Nigella Lawson Gets It Right. For Women, Cooking Is Independence — And Self-Care
By: Micheline Maynard
Tags: Women, Feminism, Independence, Cooking, Food

It drives me crazy when I hear women say, “I can’t cook.” I’ve been cooking since I was seven years old. EVERYONE can cook something.

To me, “I can’t cook” is the culinary equivalent of women meekly confessing, “I’m not good with math.” It’s weakness. It’s defeat. It’s surrender.

Not being able to cook means that you give over one of the most important aspects of life to other people — to the food industry, to restaurants, to your roommates or spouse or kids.

Put simply, you’re never in control.

This is something that Nigella Lawson beautifully explains in a new essay called, “Home Cooking Can Be A Feminist Act.”

Lawson, to me, is one of the most fascinating women in the culinary world. She’s lived a life full of triumph and tragedy — the triumph of creating beautiful cookbooks, like “How To Be A Domestic Goddess” and “How To Eat.”

She became a household name through her lushly produced television show which made her a star in Britain and the United States, and convinced Ina Garten to create her own show, The Barefoot Contessa.

But Lawson also had a tumultuous relationship with her mother, lost her husband to cancer, leaving two young children to raise, and went through a nasty public divorce from an abusive billionaire ex-husband.

So, to hear her urge women to see cooking as liberating is something that I wholeheartedly applaud.

In her essay, Lawson writes,

“…Cooking seems to me to be one of the basic prerequisites for sustaining the self: it is an act of primary independence. I love feeding other people — I can’t even let a person who’s come in to mend my boiler leave without something wrapped in aluminum foil — but I derive no less deep satisfaction from feeding myself.”

Too often, Lawson says, women deride their skills by saying, “I’m just a home cook.”

That’s especially true now that chefs have become celebrity figures, and television shows heap praise on people who are able to craft lions out of bread dough and create pubs with edible carpet (I’m looking at you, Great British Bake Off.)

Her goal, she writes, is to get women to drop the “just” and to take pride in what they do in the kitchen.

“Real cooking is what happens in the home,” Lawson writes. “Restaurant cooking can be fabulous, inspiring, transcendent, and oh-so-marvelous in many ways, but for me it will always partly belong to the realm of theater.”

She goes on, “Furthermore, the restaurant kitchen insists and relies on conformity; the spontaneity of the home cook is by contrast gloriously anarchic. Don’t apologize for that: revel in it.”

The key in that sentence is don’t apologize.

I cringe when I hear women apologize for a dish that doesn’t replicate the photo they saw in Saveur, or when their icing fails to replicate the perfect florals featured on the same cake in Southern Living.

Well, Julia Child never apologized. Just like Lawson, she told women to own it (although the phrase wasn’t really around when Child was at her peak.) Child told us to present our dishes with pride.

After all, we were doing something for our guests, and something for ourselves.

In feeding others, we feed our pride of accomplishment. In feeding ourselves, we are committing self-care.

I look at cooking in the same way that I look at gardening. It’s doing good — for people, rather than the land. It’s therapeutic — an hour at the stove or in the garden makes you forget all the political noise that surrounds us.

It’s creative, in the same way that selecting colors and plants can be. And in the end, it’s satisfying, because it’s something that you did, not something which was done for you.

While it is fun to be waited on, and to sample the best that chefs have to offer, there’s also a real joy in replicating something you’ve eaten in a cafe, and perhaps improving upon it.

Lately, there has been a great awareness of the way that other cuisines are informing the way we cook at home. I just had a wonderful conversation with Christopher Kimball about that for my blog on Forbes.com.

He’s built his whole Milk Street business (magazine, the Web, TV and radio) around the idea that we are borrowing from other cultures in the dishes that we make for ourselves and our friends.

“”I just started cooking differently a few years ago,” Kimball told me. “ It didn’t dawn on me what I was doing. Now we have the idea of a brand that people want to participate in and be part of.”

I call Kimball’s approach a “wedding” of everything we’ve encountered in our travels, by dining out and by experimenting with what we see in grocery stores and farmers markets.

Lawson sees that, too. She explains in her essay that people aren’t trying to create anything particularly ambitious. “We are not creating a cuisine, we are making something to eat. Sometimes, this means we go to the store for far-flung ingredients; at other times, we simply choose the ease of the familiar.”

Writes Lawson, “Neither is better than the other, and sometimes the two are fused: ultimately all home cooking provides comfort.”

So, the next time you hear someone say, “I can’t cook,” send them to Nigella Lawson’s essay. Or to me.

I’ll be happy to explain how cooking can actually make you feel better, not worse, and ultimately, more powerful.

Micheline Maynard is an author and journalist. Follow her on Twitter @mickimaynard