I Shoulda Been a Tradwife

A couple of years ago, I was on the F train when I noticed a family next to me. Pretty normal: mom, dad, two sons—one maybe 11, the other maybe 15. They might’ve been tourists, or locals, or just from New Jersey; that is, they didn’t stand out. The only reason I took notice of them was the boys. They were meaty lads. Not fat, just big. Tall and solid. Kids who probably played football and could intimidate the other kids by dint of their mass. Inwardly, I recoiled in absolute horror, for I realized: I could have had boys!

What would it have been like to have two boys instead of two girls? In truth, it might not have been much different: Same parents, similar kids. They might have been more physically daring, perhaps, or more confident in their math abilities, but still about as smart, quirky, creative, and petite as my real-life daughters.

My catastrophizing mind, however, imagines the football boys, big and aggressive and entranced by hypermasculinity. They’d roughhouse into their teens, shaking the whole apartment building with their wrestling, and as they grew, I’d shrink, both physically and figuratively, making no impression on their increasingly alien—if also totally mainstream American—lives and personalities. Remember how King Triton gets transformed into a poor, unfortunate soul by Ursula the sea witch in The Little Mermaid? Yeah, that would be me.

There would be only one silver lining to such a situation: With monstrous boys comes insatiable hunger¹, and I would get to cook more—more food, more often.

I’ve loved cooking at least since I took home economics in seventh grade. We learned the basic measurements—three teaspoons to a tablespoon, sixteen tablespoons to a cup, and so on—and eventually cooked lasagne, of which I consumed copious amounts. Through high school I made sandwiches and sausages and salads, and in college my girlfriend and I would host soup parties. I cooked for my wife on our third date—seared duck breast that was probably too rare and fresh fettuccine with an uneven pesto—and when she was pregnant with our first child I flew to Taipei to learn her family’s recipes. We are one of those families that insists on having dinner together every night, and while Jean does a lot of work making that happen—from shopping to prepping ingredients—the role of chef defaults to me. I’m the one at the stove, the one with the recipes in his head, the one with a sense of how it will all come together.

My love of cooking is, of course, bound up with my love of eating, but they’re not as inextricably bound up as you might think. I mean, I certainly honed my cooking skills over the years so I could eat the foods I like the way I like them, and so I would not have to rely on restaurants to feed and please me. But the pleasures of cooking do not stem only from the eventual pleasures of eating.

I like the process. I have no formal training, so my knife skills are surely lackluster compared with your typical CIA graduate’s, but I can dice onions, carrots, and celery into a mirepoix with no anxiety. I can spatchcock a chicken, skim a stock, sear a steak, knead dough (and braid it for challah), griddle tortillas, simmer some goddamn good beans, and throw together a vinaigrette on autopilot. I have even been known to make a decent hot sauce. And I’ve done all of these things dozens if not hundreds of times, refining the processes—the physical movements, the order of events, the temperatures and ratios—to gain a certain confidence in the endeavor. I may not be the world’s greatest home cook, but I do know what I’m doing in the kitchen. It’s relaxing, even². I’m a master of my domain.

(Now, do we want to talk about how this is all just an extension of my desperate desire for control over a universe where I feel I—we—have none? Nah. Maybe another time!)

Where I really get off is in making large-format dishes. Once every six weeks or so, I’ll make huge pots of ragù bolognese and 滷肉, which we’ll divide into baggies and freeze for the kids’ school lunches. (Yep, they get home-cooked lunches as well as dinners. So spoiled!) I’ve held kimchi-making parties where we turn 50 pounds of napa cabbage into buckets of fermenting gold. I’m overdue to brew up a batch of Sichuan chili oil—maybe this weekend? And during the summers I host as many barbecues as possible, culminating in a big pig roast, a misnomer since I actually smoke the hogs (generally two 45-pounders). That annual event, which always coincides with my younger daughter’s birthday party, is my favorite day of the entire year: I wake at 4 a.m., start the fire, load the pigs into the smoker, and tend the fire all day, taking breaks to make salads and sauces and to buy extra ice, then greeting friends and strangers as they pile into our garden. I bounce around, talking to people I might not have seen in months, and then, finally, we pull the pigs out and attack them with sharp knives and hungry fingers. It’s a joy to observe, even if I myself take only a few bites of the porcine fruits of my labors. It’s fine—I’m doing all this not to eat but to feed.

Restaurant chefs always use that line—that they just love to feed people, and that’s why they became chefs. And while I get it, I’ve always distrusted it coming from them. There’s so much ego and money and potential fame bound up in the restaurant world that this folksy refrain can sound hollow. It’s one thing to enjoy feeding people; it’s another to do it for a living, and to evolve your technique beyond the everyday delights of home cooking into the rarefied world of haute cuisine (and its equally rarefied sub-branches). There’s something else driving that.

Or maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe the joy of feeding people persists even when you’re tweezing micro-herbs onto a plate or singeing the hair off your forearm in the twelfth hour of your shift on the grill. Maybe I should have become a restaurant chef myself, and channeled the energy that went into writing instead into cooking for capitalism?

I did once take one single tentative step into that world. On a winter visit to New York, before I officially moved here, my friend Tom put me at the salad station of his Upper East Side restaurant, États-Unis, for a night. There was just one salad on the menu, a tower of, if I’m recalling correctly, endive, goat cheese, and walnuts, with some kind of pomegranate dressing. And I made that salad, many times, probably never the same way twice—I forgot ingredients, doubled up on others, and was generally pretty sloppy. My B+/A- attitude was unhelpful. But this didn’t bother Tom: It was winter, he said, and this was a winter salad that was only on the menu because you always have to put a salad on the menu. We never discussed the joy of feeding people, and I never cooked in a restaurant again.

Instead, I became a writer, which is not all that different from being a restaurant chef³ . We struggle with the same sense of balance. On the one hand, writing is about craft and creativity. With every essay, story, article, I’m trying to create a new, unique expression of my ideas about the world, and to shape them—word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph—into a pleasant, professional, surprising form. And I’m doing that for me, because I’m testing my abilities, experimenting with language and structure, to find out what delights I can produce. But I’m also doing it for you, because I enjoy feeding you my words and watching (sort of) you delight in them (sort of) yourself. This newsletter is, I guess, the equivalent of an endless large-format meal, a pig roast in pixels. Okay, let’s call it what it really is: literary gavage. Trying! may be a lot to swallow, but I hope it goes down easy, and fattens up your brain. 🪨🪨🪨

Notes

1. Yes, I know girls can be monstrously hungry, too, but mine aren’t. At least not usually.

2. Except when the girls come barreling through the kitchen while I’m at work, or when Jean finds exactly the wrong place to stand while I’m moving hot pans around.

3. Long hours, low pay! The joke was too easy, so I had to stick it down here, where no one will notice.

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