Recently, we discussed how choosing to cook for your family emphatically does not make you a bad feminist, so long as you’re doing it because you want to and not, because, say, “what a woman cooks is a window into her womanly personality.” Those words come from one Patty Pinner, author of the new cookbook Sweety Pies: An Uncommon Collection of Womanish Observations, with Pie.
Now, we certainly have nothing against pie. We’ve made a few in our day (always using premade crusts, tragically, because pastry is our Waterloo) and we’ve eaten many more than we’ve made. We do, however, have something big against the implication that baking is some sort of extension of one’s femininity. Pinner apparently describes herself as a “descendant of that generation where a woman’s appearance, manner and domestic prowess were synonymous with her feminine identity.” Patty Pinner wants you to get back into the kitchen where you belong, ladies! How do we know this? Because she told the Saginaw News.
She’s also working on her third cookbook, “How to Feed a Man,” which will feature more entrees than her previous work. Despite the title, it’s not a romance-themed cookbook, Pinner said.
“When I think of romantic cookbooks, they focus on (special occasions),” she said. “What I’m trying to do is encourage women to come back to the kitchen, and the art of housekeeping, and to make every day a special day.”
Listen. Cooking, whether it’s for yourself, boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband, kids, roommate or whoever, is great if you like doing it, but it doesn’t make you more of a woman. Ordering in delivery every night doesn’t make you less of one. There is no special skill possessed by or obligation on the part of women to cook. Do what you want.
