A home cook and proud of it
Recently one of my favorite food historians, Prof. Rachel Laudan, wrote a blog post entitled Good As Far As It Goes, But It Doesn’t Go Far Enough: Nigella Lawson’s Defense of Home Cooking. In it, she begins by singing the praises of Nigella Lawson‘s celebration of home cookery in her (Lawson’s) blog post Home Cooking Can Be A Feminist Act.
Lawson is one of the world’s most famous food celebrities and she’s achieved her status on a platform of celebrating home cooking. She has consistently embraced the joy and creativity of cooking at home, while downplaying the need for special techniques and ingredients. To some extent, that’s exactly my point as well. I hadn’t spent any time researching Lawson, but a post I wrote a few months ago (here) could almost be a precis of Lawson’s career.
As to Home Cooking Can Be A Feminist Act, unless you make the assumption that all home cooks are women or all restaurant chefs are men, I’m not sure that she made her point effectively. In fact, there isn’t a single reference to sex or gender anywhere in the entire post but I do think that one could make the reasonable assumption that we identify home cooking with women and restaurant cooking (cheffery?) with men. There is a recipe for chicken and frozen peas that looks like it could be interesting, and Lawson’s typical of pairing the cook’s world to the chef’s world while coming down firmly in the cook’s camp.
This brings me back to Laudan. I can say with absolute certainty that Laudan knows far more about everything relating to food than I do and this includes the career and writings of Nigella Lawson. So following her praise of Lawson’s home cooking platform, she then proceeds to point out that Lawson doesn’t reach out to the next plane. The metaphor she uses is the photo enthusiast who loves taking pictures with their cell (mobile) phone. This amateur photographer will receive enormous enjoyment from their efforts and may occasionally produce a brilliant photo or two by accident, but some may well want to develop their techniques and compositional skills to move to another level. In other words, technique and skill have value.
For Laudan, it isn’t enough to follow simple recipes and the leadings of your taste buds (and I don’t know if Lawson would disagree with that). Knowing how to properly sear a steak or sauté onions not only make for a better tasting meal but also open doors of opportunity. From Laudan’s post:
The way to defend home cooking is not to rabbit on about how it’s neither difficult nor work. Quite the reverse. To change the belief, neatly skewered by Lawson, that it is “unwaged and taken for granted, sentimentally prized but not essentially valued or respected,” home cooking has to be treated as skilled work that is a real contribution to the household economy, as a demanding and honorable job that demands thought, learning, time, and attention, and that, only then, can be profoundly creative.
From my perspective, the approaches of Lawson and Laudan are not mutually exclusive nor are they far apart. In my experience, it is true that a delightful dinner can be composed with limited knife skills, simple equipment, and the most basic techniques. It is also true that adding skills, techniques, and experience (and the occasional piece of kitchen equipment) can make a home meal even more special. And again, from my perspective, there are few things more joyful and more rewarding than preparing and sharing a meal with the ones you love.
Thanks for posting this. I had missed your earlier post on home cooks when I was out of it for a few weeks. Yes, I agree. I basically couldn’t care less about chef cooking because it is irrelevant to my life in many ways. I don’t particularly care for many of the dishes that are best suited to preparation by chefs, I can rarely afford to go to a restaurant with a good chef, and I have never, ever thought of home cooking as some kind of dumbed down chef’s cooking. It’s a whole different genre. However one point I had been trying to make is that individual, disconnected recipes are not the way to run a home kitchen. Will have to give more thought to articulating this.
I think you’re right about “individual, disconnected recipes.” As a home cook who has moved from just knowing how to fire up the George Foreman to someone who really takes delight in constructing a delightful meal, I really haven’t found recipes by themselves all that useful. Recipes and cookbooks that incorporate techniques, flavor combinations, and unfamiliar ingredients are useful.
Let me take this opportunity to tell you how much I liked your book. In fact, it opened a door to scholarly research about food and culture I didn’t know existed. I heard your interview on Russ Roberts’ Econ Talk a few years ago and bought Cuisine and Empire that day. It prompted me to think about food, culture, and history in a new way and inspired me to explore this avenue more deeply. Thank you.
Thank you for this post, it inspired me to write on the subject myself. I was thinking about the emotional aspect of home cooking. Perhaps a set of emotional skills accompanies the culinary techniques that create a nurturing home dining experience. Home cooks preserve culture, adapt to the tastes of their families and friends, and are masters of hospitality.