Last night I was about to write about complexity and polarization. It would have been around 2200, when I thought that today’s morning would be a bit crowded, so I better prepare breakfast in advance. So I went to the kitchen and, almost in automatic pilot, started a well known recipe for morning bread. I did the first part, realized that had still some other household things to do, which took me about one hour. Then went back to my bread, and after some more work, I leave it to rise for the morning. I might have been busy with it about one and a half hour.
Today, pretty much the same. I am warming up to write what you are actually reading, and I think about having some fresh bread tomorrow. So I went to the kitchen, and doing this and that here and there, by now there are black beans boiling away and some bread rising. I might have taken again one hour, perhaps two.
Yesterday I might have expend another hour cooking for my lunch and nothing else, since C. was eating out and I don’t dine if I am on my own. Today we were biking around and we had a late breakfast, so coming back home at dinner time I put together some chickpeas, chorizo and spinach from a Bitman’s recipe, due to his times as The Minimalist in The New York Times. It also took no time whatsoever, perhaps 45 minutes.
Consider that my son is in his twenties by now, so we need not to cook for him. Also, consider that I derive lots of pleasure from cooking. For me, after years and years of gathering recipes from here and there, working out the kinks of the few I inherited from my mother and my grandmother, and paying attention to the cooking pages of the newspapers that I read, cooking have been almost another pleasant hobby. So it is easy to realize that it is, after all, a very time consuming hobby. I can barely imagine the life of the women, because they were women like in 99% of the cases, that had to cook breakfast, lunch and dinner, day in and day out, for a family of several people.
And it is not the time in itself.
As you can read above, with one or two hours a day you can make do. But the kick is that these two hours a day are not two hours that you can block and use, and then work or do anything else. The bread have to be prepared, and then left to rise, and then knead again and place in forms. The oven has to be warmed up. The black beans that are boiling right now had to be placed to soak yesterday. The time is not the point, but the thinking and the weaving of the cooking in my daily life is. And I have the luxury of cooking as a choice. Anytime we want we can eat out, or I can ask C. to cook. But imagine that I would need to work in an office 8 hours a day. Or in a fabric? No wonder that people does not cook that much anymore.
And yet I wonder more and more, now that my cooking has become simpler, and even more enjoyable what have we lost when we allow ourselves and our women to stop seeing cooking as a duty. Take the bread that is rising right now, a mexican recipe with cheese and corn and chilies. Kneading it I got a combination of smells that I had not got before but in a taco. So I got to think about our mexicans forebears, and their taming of the maiz, probably along thousand years. Maiz is a very hard to domesticate plant. I got to think how that social capital enriched our lifes today, even if the spanish killed massacred almost all of them. And then the beans begun to boil, and I smelled the kitchen of my friends back in Caracas, when we were argentinians left to the mercy of the venezuelans, who opened their kitchens and let us into their own world of caribbean tastes and textures and colors (BLACK beans? really??). All this food, and I am talking only about two things, carry a whole history behind, a history that I have greatly enjoyed to learn, a history that is, actually, part of who I am.
Can you imagine what we loose when we stop cooking on order to go working?