Kitchen sink drama as cheffing takes over from cooking during lockdown
Who would have thought our food preparation at home would become a primary area of showboating, asks Sarah Caden
THE bread-making of the early weeks seems sort of innocent now, similar to the way we started into all of this writing up a daily schedule for the home-schooling or painting everything in the house that didn’t move.
At the time, as half the country seemed to be spawning a sourdough starter, there was a giddy sense of community about it — new community, community apart, community mostly sharing online and in WhatsApps as to how their mix of flour and water was fermenting.
Wasn’t it gas how we all had the time to commit to this? Who ever thought we’d be getting around to baking sourdough? Won’t it be a wheeze for the short amount of time we’re going to be in this state of lockdown?
Then, like most other things in lockdown, we moved on.
What has been interesting on the Covid cooking front, however, is that it seems to have become more elaborate instead of more basic as time has simultaneously raced and dragged on.
You’d think at this point the toilet-roll rush of the early days would have morphed into a run on frozen chips and fish fingers or trashy takeaways, but instead our WhatsApps buzz with news of which restaurant has just launched its cook-at-home kits.
We’re high on fine-food recreation and this time it’s serious.
A takeaway is so March 2020. Now, in May, it’s all about recreating restaurant food at home. In case you don’t know, this is where your favourite restaurant assembles a kit of ingredients, either delivered to or collected by you, which, with instructions, allows you to recreate their dishes at home.
It has been a positive move for the restaurants, who get all the social-media goodness, as everyone madly posts just how brilliantly they were able to replicate what you’d get in the restaurant. It’s an ad for what we’re missing, without making us depressed. Everybody’s happy.
What can’t be confused in this latest lockdown craze is the difference between cooking and cheffing. Cooking is what you do to survive, what you do in a workaday fashion to keep the household going. It’s not glamorous.
Cheffing is cutting edge, exciting, even sexy and, in pre-lockdown world, mostly done by men. It is not be confused with housekeeping.
When the big lockdown shake-out of how we lived, how it affected us or even changed us, is assessed, it will be interesting to see the extent to which the allocation of domestic chores, with everyone locked up together, changed or did not change.
Statistically, we know that while many homes are two-income, with both partners working outside the home, it remains the case that women shoulder most of the housework, cooking and childcare. Will that have altered in lockdown? We’ll have to see, though there may be a spike in men doing the cooking. But are we talking doing the cooking, or showing off at the cheffing?
Lockdown has provided great opportunity, via Zoom, and the various platforms of texting and image-sharing, for people to find new ways to show off. No one could have predicted that the preparation of food would become one of the primary areas of showboating.
It’s a bad sign when the celebs are getting into it, clearly worried that we’re more interested in each other’s homespun entertainment than their antics these days.
So David Beckham’s making brownies, Naomi Campbell’s on the banana bread and Amanda Holden is ‘hilariously’ cutting onions while wearing swimming goggles — albeit without a chopping board, which can’t be good for the counter-tops.
However, again, it’s not so much the humdrum cooking that counts, but the special stuff. The dull stuff remains the dull stuff.
We’ve fetishised cooking in modern society for some time now, while at the same time consistently devaluing home-making and housekeeping. People who work from home have no illusions about the lack of status attached to their efforts. Increasingly, we employ other people to do our dirty work, which is everything from window-cleaning, house-cleaning and gardening, most of us having grown up in a home where the idea of having regular “staff” was something confined to the upper classes. It has been interesting to see the column inches used up in moaning about how to cope without a cleaner in lockdown.
And cooking, on a day-today level, has not really been elevated to something special in the recent years, through which we’ve taken to photographing our fancy meals.
Until lockdown, it remained a phenomenon that generations reared on good home-cooking — mostly done by their mothers — weren’t exactly whizzes in the kitchen. They still put mammy’s cooking on a pedestal but never got the recipes from her, because cooking was about being relegated to the kitchen, whereas we were reared for better things.
Housework and having careers weren’t really happy bedmates, until housework and having careers were forced to co-exist in lockdown. Still, we have bucked against simply knuckling down to being plain old home-makers. That still smacks of drudgery, unfortunately.
Instead, we rapidly restyled ourselves into master bakers — keep your simple soda bread, we’re going sourdough — and recreating restaurant-standard dinners to beat the band.
It’s not so much getting domesticated as becoming a creative. God forbid anyone would confuse us with a housewife.
That remains a no-no, even when we’re still nowhere but home.
‘Cheffing is cutting edge, exciting, sexy’