I Thought Cooking Was Oppressive...Until I Fell in Love With It

How my kitchen transformed from a battlefield to a safe space for my creativity.

- By Salva Mubarak

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”.