That kugel is a family heirloom, a collector's item, since it was the only recipe her mother ever cooked. Francine is a second-generation non-cook.
Lily Gordon's kitchen incompetence was legendary. One day, as Francine tells it, she was at her mother's apartment and needed to use the oven. She couldn't figure out how to turn it on, so she asked her mother. Her mother didn't know how, either, pleading that she hadn't had occasion to use it. She'd only been living there four or five years.
Diet she's got in spades, but you won't find much else in Francine Levinson's refrigerator.
(Kyoko Hamada)
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But Lily Gordon may simply have been a woman ahead of her time. Dollar burgers, rotisserie chickens, supermarket salad bars and frozen foods that stretch along three or four aisles have all weaned people from their home stoves. The U.S. Department of Agriculture found, in January 2000, that only 55 percent of American dinners at home included one or more homemade dishes. By 2003, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American woman spent 47 minutes a day on food preparation and cleanup, down from 2.3 hours for nonworking women and 1.2 hours for working women in 1965. (And don't think that men picked up the slack: In 2003, the average man spent just 15 minutes a day on those chores.)
Home cooking has followed in the footsteps of home sewing -- the commercial substitutes have become not only more prevalent, but often cheaper. Fewer and fewer Americans have learned cooking in school, or at home, except in front of the television. Emeril
Lagasse might be showing vast Food Network audiences how to cook, but that doesn't mean they're going to turn off the TV and take their lessons into the kitchen.
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, writing in 1893 in favor of establishing communal kitchens to free housewives, posed this question in a poem "To the Young Wife":
Are you content with work, -- to toil alone,
To clean things dirty and to soil things clean;
To be a kitchen-maid, be called a queen, --
Queen of a cook-stove throne?
No, not Francine.
She gives credit to her mother, who worked full time in her husband's car dealership and repair shop until 1968 and then, Francine says, became the first woman in Washington to own a liquor store. Lily Gordon was a workaholic, says Francine, though the word hadn't been invented at the time. She left the house at 7:30 a.m. and wasn't home until 9 at night, by which point the housekeeper had already fed the three children. The housekeeper even cooked on Sunday, when the family always had an open house for the relatives.
So Francine, with her mother as her model, learned to entertain, but not to cook. That was the surprise Francine sprang on her new husband, Mel, when they came home from their honeymoon in 1964. What should they do for dinner? Mel wondered aloud their first day in their new apartment. Francine suggested a new restaurant she'd heard about.
Mel's mother had warned him that Francine didn't cook. He was beginning to learn what that meant. One day Francine tried to make hot dogs. She asked Mel how much water she should cook them in. Teasing her, he said, "Half a cup per hot dog." A few minutes later he walked in to the kitchen to see Francine carefully measuring half-cups of water into the pot.
