Just now I was watching my son cook pancakes with his 8 year old daughter. Being the adventurous soul that he is it was a major production and his daughter was a full partner in the process. It involved sourdough starter, sour cream, buttermilk and homemade yoghurt in additional to the traditional flour, eggs, and water. My wife and I cooked many times with our son while he was growing up. As an adult his love of cooking has only gotten greater. For a few years he worked as the food editor and photographer for what would now be called an influencer blog. He has followed his own curiosity to make sourdough bread, brew his own beer, and many other things.

His love of cooking began with us his parents, but my own did not. My father never cooked and my mother saw cooking as her wifely duty not as something to enjoy. I certainly learned rudimentary things about cooking from watching her but not because she intrinsically liked doing it. My mother was one of three sisters (originally four but one died.) Fourth of July family cookouts and Thanksgiving family dinners rotated at the house of each sister in a regular sequence. Each sister prepared dishes, and desserts for the events as the extended families got together for food, fun, bid whist, conversation and the like. These events were the signposts of my life growing up.

At one of these Fourth of July gatherings held during my college days. I sought refuge from the heat in the living room of my aunt’s house. The only other person indoors was my father’s uncle. I never had much interaction with him. He needed dentures to speak clearly and sometimes when we would visit he was hard to understand and perhaps I was secretly afraid of him. He was sitting on the couch staring off into space. Out of nowhere except his memories he said, “Fuck capitalism.” I was going through my black student radical phase so this not only surprised me, it interested me. I did not talk or even think about the new politics I was learning at college during the 1960’s. My family would have been appalled to hear about it and I certainly didn’t expect it from a man in his 70’s. We began to talk and it turned out that he had been a kitchen worker and chef’s assistant  in his younger days. He was instrumental in getting the kitchen workers to form a union to fight against their exploitation by their “capitalist overlords.” As he talked he became that younger version of himself rather than the old man I had known. Again it was working together with others in the kitchen that animated him. I learned more than history that day. I learned that older people are valuable books that tell us about the world we think we know, but don’t.

I didn’t realize the important role communal cooking played in the three sisters’ lives. Once while I was in college I dropped my mother off at the home of one of her sisters who was sick and temporarily bedridden. The other sister was already there. Together the two sisters began putting the house to rights and cooking meals for the bedridden one. The two sisters fell into this harmony of roles that had been going on for decades as they moved around the tiny kitchen. This was the only time I saw my mother this joyful in the kitchen. I realized that it was the doing of the necessary for family while alongside family rather than the cooking itself that made her happy. As I left them there happily puttering around it was like the ending of a Hollywood movie as the camera pulls back from a scene that is continuing and that you realize has been happening for many years and will continue to happen.

My daughter in law observed that this generational cooking together has been going on since the human race began. We are hard wired to do it, and it is an important factor in the survival of the species. Its necessity is covered up by how much fun it is. So, cook with your loved ones as many times as you can. It makes them and you better people.