48 OCTOBER 2017
PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS TOLD ME I’m too literal, so in
fairness, you should keep that in mind, but here’s
how it happened: My mother told me, sometime in
the early 1980s, as she cleaned breadcrumbs off the
table and snot off our faces, that you could have it one
way, but not all the ways. You could be someone who
cooked, or you could be someone who worked. She
was someone who cooked. She made chicken schnitzel
and spaghetti and meatballs and fried flounder with
creamed spinach, all on rotate. She didn’t appear
to enjoy cooking for her daughters very much, but
we four weren’t a rewarding group to cook for. We
complained and nagged and fought with each other at
the table. She smoked her Kents over the frying pan
and talked in Hebrew to her sister and her mother
on the phone and just got through it.
She probably meant something else when she said
that. She was probably just telling me that there were
different categories of existence, and likely she didn’t
mean for me to take it to heart quite so exactly, but
here I am, 41 years old, and I don’t cook. I didn’t cook
after I got married when I was 30, which people told
me would magically happen. I didn’t cook after I had
two kids. I didn’t cook after my mother, on a visit
after I had a baby, kept the Food Network on nonstop
for six weeks, hoping it would take. I didn’t cook.The Feed
Women learning
to cook, 1961
(author not
included, obvs)what will the kids think?
For Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s two young boys, it was
unfathomable that Mom could ever cook dinner.
That was always Dad’s job...until she met April Bloomfield