As I was making my daily internet rounds this morning, I came across an especially delightful essay in the New York Times by Leslie Kaufman. Titled “My Sons, the Sous-Chefs” it chronicles her recent decision to get her sons—one 14, one 10—to be responsible for cooking some of the family meals, and if I were teaching a writing seminar, I’d use it as an example of how to turn a personal experience into masterful prose.
Kaufman’s craft starts shining in the fourth paragraph. After opening with a standard “mystery/revelation” construction—in which she creates the “mystery” of a sophisticated diner praising a subpar meal, then “reveals” that the chef is her teenage son—she lays out her thesis like this:
I cannot remember exactly when it occurred to me that my children should be cooking dinner for me instead of the other way around.
It almost certainly came at the end of a typical long workday: I rush home from the office, start hustling in the kitchen even before my coat is off and then, maybe 15 minutes later, a child stumbles downstairs from playing a video game. He peers into a bubbling pot and moans, “Not pasta again,” or “Don’t you know I hate tomatoes?”
It would be easy for her to cast her cooking lessons as feminist actions on behalf of her male children, and really, I guess they are. But rather than banging that drum, Kaufman makes the point gently. She introduces herself as a harried character who cooks pasta, which is pretty standard fare, especially considering that her son was introduced as making seared duck breast. Then she describes her son’s typical teenage behavior but has the grace not to comment on it. She just lets the details create a picture of him (and her.) If we want to read feminist (or other) themes into the work, then we can, but we have to do it ourselves.
Even better, she keeps describing her family’s “flaws” throughout the story, never once reducing herself to grand moral statements or easy conclusions. “I made it clear that they could cook only when an adult was in shouting distance,” she writes. “But the goal was to have them plan and execute the meal on their own while I commuted home or ran errands — or drank a glass of wine on the couch.” That’s right, sister! She can be a good mom who creates boundaries and rules, but she can still have the self-interested desire to drink wine. She makes herself human.
Further down, Kaufman also admits that she makes mistakes in how she responds to her sons’ efforts, describing a scene where she tosses some undercooked meat back into boiling water. Her son freaks, she freaks, doors are slammed. “Sam stormed upstairs in a fury and despite my apology missed what turned out to be a very delicious meal,” she writes. “Later, he said he would have preferred serving the dish the way the recipe said to. If the meat wasn’t cooked enough, he would have put the bowls in the microwave. It’s not what I would have done, but it was his meal, and I should have let him make his own mistakes, too.”
And again, for me, these details make Kaufman and her family seem like flawed, loving people who care and screw up and try to grow. It sounds pretty sentimental when I put it that way, but the story itself never uses this language. It lets the reader come to these conclusions privately, which is incredibly flattering.
The story ends with a glorious triumph for her oldest boy, which just clarifies that what Kaufman’s really doing here is writing a short story disguised as a food column. I don’t know if all of it’s true or if some of it has been exaggerated, but who cares? The essay creates a sharp portrait of a family at work and offers some deeper things to ponder. I can’t ask for more from this kind of thing.
