Phoebe Peerbux looks back on the cooking co-op she helped establish one year ago in order to tackle the struggle and isolation that can accompany early motherhood.
Finding myself alone at home with my two under-twos, while my husband was at work, I felt as though my brain was melting.
One day, as I was bent half over into the dishwasher, fishing out guck, while my toddler was throwing all our crockery on the floor, and the baby wailed, I recalled something the songwriter Joni Mitchell once said in an interview: “when the women aren’t singing in the kitchen, you’ve got a sick nation”.
I didn’t feel much like singing, or smiling or laughing. I felt like shouting and crying. But I knew she was right. Her words echoed in my mind, or perhaps as they fell to my heart, I found a clue; in a healthy society women are together – not alone, separated.
It was then I recalled sweet memories of cooking with other women; a three-girl house share playing Ready Steady Cook; a South African kitchen full of women with sleeves-at-elbow rolling what they called “baraka biscuits” while singing dhikr; a scene outside an Egyptian tomb (of a wali, not a pharoah!) where smiling women beckoned me to help them roll vine leaves. I could suddenly see the problem with my kitchen was that it’s mine, alone, and individual. What I yearned for was not so much to escape the work, but for company in doing it.
Blessed with the company of an incredible community it took only a couple of text messages for me to test my hypothesis and set up our cooking co-op, a place where we can catch up and cook up. Now quite often, on Monday mornings, a few of us come together and bulk cook two recipes. The children scamper off to play with one another, or scramble round to help the aunties chop or grate vegetables (win/win) while we get to spend sweet productive time together.
In these moments I feel connected not only to my companions but to a time-old tradition of solidarity in womanhood. My friends become my sisters as I take on their family recipes, and the ‘chore’ of feeding my family (and cleaning up the kitchen) is transmuted into meaningful connection and mutual assistance. Although we haven’t yet found ourselves singing, we are smiling and laughing, and glad of the baraka of helping one another. Often we cook for an absent friend, someone who is ill or working, recovering from birth or hosting guests. Most importantly we go home nourished, with hearts and tupperwares full enough to feed the family.
The prophet ﷺ said “The most beloved food to Allah is that which is received by many hands”, and somehow, by Allah’s power, we have found cooking together, and for one another, reduces the burden and increases the reward. Even if you only have one friend to try this with, I would really recommend it.
