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It has bothered me almost all my life that women cook and wash up, while men joke, eat and doze. I must have made a vow, when I was a girl child washing dishes after family suppers, that I wasn't going to be a kitchen slave when I grew up.
In the extended family I was born to, there was no wonderful sacred society of women cooking mysterious dishes and delicious meals, secretly passing on the legacy from generation unto generation unto the sixth or seventh generation of them that love to eat.
My grandmothers on both sides of the family were the offspring of rural folk who made do with what they had, and it was obvious that what they had was not exotic. We had plain old American meat and potatoes, served with a Jello salad and maybe a sheet cake, or possibly a cobbler, for after. For excitement, there was sometimes the relish dish, made up of store-bought sweet pickles and canned olives served in a fine glass dish divided down the center for this very purpose.
The most exotic and mysterious I ever saw my grandmothers get about kitchen duty was when my dad’s mom, a largish lady decked out in an old dress with a homemade floral apron over it, cleaned some butchered chickens at the sink while I watched. She showed me the grit inside the gizzards. I thought that was interesting.
But generally, there was nothing of note going on in the kitchen except work on the part of the family women. The family men, waiting for the women to feed them, sat around in the living room and made fun of each other.
In the early 1960s I was old enough to be enlisted for KP by my mother after we ate. No one asked me if I preferred to play with my cousins. I don’t remember being asked about my preferences at all. It was just a bald order: Get in there and help with the dishes. To be honest, my big brother had to do it too. We were burdened with one dirty dish after another, as the women put the food away, and sometimes we could hear manly snores from the living room.
And there I think I made my vow, while staring down at the cold, soapless dirty dishwater I had my hands in trying to find that elusive last spoon, and here comes my ma with a giant kettle of encrusted mashed potatoes and she plops it into that water…I vowed that I would not wear this ball and chain when I was a grown-up.
Well, I grew up, got a great job, got feminist, and still cooked and washed up while the men joked and watched football or whatever on TV. I think I divorced my first husband because of it.
Now my dearest is retired, and he's the head cook and I'm the chief bottle washer. It is good and right and fair. He makes more than meat and potatoes too. And so can I. Apparently we both have become the sacred society of kitchen workers because our respective children call us and ask for our secret recipes.
Here’s my secret recipe for candied yams, recently requested by my daughter Milo:
Open a big can of cooked yams, drain and dump it in a casserole dish.
Put some brown sugar and butter in a bowl with a wee bit of water and stir it around a little after nuking it. Pour it over the yams.
Put a bunch of mini marshmallows on top and bake it for 30 minutes at 350 degrees.
Very mysterious and everyone loves it.
If you know a kitchen slave, or you are one, I share these vital words: Break the chain, while you still can!
