Forum: ell.stackexchange.com
Tags: <gerunds><subject-verb-agreement>
Title: Is "Your cooking made me happy" acceptable?
Question: Your cooking made me happy.   Is this correct? Can " your cooking " be used as a noun? The more I read it, the weirder it sounded  to me.

Answers:
sents: text: Yes, it is grammatical.
text: Interestingly, "your cooking" can mean either "the food you made" or "the fact that you cooked."
text: So, for instance: "Everything you made for the care package was delicious.
text: The food brought me great comfort during the stress of exams.
text: Your cooking made me happy.
text: " vs.
text: "I know it was a big deal for you to take the time away from your job to do this dinner.
text: It means a lot to me that you did all the cooking personally.
text: Your cooking made me happy."
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/5890/Codeswitcher
score: 22
sents: text: It does sound a bit weird to my (American) ear, but not for grammatical reasons.
text: The "-ing" form of a verb can be used as a noun.
text: This "noun" form is called a "gerund".
text: I can imagine the example sentence being used in a scenario like this: Older mother: Looking back, what did you enjoy as a child?
text: Grown up child:
text: Your cooking made me happy.
text: If the conversation were between a man and a woman he was courting, or between a husband and wife, I would not expect this sentiment to be expressed the same way.
text: A statement in the present tense would make more sense, like: Your cooking makes me happy. or The way to a man's heart is through his stomach. or a woman might say Someone needs to write a book On the Care and Feeding of Boyfriends .
text: I also know families where the father does much of the cooking.
text: In those families, I can imagine a child someday telling her father, "Your cooking made me happy."
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/9100/Jasper
score: 7
sents: text: The -ing form of a verb may indeed be deployed as a noun (when this happens we call the -ing form a gerund ), and play the same syntactic roles as any other noun.
text: In those roles it may still take the same sorts of complement it takes as a verb, and it may take either adjectives or adverbs as modifiers.
text: Cooking rice is boring.
text: I hate your cooking.
text: I love my mother, but her atrocious cooking drove me from home.
text: I must thank Cedric for heroically cooking such an enormous meal on such short notice.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/32/StoneyB on hiatus
score: 5
sents: text: The sentence Your cooking made me happy is grammatical.
text: But the problem is the cooking in contemporary (American) English can refer either to (a)
text: the act of cooking (b) the result of cooking
text: In the sentence you've made I would think it means (a), or to reword it: That you cooked for me made me happy OR That you always cook[ed] for me made me happy If you want to express the other meaning, then I would say:
text: I was happy to eat the food you made OR Eating the food you made made me happy
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/4272/virmaior
score: 4
sents: text: Cooking may be a noun referring to the art of preparing food: "The artful way you prepare food makes me happy."
text: Cooking may be a gerund.
text: Then this is a case of possessive with a gerund .
text: It is like: "I hate his singing in the shower"
text: – I hate that he sings in the shower.
text: In your case: "It makes me happy that you cook.
text: " I guess that both forms could be understood as either "I am happy that you cook and nobody else
text: but you" or
text: "I am happy that you stopped playing and started cooking."
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/16474/hagello
score: 2

Summary of the answers:
The sentence is grammatically correct,  although slightly weird sounding.
The sentence is grammatically correct, if not a bit strange sounding.