"I thought cooking was oppressive...until I fell in love with it"

I used to think the kitchen was a trap. Not the sunlit, aesthetic version that occupies major real estate in the saved folders on Instagram and well-intentioned Pinterest boards, but the real one I grew up with. A place defined by repetition and a kind of quiet resentment that is somehow only palpable to daughters. You see, my mother did not like to cook. She loved reading and collecting books, watching Shyam Benegal films, and taking on little crafts that might not produce photogenic products but would be imbued with a special kind of joy that could not be described by words. What she didn’t love was cooking. 

“It was a different time,” my mother would say with an amused smile at my righteous outrage. Why would she cook then? I would wonder. I was in my early 20s at the time, and the choice felt simple. If she didn’t like to cook, she shouldn’t. The thing is, like in most households (whether in small towns or a city like Delhi, where I grew up), cooking was not framed as a choice for mothers; it was simply expected. It didn’t matter if your mother went to work every morning or stayed at home to manage domestic chores; the kitchen was her “territory”. 

Watching this growing up, and finding out that my mother didn’t actually like making biryani whenever the craving hit us on a random Thursday, I absorbed a very specific understanding of domesticity. It was gendered, invisible, and endless. My mother never hid the fact that she didn’t love to cook. But she would also shun any suggestions of keeping a cook in the house. This was something that I never understood. Was it about the extra money she would be able to save? Or the unspoken expectation laden on her as a woman of her time, which would render her ashamed in front of the other women in the family? By the time I was old enough to articulate my own preferences, I had already decided that I wanted nothing to do with the kitchen.

Simmering dissent

In my 20s, this resistance became a part of my identity. I prided myself on not knowing how to cook. When I moved to Mumbai for work, I would proudly carry hastily-made Nutella and white bread sandwiches for lunch, or rely on takeout and instant noodles for survival. I was too busy, too set on not repeating the mistakes of my mother, too uninterested in domestic expectations to participate in something that felt like a trap. Rejecting cooking felt like rejecting the quiet sacrifices I had witnessed growing up. For a long time, this position felt solid. Then, in my 30s, things began to shift. 

The change was not sudden or dramatic. It came gradually. It started with the passive consumption of cooking and baking videos. Brightly coloured sets, sanitised everything, and the jaunty music scoring those videos made it the perfect way to unwind without really engaging. Soon, videos of skilled cooks whipping up biryani in one pot or cupcakes being frosted became ASMR to me. The videos felt calm, intentional, even pleasurable.

Now, Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithm cannot wholly be given credit for this slow transformation. It was during this shift that I lost my mother. At the time, there was no discussion about the division of responsibilities or the new roles we would take on as we came to comprehend a life without her. But somehow, being the eldest daughter at home, running the household became my purview. Even though we had managed to convince my mother to hire a cook in the years before her demise, the responsibilities of managing the kitchen became a part of my daily chores. The transition felt organic, given the emotional upheaval of the time. My relationship with food and cooking was slowly changing. And then, I got married.

Falling in love

My now ex-husband never asked me to cook. He had figured society would have instilled that expectation into me, like how it had done to my mother, his mother, and his elder sister. But the fact that I didn’t know how to cook—and didn’t naturally take over the mantle of cooking from his mother after marriage—became a significant nail in the coffin of our marriage. It was a line in the sand for me. My shifting attitude towards cooking in the wake of my mother’s death had done nothing to erode the massive chip on my shoulder.

Months later, the distinction between obligation and choice began settling in the crevices of my consciousness. Therapy helped, so did the joy that sparked in me when I saw people eating what I made for them. It started simple. A cheese omelette, some French toast, or a plate of creamy scrambled eggs. Without the pressure of expectation, cooking became flexible. Some days I cooked, some days I did not. There was no guilt attached to either decision.

Cooking began to reveal itself as something else entirely. It became a form of creativity that was immediate and tangible. It engaged senses in a way that felt grounding. There was a rhythm to it, a process of trial and error, adjustment, and intuition. The people I fed, my family mostly, began talking about how I was a natural.

Serving sentiment

At first, I would try to brush it off. I would ignore the delight I’d feel at someone moaning after taking a bite of my freshly-baked cookies. Or how nothing had made me prouder of myself than being told that I had managed to successfully recreate my mother’s biryani recipe at a family potluck.

The shift did not erase my earlier understanding of cooking as labour. I see my younger sisters struggle with the same beliefs that I did at their age. I cannot, in good conscience, preach the joys of spending hours in a hot kitchen and occasionally burning and nicking yourself while cooking. It’s still an unevenly distributed form of labour. For my cousins and aunts, cooking remains an expectation placed disproportionately on them, solely on account of them being women. My own experience didn’t negate that reality. It just exists alongside it.

Today, my relationship with cooking is defined by the reclamation of joy and choice. It’s not a duty I perform, or a skill I feel obligated to master. It’s something I engage in on my own terms. And perhaps that’s the most significant shift of all.

Lead image: Shutterstock

This article originally appeared in Cosmopolition May-June 2026 print issue. 

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