This title of this essay is one of the most published American cookbooks of all time. Since I was a very young child, I used to trawl through the internet for cooking videos. Like every privileged South Delhi kid, my understanding “respectable” culture was defined by the west. Western songs, western accent, western food….. So it is no surprise that I feel an emotional connection with the homages to this piece of text that I saw scattered through food culture I consumed over the years. I have never read the book, I doubt I can find ingredients to half of these recipes, even in a city like Delhi, but I distinctly remember what this book looks like. Tucked away in a rustic kitchen studio, tastefully decorated in the most trending decor on Pinterest, more ornamental than a tome brimming with knowledge.
Now this preface can lead to many themes that I can explore. Postcolonial insecurity gripping my identity as an Indian, the problem I have with the mainstream meme culture, making every cultural artefact into a viral post, an ornament devoid of context. For me, those themes don’t matter anymore. These thoughts are not the first things that don't come to my head when I think about the book. It is the title, a title that I never truly understood and I am learning what it means to me. “The joy of cooking”, what was the joy that cooking has really brought in my life?
Cooking for most of my life was more of an escape than joy. A way to discipline my mind away from the dark thoughts that plagued my soul. Cooking was mindless procrastination, cooking was an endeavour to seek validation on social media. Cooking was the only joy I had in my life, a splash of colour on the grey canvas of passing time.
Now, this is a problem, this is an unsustainable joy. What this year has taught me is when joy is conditional on anything, it is precarious. What do we do when every second the world around reinforces how insignificant your ideal version of the world is? How unsustainable, and fleeting, the moments of happiness tied events, hobbies or things beyond the boundaries of your own sense of self really are. Cooking I think will become a true a joy when it is not the sole joy I have.
So now I have a few more moments of happiness, a few more reasons that I seek out to be happy. Every day is not an obsession to get out of the painful haze, seeking relief through distracting myself, through seeking fleeting moments of joy. It is funny how these moments translate into the act of cooking itself. Till the joy is not about cooking anymore. These are rare moments when I can look beyond the food porn, the aesthetics and the sensory overload of good food. To seek pure unadulterated peace and happiness. Laughter, that is not conditional on anything, any event or anyone.
So what is the joy of cooking? I don't think there is any joy unique to this activity, the reasons for joy coming from cooking are certainly unique…but reasons for joy are becoming immaterial in my head, and that is a relief.
To anybody who has still stuck around reading this, I hope you were expecting food porn. Because good food has always been a distraction from the world for me. But it was never solving the world for me, which meant the pain would repeatedly come back. I don’t think I can teach anyone the lesson that I am still learning, I am not sure people look at food the same way as I do. Yet, this is something I would have wanted to read when I was looking for recipes online.
