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By Maria Dolan

Jan. 4, 2000 | I don’t want to offend my father, whose hefty plates of barbecued ribs fed me on many a summer evening. But it was a long time before I understood that men could cook.

Our mothers, after all, were the ones to whom my childhood friends and I looked for sustenance. In a divorced family, like mine, a mother was often the only parent available. But even in two-parent families, meals -- whether exotic or mundane -- were nearly always seen as a woman’s task.

After college, when my girlfriends and I were finally in charge of feeding ourselves, we were surprised to find that we were uninterested -- even inept -- in the kitchen. As modern, educated women setting up camp in cities far from home, we were too busy with our newfound freedoms and demands to find time to attend to domestic details.

Also Today Matt Gurney's cider soup A recipe that promises to seduce, whether the cook is man or woman. By Maria Dolan

In Washington, practical Julie lived on bagels and soda and stayed awake all night reading legal documents. In Dallas, stylish Nita forked up pasta salad between grant-writing deadlines at the museum. And in San Francisco, I,
bred-in-the-bone bohemian, worked at the wine bar in an Italian trattoria and wrote short stories without endings, dining, when my boss allowed it, on bowls of pasta puttanesca.

Even my new roommate was not immune to this collective stovetop ineptitude. A long-limbed fund-raiser for the arts, Carrie would use the superfueled left flame on our ancient gas range to fire up a can of soup in less than a minute. When she got more inventive than that she was dangerous. She once left a skillet on high with a wooden spoon beside it while she dashed to the corner market for a missing ingredient, with predictably incendiary results.

I think we women had all assumed that we could slip easily into an apron whenever we felt like it, that good cooking would come to us naturally. Perhaps we thought those dinners our mothers had served had come to them naturally, too -- that they carried a gene for domestic talent that we had all, surely, inherited.

I cannot speak for my friends, but I loved food, and I missed it. I missed the elegant dash of my graduate student mother’s hurried dinners. I liked to stand in the doorway of a bakery and inhale, to rub rosemary between my fingers, or to sip from a tasting spoon. But I didn’t know how to translate my appreciation of food into a meal.

When I finally decided to make something, I’d turn to a fancy, literary cookbook full of autobiographical meanderings and recipes for smoked lobster or cassoulet. After an afternoon spent preparing one of these impossible dishes, I would throw it away and go out for pizza. My food didn’t ignite, but it didn’t quite work, either.

After a couple of years some of us got restless again. Nita moved to New York and, seduced by the gourmet takeout at that city’s famous grocery, named her new cats Dean and Deluca. Carrie found another job and was sent to Paris. I moved back home -- to the cheaper, more comfortable city of Seattle. Julie, tired of working all night, was thinking about following me.

It was on a night in that old friend of a city, while I was fed up with my meager cooking skills, that I learned how we modern girls might feed ourselves.

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