By Lisa Swander
@lisa_swander

My daughter stands before me at our dining room table, hands on hips, watching my eyes water. I’m sampling her “Chomptastic Carrots and Dip,” her first attempt at a recipe accompanied by a picture of a cartoon horse.

“There’s garlic in it,” she says happily.

It’s an ominous sample, plated in a handled mixing bowl. I hack into my elbow. “Is that right?”

“It’s either a tablespoon or a teaspoon,” she says, and then pauses to frown into the middle distance. “I can’t always tell the difference.”

 The garlic and I are merging into a single pungent organism, but I manage to nod. “Is it delicious?”

“It’s very flavorful,” I say.

She eyes me, suspicious of diplomacy. I reach for my water. There’s no one to give a second opinion as, strangely, my husband and son have vanished from our home and possibly the entire state. She hands me another carrot, top-heavy with chomptastic paste. “Mom,” she sighs, “It can be both, you know.”

It’s been weeks of this. She is eight, she dislikes most foods, and she’s decided this is the year to cook her way through The Disney Princess Cookbook. Loose interpretations of Seven Dwarfs Soup, Magic Carpet Roll-Ups, and Under-the-Sea Sand Dollar Crackers keep arriving, and because I’m a slow runner, I keep tasting. My daughter doesn’t. Nothing she cooks passes her lips. I suppose any self-respecting princess cookbook would have notes on royal food tasters and poison, but I’ve never checked. I just sample and cough, and she beams.

I’m proud of her. Meal prep is another step to independence, and garlic aside, she’s made some solid contributions to our family dinners. The Seven Dwarfs make an A+ chicken noodle soup, and Merida’s (allegedly) Scottish scones are downright respectable. Regardless, there’s beauty in the attempt. Cooking is time my daughter and I share, a bit of creative co-work we both genuinely enjoy. In turn, we share cooking with the women in my family, a generational chain of fine home bakers and cooks I’m grateful she’s chosen to hook into.

I’m also relieved. Dinner can be a fraught and whiny event at my house. And although my daughter won’t eat her cooking, she won’t complain about it, either. Between that and the freshened-up menu, I’ve enjoyed offloading some of the dinnertime burden, one I’ve shouldered alone most of my adult life.

It’s who I’m offloading it to that troubles me.

Cooking may have a rich history in my family, but that history is almost exclusively female. My children have noticed. Although I required both kids to learn the same survival menu of grilled cheese, eggs, and a smoothie, my son’s culinary interest ended once we unplugged the blender. His sister will seek me out to bake cookies; he will add chocolate chips if he can eat the rest of the bag.

Maybe this is temperament. He prefers the forest and she prefers the trees, and it doesn’t get more meticulous than leveling flour with an offset spatula. But when I look at our family dynamics, I fear there’s something more powerful at work. It’s difficult to untangle those Tangled Frying Pan Eggs from generations of patriarchal structures. Including the one I co-created.

Despite my best intentions, my marriage runs on gendered tracks. Some of that is logistical; I’m home earlier than my husband and my hours are flexible, so dinner and childcare are easier for me to handle. Some of that is preference; I’ve always loved to cook almost as much as he hates it. And some of that is centuries of baked-in expectations, many of which make me feel like a dutiful mother but a lousy feminist.

I remember how grown up I felt the first time I brought a dish to my grandparents’ house. It was fondue, warmed in a tiny crockpot I received as an apartment-warming gift. I’d yearned to join my aunts, mother, and grandmother in whipping up the magic of our holidays; anything delicious and homemade came from the same women who planned every celebration we had. Never mind that my uncles and cousins never seemed to bring anything, or if they did, that it came directly from the Costco pastry counter. I understood that cooking was a rite of passage for me in a way it was not for them. I wanted it. I got it.

If I’d understood where that passage ended, however, I might have wanted something else. I had no idea how easy it was to fall into a complementarian sort of marriage, one where my attachments to feeding and nurturing became the same domestic shackles my mother and grandmother would have chewed their own arms off to escape.

Eventually, I broke down, as many women do, and my husband and I emerged from the smoldering debris with a more equitable household. Still. The kids were old enough to watch me in my June Cleaver days, and I wonder what damage it did. If my husband had cooked more, would my son have taken more interest? If I’d cooked less, would my daughter have been less drawn to its garlicky charms?

When I’ve picked at this particular wound, the princess cookbook rubs in a fresh crack of sea salt. Princesses. I tried to keep them out, but princesses have a way of hitching rides on Christmas gifts, pajamas, and party invitations. The worst of them—the ones sealed in towers or glass cases—are glaring beacons of female disempowerment. They also have the best castles. The less I welcomed these princesses, the more my daughter wanted them, and so when The Disney Princess Cookbook slithered under our Christmas tree, I decided to leverage it. My daughter had been riding the buttered noodle express for years. Perhaps we needed a narcoleptic princess to crash it.

It worked. America’s Test Kitchen chicken salad couldn’t compete with Magic Carpet Roll-Ups. The meatloaf I’d foisted upon her was palatable only when Cinderella recommended it. She ventured into broccoli, parfaits, and creamed wheat, led by some of the most regressive characters in the Disney vault. Princesses were expanding her horizons. I laughed. I cried. I shuddered.

Some days I appreciate the princesses. Others I turn the book spine-in and turn on the Test Kitchens. Some days I tell myself that as long as she’s choosing cooking, it can’t be oppressive. Others I think about how cooking in my house looks much like it did in my mother’s house, and my grandmother’s house, and her grandmother’s house, and I want to feed something chomptastic through the shredder.

Peace lies in accepting that this back-and-forth is the best I can do. It’s a variation of most parenting—the mixture of satisfaction and regret, of confidence and terror, that whisks us through everything our kids will discuss with a therapist someday. I wish I could tell my daughter that life has the certainty of a well-executed recipe. I wish I could tell her if she combines the right ingredients in the right order, she’ll have no anxiety, only joy. But I’ll have to tell her the truth, as soon as I recover from the garlic dip, and it’s the same thing I tell myself: Mom, it can be both.

Lisa Swander is a writer and former English teacher. She lives in Indiana with her husband and two children and bakes a mean gingerbread. You can find more of her work at lisaswander.com.

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