The Cook

As a new mother, the kitchen became a new sort of retreat.

A few weeks after my son was born, when my C-section wound had scarred just enough that I was comfortable standing for more than ten minutes at a time, when I could bend to retrieve pots and pans from under the stove, I started to cook again. This was one of the aspects of pregnancy I hated most: It had taken the kitchen away from me, which had always been a safe space, a retreat, where I could be one of my most authentic selves. To look at, our kitchen wasn’t much of a retreat. We had only just moved, and the space was still lit by the overly bright, cold lightbulbs left by the previous tenants 

I had prepared for my return to cooking as if for a ritual. In the worst throes of my seven-month stretch of pregnancy nausea, when I couldn’t even go near my stove for several days after caramelizing onions, blooming Indian spices, or sautéing lamb, I bought a kelly-green 24-cm LeCreuset, which my Dutch husband assured me we most certainly did not need. One day, I would feel like myself again. 

The reality of returning to the kitchen to make even one of the simplest dishes in my repertoire (my mom’s spaghetti with red sauce) was much more complicated. And very little of that complicatedness was because I still felt like my insides had been scooped out with a grapefruit spoon, my mid-section cut apart. 

I always loved the kitchen. I started baking when I was 8. As a pastor’s wife (and later as a pastor herself), my mother was expected to regularly contribute homemade cakes to “Church Wife Bake Sales”. Even though she was a passionate cook and baker, she just couldn’t do it. But this was not the place to take a stand. So instead, she taught me to follow recipe instructions and basic techniques and paid me ten francs per cake – a fortune, to an eight-year-old. Our lemon buttercream Swiss rolls were the stuff of legends. 

Over time, she passed on her signature dishes. The simplest is the velvety, earthy red sauce that uses celeriac root instead of celery in the mirepoix. Eleven years after her death, there is no aroma in the world that reminds me more of my mother. I learned how to make Gnocchi Parisiennes, these lightest-off-all dough clouds in an impossibly airy bechamel with just a hint of nutmeg. When I came home for Christmas, she would make Capuns, golf ball-sized dumplings from mountainous Grisons, the Swiss region where she grew up. Capuns are filled chock full of dried sausage and herbs, wrapped in Swiss chard, and baked with a golden crust of Swiss mountain cheese, which I would only eat with apple sauce (I tried for years to beat my uncle’s unattainable record of eating the most dumplings in one sitting - 12!). 

During the earlier weeks of my maternity leave, Baby Ben and I spent long afternoons in a pillow nest in the corner of the couch. I didn’t have the ab strength or agility to get up from the couch a lot so spent hours feeding and nuzzling the baby, while my bladder got fuller and fuller. 

I loved every second of it. 

At the same time, I longed for the familiar cadence of my husband’s voice ending his last Teams meeting (“so that is everything from my side, anything else from you?”) through the half-open office door. I started shifting the squirmy baby with his impossibly wobbly, breakable head so I could thrust him in Tom’s arms before he even got a word out to ask how we were doing or to coo at the baby or tell some anecdote about an annoying coworker. 

I knew but couldn’t empathize with how tired he was as a new father, caregiver, and also an accountant in the middle of the financial year-end. But I had just taken care of the baby for hours! While he had talked to adults! He is a dad who wants to do his fair share - and does. But just to make sure my care-sharing math came out right in my own head, I spent my precious me-time cooking. I wasn’t wasting my time; I was producing something useful; I was home-making; I was providing sustenance. But it was more to myself that I repeated this almost as a mantra, over and over again, to soothe the mom guilt that had already found its voice. 

Before I got pregnant, cooking allowed me an easy creative outlet. I was good at cooking without feeling (very) competitive or (very) perfectionist. Like my mother, a historian, theologian, pastor, and fantastic cook, I talk about my academic accomplishments first. 

My grandmother was a chef, though she would never have used that term. She ran a hotel in the pre-Alps while raising six kids and running her husband’s political career from behind the scenes. She made elevated but hearty alpine dishes that could and did feed dozens: Oxtail soups, Sunday roasts, rabbit stews using all parts of the rabbits grown on the premises, omelets from the eggs of chicken she had raised. My grandmother had given up her studies when she got pregnant, a decision she struggled with until she died. She was proud of her work managing a hotel, work that brought in a good chunk of the family’s income. Cooking was not a mere womanly pursuit; her place was not in the kitchen. But she made cooking her own, an outlet for her considerable creativity. But she was also not spending her creativity on something frivolous. The “frivolous” creative bits, she kept hidden. After she died, we found an unpublished, finished novel among her things. 

When cooking, I can justify it to myself to step away from my baby for an hour or two, because I am doing something motherly. Because I am nourishing my family, I don’t have to so closely examine the constant tension between remaining a person with her own needs, wants, and interests and being a good mother. I love being a mother, more than I ever thought I would. But as a gender researcher, as my mother’s daughter and grandmother’s granddaughter, I struggle with how easy and joyful I find it to conform to this new gendered role I have taken on. 

And even while listening to a podcast and sipping a glass of wine, cooking is no longer just a creative outlet, just a space to relax. It now serves as a crucial distraction. My husband and I  have the tacit rule that we don’t interfere with the other parent caring for the baby unless we are explicitly asked for help. I love to tell everyone about this: It’s so important to set some basic rules and boundaries to parent equitably! If you don’t make a plan ahead of time and try actively every day, it’s so easy to fall back into gendered patterns! 

I remember how I would sometimes smell the inside of my elbow or the front of my t-shirt breathe in the sweet smell of my boy’s head. While chopping onions, I might grip the knife so hard I had to stop because was afraid of accidentally cutting myself when I heard the baby start to wail in the next room. I nearly wept with relief when my husband called out to me to make a bottle. I hold a glass bottle under the BabyBrezza and go to the living room, where I would give my husband an annoyed look and kiss the baby.