At the time, it was school policy for the girls to take home economics while the boys got to take shop class – a policy that seemed discriminatory and archaic to me. After a few classes on how to make popovers and what to do with a box of biscuit mix, my stagnating imagination turned to daydreaming, scheming on how I could possibly escape that 46 minutes of agony and get across the hall to wood shop with the boys. It didn’t work, and I dutifully suffered through an entire year of home-ec. I did finally get my chance to work in wood shop once I got to my public high school career and it was a bright beacon, a second nature of working with my hands and a forcing of my brain to understand the math that was always so elusive to me.
If my awkward year of home-ec did teach me anything, it was that I did not ever want to cook from a box, or be told what I had to do. The early years of being out on my own frequently saw me holding two jobs, but most nights I cooked something for myself, and I always packed my own lunch. But things really seemed to change for me after I had a baby 5 years ago and became a stay-at-home mother. Early infancy gave me plenty of time to read and begin to cook and bake more in depth from cookbooks, and by the time my son had turned 4 I had grown a sourdough starter out of rural Wisconsin grapes and delved into breads that took 3 days of planning from inception to first slice. It didn’t happen overnight, but it seemed like all of a sudden one day I needed barbecue sauce and the thought never entered my mind to run out and buy it.
Today there isn’t much I don’t make from scratch, and I don’t say that with a judgmental eye or with disdain for you if you do. I just find being in the kitchen infinitely rewarding, and many of my tasks there are as much my life’s work as they are my relaxation time. I take my job as a homemaker seriously, taking as much pride in my ability to finally turn out a loaf of bread that meets my standards as my ability, weather cooperating, to get 3 loads of laundry to line-dry in a day.
The economic and ecological climates demand encouragement for the domestically inclined, and good resources for those who want learn how to do more for themselves. I hope to encourage any person who may have felt similarly dismissive and annoyed with the old-school notion of home-ec, and to maybe inspire those who are ready to start some serious kitchen experiments of their own.
