In Praise of Togetherness
On a clear, cool spring morning, Marion Cunningham is waiting for a sprinkler repair person and getting ready to cook waffles for friends. A tall, vigorous, beautiful woman with snow white hair and lively blue eyes, she’s in a sweatshirt, slacks and a relaxed, welcoming mood.
The cookbook author and syndicated columnist began her career in 1972, when she was asked to revise the “Fannie Farmer Cookbook.” It took her five years, and she’s done another revision since. She’s also written “The Fannie Farmer Baking Book,” “The Supper Book,” “The Breakfast Book” and “Cooking With Children.” And she just came out with “Learning to Cook With Marion Cunningham,” a text for adults who really, truly don’t know how to cook. If ever there was a professional home cook, it’s Marion Cunningham. And if anybody has made excellent use of a home kitchen, it’s Cunningham.
Her house in Walnut Creek is, as she puts it, “one room wide.” At one end is the master bedroom, where built-in bookshelves hold hundreds of cookbooks. The window looks out onto green foothills and Mt. Diablo. The house, in fact, was designed to provide a view of Mt. Diablo from every room, including the living and dining rooms at the opposite end of the house.
What’s remarkable about Marion Cunningham’s home kitchen is how utterly unremarkable it is. It’s so small and modestly appointed, it’s easy to assume there’s another kitchen--a large, roomy, professional kitchen--where she really does her work. It’s incredible that all those recipes for the two revisions of the Fannie Farmer cookbook, five other books and countless newspaper columns were tested in an unabashedly amateur kitchen that’s not much larger than what you’d find in many apartments.
The refrigerator is a Kenmore. There’s no professional Wolf or Viking stove--just a KitchenAid built-in electric oven and an electric stove top. Yes, an electric stove top. Anyone who’s ever made the leap from scrambling eggs to cooking omelets understands the superiority and necessity of a gas range. Cunningham says mildly: “It would be too difficult to run a gas line into the kitchen, and I’ve gotten used to electric. You just have to learn to take the pan off the burner instead of adjusting the flame.
“But I wouldn’t recommend my oven,” she says frankly. “The old-fashioned dials held calibration a lot better than these digital pads do. I’ve had these pads replaced twice. I know they’re on the way out when I have to press the numbers really hard. I haven’t been able to find repair people who can fix the digital controls; they only know how to replace them.”
She takes a moment to check on the waffle batter. It’s an original Fannie Farmer recipe, made with yeast, and was mixed earlier to allow time for it to sit. She stirs it thoughtfully and approves the thin, ropy consistency.
As for her general cooking equipment, nothing exceeds the arsenal of the average home cook. An Oster blender. A KitchenAid mixer. Two Toastmaster waffle irons (“I finally conceded that one simply isn’t enough when company comes. Nobody wants to wait for waffles.”)
This space, says Cunningham, is just what she wants: a kitchen that’s as close as possible to the kitchens of her readers--other home cooks. She also does her own grocery shopping.
Wouldn’t a productive, busy cookbook writer desire, at least secretly, the professional-level equipment that so many people are putting into their homes as a matter of course: the Sub-Zero refrigerators and powerful six-burner gas stoves, the alloyed pots and pans with mind-numbing price tags?
“All those things are quite beautiful to look at,” she says. “But I come from a different time, when you didn’t need to start with the best of everything, but made the most of what you had.” She surveys her compact work area. “Of course, I’m not too many years away from pioneer women cooking in one pot over an open fire.” She laughs. “I’m happy with easy-to-use, inexpensive things that work. What’s important to me is not what I cook with, but how cooking and food puts me in community with others.”
Surely then, she finds it hopeful that today’s architects are making kitchens larger, designing them as communal rooms, intended to provide the hearths and hearts of new homes.
Cunningham is skeptical. “This may not be the broad view, but I’m concerned how little communal life there is in homes, regardless of what kitchens look like. How often are these people using their kitchens to host a bunch of people?” In reality, she continues, homes are empty most of the day. They’re a place to reheat take-out or microwave instant soup. Families are always heading out the door to work, to school, to soccer, to the gym. No longer are they sitting down together.
“The last time I was in Los Angeles, I saw these new apartments right downtown--low-income housing, I think. Anyway, the kitchens consisted of a toaster oven, a sink, a microwave and a tiny fridge. It was assumed that people who lived there weren’t going to cook, that they wouldn’t be getting together over hot meals and talking to each other. That seems so bleak to me.”
Cunningham believes that the practice of home cooking has been diminished in several ways. Technology, she says, has changed people’s lives on the simplest levels, more often than not cutting them off from their fellow humans. “Once the clothes dryer was invented, women stopped hanging out their clothes and leaning over the back fences talking to each other, exchanging recipes, getting to know each other. When the kitchen is removed from people’s lives, what’s left are screens--the TV, the Internet. People are looking everywhere except at the people who are near them. Why is this?”
In Cunningham’s cooking classes, her students often come from homes in which neither parent knew how to cook or the person who did felt harassed and bothered by cooking. The reason, she claims, is that cooking has never been advertised as a desirable activity. “It’s been considered menial and drudgery. This was a natural attitude of immigrants who came looking for freedom and riches. By the turn of the century the middle class could afford hired help. The more successful you were, the less time you had to spend in the kitchen.”
“More people than ever are buying ready-made food created by strangers,” Cunningham points out--rotisserie chicken, deli items, frozen entrees, take-out. “I stand in defense of home-cooking,” she says. “I feel that, as a society, we don’t revere cooking. The sharing of food is a communal, primal center to life. When you eat together, your defenses are down and that makes you vulnerable. You’re in a position of revealing what you need with and from other people and [the fear of such vulnerability] may be what keeps us apart.”
The results of families not sharing a meal are showing, she says. “Young people haven’t been trained in manners. I see many who don’t even know how to use a knife and a fork. They don’t know how to participate in a dinner table conversation, the give and take of it. They haven’t learned the art of telling stories, recounting their days. Or sharing food.
“In Kathleen Norris’ book, ‘The Cloister Walk,’ she writes about a monastery in the Midwest where, because it was easy and more economical, the monks were served their food cafeteria-style. But they soon went back to eating family style with bowls of food on the table because they felt that the passing and sharing of food is such an essential part of life.”
But technology must have brought some improvements. What about cooking gadgets? Isn’t there something she’d like to see invented, or something she’s especially fond of?
Cunningham springs to her feet. “I have one that’s really a thrill!” She strides into the kitchen and pulls out what looks like a long, skinny rasp with a handle. “It’s a grater. Look how quickly it works!” She grabs some locally made Gouda, and in no time she has created a curly pile of cheese on the counter. “So much, so fast!” she says with pleasure. Next, she grates hard chocolate, hard Parmesan. This is Marion Cunningham’s idea of technology: hand-held, hand-operated and effective. “The woman who designed it saw how carpenters’ rasps worked . . .”
If there’s anything Marion Cunningham would like to see in the next millennium, it’s not a gadget or appliance, an architectural space or elaborately prepared food, but a return to the simple pleasures of cooking, sharing meals and being together. “There are few enough rituals left for busy modern people,” she says. If people want to improve their lives, her suggestion is simple. “Learn how to cook.”