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Is Cooking Together All That Hard?
Co-author of books with Suzanne Goin and Jessica Koslow has written a book on cooking for newlyweds
I never really got the concept of “cooking together.” The image that comes to mind is the cliché rom-com scene where the hot guy stirs a pot of his special sauce and gives his girlfriend a taste from a wooden spoon, making her go “mmmm.”
Then I met my future husband, and we started doing our version of “cooking together,” which mostly means cooking for each other. When we cook together, a natural division of labor occurs. I’m good at mise en place, and I like to bake. Bernie is excellent at setting pan to flame and has a way with meat. But even when we are cooking from one recipe, our activities still feel separate. Is this what cooking together is supposed to be?
When I heard that Maria Zizka, co-author of books with Suzanne Goin, Elizabeth Prueitt and Jessica Koslow, was writing The Newlywed Table: A Cookbook to Start Your Life Together, I was intrigued. Normally, I would roll my eyes at something that at first glance seems retrograde, but I had reason to believe that Zizka would offer a fresh take on what it means to cook while in a relationship.
At the age of 31, she has collaborated with today’s darlings of the progressive culinary world, people who’ve created new genres of cuisine out of grain bowls and toast, and make fermentation seem sexy. And since we got married around the same time, I was curious to hear her insights on how love plays out in the kitchen.
Though The Newlywed Table is a collaboration between Zizka and her husband, Graham Bradley — she wrote it, he designed it — I was surprised to find that their relationship is conspicuously absent from its pages. I learned more about them from Google and peeping on Zizka’s Instagram than I did from reading the book she wrote on married life. Bradley is barely mentioned after the introduction, and there are no photos of the couple. When thumbing through other cookbooks, I can learn, what an author’s spouse’s favorite cake is (in Small Victories by Julia Turshen, it’s the…
