Cooking And Sexism

This is a sort of followup to the Egg Noodles post from two days ago, but, a bit of a tangent from it.

I had mentioned in the previous post on egg noodles learning to cook from my mom, and having watched my grandmother cook, and picking up some of what she did.

It was a friend’s comment on Facebook that really irked me. No, not at her – at the sexism displayed by my grandmother.

See, I watched my grandmother. That doesn’t mean she ever taught me anything. Now, it might be possible to dismiss this as ones of those “yeah, but you were young, so she wasn’t doing it because you didn’t pay attention” or something like that. However, that wasn’t the case – she was involved in my life (it’s the same lady that thought it was horrible that I was left handed, so, whenever my parents weren’t around, she taught me to be right handed.  My parents weren’t particularly impressed with that trick, either.)  But, cooking wasn’t something she stopped to teach me anything about – I ended up just observing, and much later in life reconstructing it.

How far did this go?  Well, I had asked my grandmother for the recipe for a family delicacy: finger cream pie.  Every time I asked, there was some hand waving, and “well, it’s just a bit of flour and (REDACTED – can’t give away the secrets 😉  No proportions, nothing.  However, when I was married, I asked about it, and she gave Heather recipe, and instructions on how to execute it!  It wasn’t just a matter of certain ingredients, it had to be done at room temperature, for instance, due to a specific set of chemical reactions!  The only way I got access to it was because she gave it to someone else!

See, it’s stuff like that which drives me bat-shit nuts sometimes.  That’s why I’m very much a pro-equality guy: because there’s absolutely no reason why I would have been incapable of making finger cream pie.  In fact, I’ve made it at least three times now (once was a failure of sorts – I sort of “smoked” the pies when the boiled over 😉  When I have kids, if my daughter asks how cars work, you know I’m going to teach her.  If my son wants to know how to sew, I’m going to teach him (though, I’ll probably have to relearn it myself 😉