Andy Baraghani, The Cook You Want to Be Redux (Father's Day Edition)
Sunday's Child is Bonny and Blithe
Baraghani’s book has quickly vaulted into my pantheon of cookbooks. It’s pretty rare than any of my more recent books end up consulted frequently, but Baraghani is good for ideas and execution. Despite the recipes being rather simple—or because of that—the outcomes are really just so lovely in a rather precise way. So today I’m doing at least the lamb chops with pickles, the brussel sprouts with creamy fish sauce, and one or two of the salads. I’m tempted to do the tahdig, which I love, but that’s too much food and I do want to take it easy to some degree.
I read with some bemusement the various columns suggesting gifts for Father’s Day, which mostly bend over backward to assure children and partners that Dad Cooking is still, safely, just grilling in the summer. Both Mother’s and Father’s Day are still pretty central engines for producing gender in familiar and stereotypical terms. Things have changed, both in quantifiable terms and in the subtle moods of our culture—I see things in television ads that were unthinkable around 1980—men doing domestic chores, same-sex couples raising children, interracial families enjoying breakfast cereal together. But the commercial appeals for the two days for parents tend to make clear that overall things are pretty close to what they have been.
I’m also aware from social media that both days are frequent occasions for pain rather than celebration. Plenty of people have had specifically bad or fraught relationships to one parent, sometimes to both, or have experienced their own motherhood or fatherhood as painful, confusing or unpleasant, and find the representation of these relationships in idealized terms really off-putting. Or they find the incessantly hagiographic attention to children and child-rearing insulting and exclusionary. Enough people, in fact, that I’d say they’re not just individually entitled to their own feelings without being bombarded by commandments to feel otherwise, but to conclude (alongside a mountain of other evidence) that families and parents more often than not are a major source of our emotional and material struggles rather than a haven in a heartless world.
But on the other other hand, because I am nothing as an online writer if not gripped by indecision, I think one of the deepest dysfunctions that social media has brought to our wider public culture is the inclination to turn your own experience into a generalized commandment, to treat every moment that the wider culture contradicts the conditions of your own being as an insult, and to view your own emotional and cognitive needs in zero-sum terms—that if someone else enjoys a secure equilibrium and you do not, the only answer is to take it from them by demanding that they give up what they are in order to be what you deem best.
In this respect, I really liked the interview this weekend in the NYT with Samantha Irby, who insists on having the feelings that she has about her body, happiness, family, with some irritation on mainstream messages and well-meaning activism alike in terms of how they negate or illegitimate her feelings, but without issuing a commandment that her feelings become anything but hers. It seems to me that if there is anything that is not zero-sum, it’s meaning—what your life means to you (in all the contradictory ways it means), what things and experiences you find meaning in, what activities you do not enjoy (no matter how much others do). That includes gender, it includes embodiment, it includes identity. I get a bit frustrated reading a particular vein of gender critique that insists on fixing something in other people’s felt experience of gender, of emotions, of embodiment. In the meanings that have accrued during their life.
Self-work can include fixing how things mean to you as an individual, absolutely. You can end up with associations that are crippling to your relationships, your ability to function, your view of the world. But that work is the most delicate thing most of us could undertake as human beings—hollering at other people with the social media megaphone is like doing open-heart surgery with a jackhammer. Social media’s best possibilities were always about simply sharing how we are, what we mean to ourselves, not in trying to operant-condition other people into what you deem best for them. Eventually a knowable sociology can arise as an emergent product of that sharing, but when it does, it’s not a weapon but a discovery.
So for me, while I don’t think of fatherly cooking as strictly confined to the grill—it’s all the cooking that happens in my household, more or less, and in a sense not marked as fatherly in my imagination—I do hold onto some of the meanings of manhood and masculinity that are visible in the wider culture. They’re personally inflected and tangled in all sorts of things, some good and some bad. Those meanings may sometimes express outward in relational life that I feel responsible for, that are an unfinished work, an imperfection, a guilt—I talk too much, I talk over women, I don’t see some of what I should see in how others feel and react in my social surrounds. But sometimes equally I prefer or value some of what others deem necessary to change: forms of masculine reserve, of withholding, even of loneliness and disconnection, to me are embedded inside a dispositional inclination that I think is a good thing for me, not just a thing done to me by “structure” that I have to hammer out of my self and soul. I think on my father, who I lost suddenly and surprisingly only months after becoming a father and I’m still drawn to his masculine inhabitation of decisiveness, of honor, of honesty and frankness, just as I’m drawn to my mother’s sensitivity to others and her generosity. I think it’s important to say what I think, but I also can’t stand a certain kind of male approach to speaking, especially within institutions, that really is zero-sum, that believes in its own value so much that it cancels out everything else said and everyone else saying it, that is relentlessly top-volume declarative and profoundly incurious.
Subjectivity is a Jenga tower: pull the wrong brick and it all comes tumbling down.