Cooking, thy name has always been drudgery
As she approaches old age, the heroine of Sigrid Undset’s Norwegian epic, “Kristin Lavransdatter,” turns over to her daughter-in-law the keys to the family household — with no regrets. Kristin at last owns her own life and the house does not own her.
Like my medieval feminist heroine, I have begun to dismiss those domestic habits of picking up, dusting up and redding up the house. I have even said farewell to the chore of cooking! I never claimed to be an excellent cook and now I can be no cook at all!
My sister and even my brothers excel to this day in all the Slovak cookery carried out by our mother. But since I was the oldest child, my task was never to help with the cooking but rather to clean up afterward and to keep everyone out of her way while she did her thing with the pots and the potatoes.
So I learned the correct order of dishwashing after supper: glasses first, then silverware, then the plates, the sticky pots, and finally my father’s lunch bucket, with the empty jar of Postum and remains of the baloney sandwich he took to the machine shop every day. I was sometimes allowed to make the green jello with pineapple and carrots for Sunday dinner, but I never learned how the soup bones turned to broth, how the chicken parts turned from cold flesh into fried delight, or how a cup of flour and a dozen eggs could turn into a table full of flaky creampuffs.
As a young bride, I did gain some knowledge and good advice from my wise old landlady, but as my own family grew to include five roaring boys, my learning curve shot up as fast as they did. I could always start with potatoes, peeling anywhere from seven to 10 pounds each night. We had a rigid weekly schedule: pork chops with potatoes, round steak with potatoes, hotdogs with potatoes, fried fish with (fried) potatoes, and sometimes spaghetti (with noodles for a change of pace). No wonder the Kroger manager had to reserve a 50-pound burlap sack of potatoes for me to pick up every other week.
Once I did try to mix things up for my family by following my sister’s instructions for “Boeff Bourguignon.” My sons ate it only because they were hungry but they threatened to throw out any other food that tasted or sounded anything like that stuff they called “beef boargigny.”
Perhaps I tasted at least some of the “joy of cooking” when I made the supreme effort to please my mother-inlaw on her holiday visits. I dutifully followed her instructions for making Danish pastry with real butter and many swipes with the rolling pin. I always let her know how much I valued her skill with gravy and with fried doughnuts, and I made sure to give her every chance to take over my kitchen.
I must also have made an effort to create nibbles and sweets for my card-club girls. After all, our real purpose was to eat and drink and talk about our kids and our pregnancies, with cards as an after-thought. I do remember making rumsoaked fruitcake every November, along with dozens of cookies to be frozen until served at our neighborhood Christmas open house. When I had to, I could cook and bake with the rest of my peers, though I secretly wished to be reading instead.
The irony of my cooking record is that in high school I won an award from Betty Crocker for “Future Homemaker of the Year.” I never had to demonstrate any skills but I knew how to ace a written test, which was the only criterion. I could guess the correct answer for how many minutes to boil an egg or how many days a week a housewife should dust.
One of my prizes was the famous Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book, 462 pages worth of “fully tested” recipes along with definitions of utensils, ingredients, measurements, and proper table settings. With my old book in hand, I can still whip out that macaroni and cheese beloved of my grandchildren or once a year, on my husband’s birthday, follow Betty Crocker’s way to a perfect peach upside down cake.
To this day I still have tucked in my jewel box my other prize, the special Betty Crocker pin with its sheaves of wheat growing out of a heart stuffed snugly into the image of a house. My heart was never really into “housewifery,” but I did cook my way through the raising of my family.
Now I have thrown away my apron, my box of recipes, my fried-out cooking pans and all the greasy cookbooks. Like Kristin Lavransdatter, I am free at last to cook or not to cook, to read, perchance to dream, while the hot stove in the kitchen stays cold.