If you are like me, a woman and hot-headed, you would probably get angry if someone said that to you. Ever since I was a little girl, I didn’t like to participate in chores that I was usually “supposed” to do, like helping mom in the kitchen. No. My life, I decided, would be spent doing interesting things other than the drudgery of cooking, cleaning and dish-washing that so many women in my family and otherwise had succumbed to.
Career woman? Who cares!
I grew up in India, where women were and still are, for the most part, judged for their abilities to have babies and look after their families. By “looking after,” I mean cooking, cleaning and housekeeping, regardless of whether they have a great career and are financially independent. (In fact, the situation of a man seeing his prospective wife for the first time has become something of a cliché in Indian pop culture. Picture this: a young man visits a young woman and her family with his mother and father. The parents of the bride welcome the visitors into the living room. Small talk ensues. The bride walks in with a tray of tea and snacks, which she has prepared herself; everything, from the way she moves to the food she has made is under scrutiny. Maybe she has a doctorate in microbiology, but who cares, as long as she can cook.)
You can’t blame me for being put off by cooking and spending my precious reading time in the kitchen. Luckily for me, (the firebrand feminist I thought I was) I never had to cook to impress anyone, not even myself. I let canteens, takeaway joints and fast food do the job. In Chennai and Delhi, where I lived, food was great. I broke all barriers created by my parents, who actually wanted me to eat healthy food and who I unfortunately did not listen to. The pizzas and biryanis were too delicious and I was too much of a feminist to waste my time cooking.
What changed?
And then reality hit for the first time in the form of a double chin and multiple tires on my belly. I signed up for a fitness program, but stopped short of cooking. An old cleaning lady, who we called Amma would come up to my flat every day and cook the worst possible meal you could imagine, but I didn’t care as long as I didn’t have to go into the kitchen. And then I moved to Germany and survived on burgers, sausages and pizza for several years, until reality hit me for the second time, kicked me, more like, and this time I knew I had to take matters into my own hands.
For the first time, I began to look for recipes. I started cooking, realizing, strangely enough, that food was sustenance, a basic need that I had been ignoring for so long. I failed miserably, I cooked so badly I had to throw away food, but I stuck it out and learned to love cooking so much that I now develop my own gluten-free recipes and have a food blog. I’ve also managed to get over my perfectionism when it comes to cooking: I aim for edible. You can always work on making things delicious.
You can find my recipes here.
And every now and then I remember Pati, one of my dear friend’s grandmother, who once told me that her place was in the kitchen, but not in a submitting, suppressed woman kind of way. Her place was in the kitchen, like my place was in front of my laptop, writing something I thought was important. Her kitchen was her “office”, she said, and a well-fed family, to her, was a job well done.
I first posted this article on Medium.com