The time I got irrationally angry at "Chef!"
In which I censor the 'my mom's cooking sucked' motif
I have spent a non-zero amount of time in my life trying to track down shows unavailable on streaming services, or on the one I happen to subscribe to at a given time. And most elusive of all had been Chef!, the Lenny Henry sitcom about life in a Michelin-starred restaurant in the English countryside. I remembered it as a truly great show, or great for the first couple seasons, which is good enough. Where had it gone though??
Sure enough, Britbox eventually came through. I was so excited for this rewatch! Lenny Henry, as Gareth (think “House” but a chef), is so good!
Is it as I remembered? Is anything ever? It’s a show about a married couple in their mid-30s dealing with very adult concerns about banks and mortgages that I doubtless tuned out originally, but that now make the show insufficiently escapist. But some of those scenes are pretty funny so it’s fine.
No, what got to me was Gareth’s origin-story scene. Everton, his unpaid employee (which could be a post of its own, but could also be chalked up to, this is a thing that happens in high-end kitchens, not that should, but it’s just accurate representation), praises his own mother’s cooking, then asks Gareth if his mother had inspired his career. Gareth answers that she did, but in a different way: he’d begun cooking “in self-defense.” What follows is an extended riff on the terribleness of his mother’s cooking, overboiling canned vegetables, using prepackaged ingredients, generally sinning against culinary rules.
The scene is meant to be funny, and with Lenny Henry’s delivery I laughed, but I also had a good mind to write to Britbox and request a trigger warning for the ep, the way some episodes of certain shows will, to let you know that dated content is ahead, and then you have to figure out if it’s the casual racism, sexual objectification, or something you’d know about if you hadn’t fallen asleep mid-episode.
I did not actually want to do this. I did, however, have this urge to shout, your mother was sick of cooking, Gareth! It’s not that she couldn’t cook, maybe she could, maybe she couldn’t, but she wasn’t a chef, she was feeding a family. She had budgetary limitations that she probably followed, unlike you, Gareth, who need to be alerted that a loaf of foie gras pâté needs to be served in small slices. Cooking wasn’t Art, it was something that had to get done every single day, without assistance. But was it fictional Gareth I wanted to say this to, or Mark Bittman, real person, who’s written a more or less identical version of the same?
The way I cooked for my daughters was a reaction, at least in part, to how my mother cooked for me. Like the mothers of my friends, mine made dinner almost every night, a predictable rotation of lamb chops, steak, hamburgers, beef stew, meatloaf (with an impossibly dry hard-boiled egg in the middle) and overcooked chicken, all served with potatoes, usually mashed; canned vegetables; an iceberg lettuce salad with Wish-Bone dressing; and fruit, sometimes fresh but more often canned.
Bittman gestures at understanding that reliably feeding her family was the essential, only to switch back to a clearly ancient-history annoyance that his mother allowed him to have cookies and milk for breakfast, and attributes his own weight struggles to this I’m sorry but entirely normal approach to breakfast.
Necessary tangent: Remember Garance Doré’s Top Shelf, from when she was still with The Sartorialist?
I’m not a very healthy person, but I do start my day with coffee and oatmeal. It used to be a tartine—bread with butter and jam. Scott [Schuman, my boyfriend] would look at me eating that and say, ‘What?! I can’t believe you’re eating that!’ When I moved to America, I understood what he was saying, because in America, you can’t eat like that. I don’t know why. It’s funny how you end up getting obsessed with nutrition when you live here. So, now it is oatmeal and a little bit of fruit and maybe some peanut butter. My mornings used to be a celebration of life and now it’s like, ‘ Ok…’
Burn it down, seriously.
I know there’s a stereotype of the Park Slope Mom, the one who knows where her family’s food comes from and only buys organic. Maybe she exists. What I’ve found is that the narrow parameters — can it be prepared after daycare and before an early-ish dinner, ideally with leftovers? Are there choking hazards? Are enough food groups represented? Are these ingredients unfancy enough that if they end up a dog’s dinner in the literal sense, I can live with this? — have made my cooking far, far less along those lines than it once had been.
I’m thinking now of Helen Rosner’s confession that she, like apparently many including in the food world, have had it with cooking:
I’ve stir-fried Sichuan-style cumin lamb, made slow-roasted pernil asado, fired up pots of oil for a farmers’-market fritto misto; I spent what felt like the summer juicing limes and slicing fish for an endless parade of tart, light-as-air ceviches; I’ve made hundreds of dishes for hundreds of meals. And I am so bored. I am so tired. In theory, I love to cook. But I am so, so sick of cooking.
The essay has many privilege disclaimers, which I suppose comes with the territory. (It’s a pandemic as well as a moment of mass unemployment so without disclaimers, ugh-cooking comes across as aloof.) But while I don’t think disclaimers and greater awareness are the ways to address this, there is something to there being a distinction between cooking because you want to and because you must. There are endless smaller distinctions within each, but there’s only the one where you might well know how to cook but be like, no, here are some nutrients, enjoy.