Domestic goddesses do more than cook—they use their charisma to turn what has historically been a trap for women into a stage
My induction into the cult of the domestic goddess took place when I was 25 years old. I had just moved into a two-bedroom apartment with my boyfriend, a roommate, a cat and some roaches. I was also working for Nigella Lawson’s American publisher, which had most recently brought out her cookbook Forever Summer.
From my current perspective, this formative preoccupation sometimes strikes me as naïve and even a little bit disturbing. There is more than a whiff of Le Petit Trianon about thinking of domesticity as self-expression; for most of the domestic goddess’s readership, cooking is still about survival, not fun.
I’m unreasonably nostalgic for that time and place; it was where I first discovered the essays and recipes of Laurie Colwin, and where my cookbook club first met to discuss her writing and eat her often strange food. Before I ever lived in New York I felt like I knew it via Ruth Reichl’s memoir of restaurant reviewing, Garlic and Sapphires. The whirlwind of exotic meals she described made the city seem like a mysterious wonderland that offered up bites of pure pleasure everywhere you looked . Born and raised in NYC by a mother who was an indifferent-at-best and poisonous-at-worst cook, Reichl went on to live in bohemian Berkeley just as Alice Waters’s mesclun-lettuce revolution was sweeping California.
Ina Garten gets to be in the sensualist category mostly for having “Barefoot Contessa” be her nickname and for adding so much butter to so many things. She started out as a purveyor of fancy foods in the Hamptons and gradually developed an empire of books and TV shows, which exist mainly to sell the cookbooks, which sell in the millions. Her focus is on entertaining, and on selling a vision of accessible rich-person party food.
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