Love's Entanglement with Cooking

Rebecca May Johnson, Alicia Kennedy, Julia Turshen, Silvia Federici

Note: Originally published in February 2023, before moving over to Substack.

When I was ten or eleven, I sequestered myself in my family's tiny '50s-era kitchen and promptly ruined it. The recipe for cinnamon candied almonds proved more complicated than I imagined, calling for dipping the nuts in egg whites and then in a cinnamon sugar mixture. I was not a precise worker, and the kitchen surfaces were soon covered in brown sticky gunk. This coincided with my family needing to leave for an event, and my Mom, when she laid eyes on the kitchen, was (rightly) upset. Worst of all, I thought, the nuts came out of the oven fused to the pan and inedible.

Early in Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson, she references the feminist Marxist theorist Silvia Federici who argued that "housework is not seen as work because it is considered an expression of love." Because of this entanglement with love, cooking is "non-work." Which then can become a trap, a cage. Julia Turshen just wrote about the relentlessness of feeding ourselves, and Alicia Kennedy recently wrote about creating "magic out of monotony." All of this needs to be written about more and more, I believe.

My early cooking memories are often connected to my refusal to clean up the space around me. And my Mom's insistence on this wild idea of "Cleaning as you go," which I ignored. My cooking was selfish and young, I was selfish and young. I only wanted to make sweet things and flit from the kitchen with my plate full and my hands unworried by tidying. 

Part of the 'burned almonds' story I didn't know as a child was that my parents were stretched. Thin. They had just moved cross-country, bought a house, and were trying their damndest to re-integrate into their extended family after a long absence. A half pound of almonds was expensive. I knew the waste I was responsible for as I threw away the rock-like nuts. And yet, they gave me space to cook and experiment, within reason. What a gift. Being expected to clean was also a gift.

I've learned to clean as I go. And I've also held onto the desire to (sometimes) cook for expression and experimentation, separate from the need to eat and feed my family. I'm glad that selfish fire is still flickering. And part of this newsletter is finally writing about food, cooking, domestic labor, and love with more abandon and care.

A favorite link

Recipe: Sweet and Spicy Rosemary Nuts — Can be made with whatever herbs/spices sound good to you