes, and a couple of cut-up sausages (I recommend debreziners, which are delicious). You could put in a sweet pepper or a carrot if you want. For six or seven bucks, you get a one-pot meal for four – cheaper than McDonald's, with 10 times the flavour.
I'm no chef, but after a few decades in the kitchen, even I have learned some tricks to make things taste good. One is butter. Lots of it. Lemon juice is also great. Or a squirt of very good balsamic vinegar. Or roasting veggies very slowly in the oven until they almost melt.
I've even learned to throw a dinner party without hating myself. Here is how to do it. Avoid Julia Child. Limit your repertoire to two or three things you do well, and hope people don't remember that they ate it last time. As you scrape the carrots, remind yourself how blessed you are to have such great friends. If you're feeding family, remind yourself that every family is as dysfunctional as yours. Cook as much of the meal as possible in advance. Outsource dessert. Sit down with a nice glass of wine after everyone has left and have your spouse clean up. After all, that's what he's there for.