I Hate Cooking
Or, I hate being the default chef
I am the eldest daughter of a very proud Italian American woman. I grew up with long Sunday dinners and homemade meals every single night.
Truth be told- my mother cooked every night partly due to cultural tradition. After all, homemade is just better than fast food. Plus, my mother was capable of making good, authentic Italian- American cuisine and she cooked that often. Why would we pay anyone else to do that?
But it was also partly from necessity. Eating out costs money and quickly adds up. Apparently homemade shepherds pie, Turkey tetrazzini, and pasta with tomato sauce is a heck of a lot cheaper (or at least it was in the 1970s).
Her mother also cooked nightly and this is not some portrait of quaint 1950s housewife nonsense. That was not a reality for my family. Rather, my grandmother worked all day as a seamstress. Then she came home and made three course meals while her husband drank at the bar with his friends (and sometimes he would bring those friends home for her to feed).
It was not really fair but that is what was expected of women. Social convention and low incomes limited their choices. When my mother was a child, as soon as she got home from school, she prepped some food before my grandmother came home because she was a girl and that’s what…
