I was about to turn twenty-six when I found myself living with my parents for part of the summer. My parents offered a pull-out couch and air conditioning for as long as I needed it—on the condition that I not give them grief. More specifically, no criticizing the food they ate. This, my mother said while cutting into a Boca Burger and sipping a can of caffeine-free Diet Coke.
My parents are good people. But somehow, they never managed to value a home-cooked meal.
Their indifference to food didn’t bother me growing up in Manhattan in the 1980s. Mom and Dad worked sixty-hour weeks while my sister and I clocked eight-hour days at private school and attended after-class classes until dark. We all moved in taxis that ticked life away in 15-cent increments, unless we were shuttling back and forth along the LIE on weekends. Of course no one ever cooked.
Dinner usually meant deciding between Chinese and Italian restaurants, their menus memorized, their phone numbers on speed dial just below emergency contacts. Weekends on Long Island we’d barbecue, but make short cuts: the honey-dijon marinade for the grilled chicken and the blueberry pie were always store bought.
That our family’s pantry was dedicated only to bran cereals and raisin bread intended for breakfast but eaten as late-night snacks, that our fridge was stocked with long-expired yogurts, half-eaten grapefruits, and crusty jars of condiments without their tops—it seemed perfectly normal through my early childhood.
But then puberty happened: I grew six inches and gained twenty pounds, my appetite blossomed in concert with my hips and chest. If I began to look like a different person, I soon felt like one, too. I was hungry, in every sense of the word.
It was then that I met a girl who lived three flights down in our apartment building. Her stay-at-home mother curated the family’s refrigerator. Cheese wasn’t an orange block in plastic wrap, but fontina or manchego in wax paper; salad didn’t mean bagged iceberg, but included mesclun and frisee.
I spent half my teenage afternoons in that alternate universe where my friend and I concocted gooey Rice Krispie treats, then eventually graduated to banana bread baked with overripe fruit or tart tatins made in the family’s perfectly seasoned cast-iron pans. I’d return to my family’s apartment in time to go to bed and have Mom ask what was so much better about the place downstairs. I should have been able to explain, but how could I?
I communicated the way that all teenagers do: rebellion. But rather than imitate a drug-addled bohemian, like most kids my age, I impersonated a housewife, or at least someone who had time to cook. I fetishized the life of an unharried gourmet, subscribed to Living in eighth grade, studied Julia Childs’ Art of French Cooking, volumes one and two. I filled the kitchen cabinets with infrequently used equipment such as mini-bundt and muffin-top pans. With a few recipes in my repertoire, I “catered” one of my parents’ dinner parties, and by sixteen I was working at Williams-Sonoma as a gift-wrapper during the holiday season in an effort to purchase that gold standard of American culinary arts: a Kitchenaid stand mixer.
It was the 1990s and the temperature of the times had changed. The legacy of the go-go ’80s was all but erased by Martha and Oprah—Domestic Goddesses who replaced Masters of the Universe. But Mom, a feminist who’d broken the glass ceiling so my generation didn’t have to, wasn’t convinced by their rhetoric. Why waste time that could be spent on professional or personal aspirations just to cook a few meals that were still inferior to that new bistro on the corner?
Each time my mother came home from work to find I’d made dinner for the family, she vacillated between insulted and intrigued: she delighted in the poached salmon and Grand Marnier soufflés, but in each recipe found a dash of betrayal. I’d somehow contorted the loving gesture of cooking dinner into a referendum on how to live life as a modern woman. She had struggled to have it all—a career and kids, marriage and Manhattan—and here I was, through my devotion to domestic life, throwing passion-fruit chiffon pie in her face.
She shouldn’t have worried so much. I didn’t bring any cookbooks to college and instead found greater pleasure in the decidedly un-domestic spheres of classroom, coffee shop, and bar. But when I graduated, started making a life for myself, and tried to marry spare time with a career, it was the process of cooking that I found I couldn’t relinquish. More than a big paycheck, I needed occasional mornings of making my own granola, afternoons lingering in the aisles at Whole Foods and evenings throwing dinner parties for friends at least once a month. The price? A full-time job that paid well and a stable living situation. Just as the media portrayed, the taxis-and-take-out set and the farmer’s market crowd were mutually exclusive.
But is either lifestyle better than the other? Having lived both, I should know. Yet, back at my parents’ place, I found myself yet even more confused. One night during a heat wave, I opened my parents’ fridge only to find Fresh Direct Styrofoams masking decaying vegetables and an army of caffeine-free Diet Coke. My mother heard me cluck my tongue. Then she dared me to cook dinner. I thought about walking to the nearby Gourmet Garage and filling a shopping cart with ingredients for an elaborate four-course meal, one that would have won Martha’s, not Mom’s, approval. But instead of fussing over the stove for a few hours, I blamed the heat and decided to make one of the few recipes Mom managed to pass down to me: penne with garlic sautéed in olive oil mixed with feta and tomatoes. A slightly more sophisticated version of mac-and-cheese that takes ten minutes from start to finish, it’s pure comfort food.
As the garlic browned, I tried to think of a smell more heavenly—for garlic cooked in olive oil beats any twenty-ingredient concoction. Weren’t this smell and this simple meal good enough? My parents and I relished the pasta, ate until our bellies were full. And I was left feeling like a fool for thinking that food need be so complicated.
Anyone want dessert? I asked, suspecting an ice cream could cap off the evening. I went to the freezer, spelunking for something enticing, but found only cartons of Boca, frozen vegetables, and ice cream bars of the worst variety—those with negligible calorie count. Actually, I’ll pass, my mother said, and my father agreed, and in doing so extended my stay another few weeks: I was about to break that one condition that kept me in their good graces.
—Diana Lind