I almost called this post “feminine arts” which is an example of internalised bias. I’m talking about cooking in the home.
People still express surprise and (in the case of other women) envy when I say my husband does all the cooking. When we were first living together, we shared the job equally, but for some reason, after some months, he said he’d rather do it all himself. I think it’s because he discovered a new found love for cooking. My father was also the main cook in our family, mostly because of the terribly long hours my mother used to work. I seem to remember boiled mince with a side of chopped raw vegetables was a staple. My grandmother was a terrifying old battle axe, and I seriously doubt she ever taught her oldest boy anything in the kitchen. My mother in law was, I expect, equally unwelcoming to her son as far as culinary expertise goes, but there were some things he picked up nevertheless.
The other day I came home to find him holding an egg which he was poking at with a pin. I had absolutely no idea what he was doing. He was looking for the air pocket at the fat end, but the egg was unusually symmetrical so that the big end was hard to distinguish. He was easily able to interpret my baffled expression, and explained that it was to prevent the egg cracking while it was being boiled. I was gobsmacked. When I was growing up, boiled eggs would invariably come festooned with a bubbling trail of white that had escaped from the cracked shell, like ectoplasm. As an adult, I’d read that if you put the egg in cold water and then boiled it, the gradual heating would protect the shell from cracking, and that seemed to work. But deliberately pricking a hole in the shell beforehand was new to me. As it turns out, my mother in law actually had a little doodad that would put the hole in for you, called an egg pricker. Oh to be a housewife in the mid last century! More gadgets and home appliances than you could shake a stick at, as you floated through the days in the arms of Prince Valium.
To show that he wasn’t making things up, Simon ordered a couple online, which have been very useful in his latest culinary obsession, Caesar salad and variations.
