I say this a concerning amount these days, but I’m starting to understand my mother a little better. This is a woman who was uncompromising on ingredients, who steamed tomatoes for sauce and dutifully soaked dried beans overnight. I was raised on the ethos of whole foods, before Whole Foods purchased our crunchy little health food store with the wheat grass juicer and the wind chimes and the rainbow selection of produce.
She made everything from scratch. Until she didn’t. I remember being surprised the first time she conceded to ordering pizza on a random weeknight, and then again several nights later. The surprise wore off, eventually. Now I realized what happened: she was tired (and bored, presumably) of the routine. This was a woman who made chicken stock every Sunday, but who also worked full time and went to school at night.
“Obligation, it turns out, is the real thief of joy.” Helen Rosner wrote that in a New Yorker article called “The Joylessness of Cooking,” which came out the day before Thanksgiving. Perfect timing, honestly. As someone who has been lucky enough to have food security, a roof over my head, and a working oven this year, I’ve cooked a lot. A. Lot. As such, a holiday that is defined by culinary output and food as a pathway to joy and togetherness just doesn’t have the same sparkle. “I am so bored. I am so tired,” she said. Thanks for your honesty, Helen Rosner. And same.
It didn’t start out like this. What I’m now calling “early quarantine” had a different tone. If there was a silver lining to be found in the necessity of cooking every meal at home, it would be that I got more self-sufficient, that I unearthed the recipes I’d aspired to make but then forgotten about, that I achieved domestic-goddess status. But like, modern, progressive domestic goddess. I would keep things interesting. I would make things from scratch, like pie dough and pickles and ossobuco. I would be prolific!
Somehow, in this belabored stab at self sufficiency, at “keeping things interesting,” it all became terribly, irrevocably not interesting. Obligation dulls desire. Especially when there are many obligations to attend to, like a part-time job and the full-time work of raising a toddler whose energy is both beautiful and boundless. This is not a complaint, but merely an assertion of my capacity as a human being who requires sleep and down-time. A day spent roasting and boiling and braising can be wholly satisfying—if one has the ability to put her sore feet up for a precious few hours, working up the energy to tackle the gleaming tower of dishes in the sink before the next round gets piled on top.
It’s weird to be in this place of burnout as one year turns into another, to not have a list of resolutions at my fingertips and a bunch of new recipes flagged in cookbooks I got for Christmas—and the excitement to try them. Where do we go from here, from this place of exhaustion when we’re still at home and we still need to eat three times (at least) a day?
I find myself longing for the days when I first learned to cook, when it was just me and my fickle electric stove and a quiet resolve to learn how to satisfy my own hunger. The simplest of foods used to offer a sense of completeness, of all-is-right-with-the-worldness. A bowl of polenta, made with leftover chicken broth, for instance. Maybe I’d add a few mushrooms, browned in a pan and kissed with a glossy layer of butter. And then a poached egg, for that sumptuous fat-on-fat-on-starch satisfaction. After all of this, that meal has felt closer to the sense of good eating I’m forever tracking down.
And I think it’s my solution. I need to go back to the beginning, relearn how to keep it simple. Like, dead simple—fewer ingredients, better ingredients, just doing their thing. Like how my mom used to cook (but with more salt, please. And refined sugar, god help me). Maybe it’s my New Year’s resolution, too: to throw aspiration out the window, un-obligate myself from being a model of quarantine cooking, and recalibrate my own hunger: the one I started with, the one that’s been there all along.
