At my bridal shower several summers ago, I was presented with a book of hand-written recipes cobbled together from the women I knew, and even those I didn’t, as several of my great-grandmother’s recipes made an appearance in the book, thanks to my aunt. That recipe book has been one of the greatest of my wedding gifts, as it has provided a plethora of regular recipes as well as constant inspiration.

The difficult recipes in the book have certainly challenged and grown my abilities as a cook. But it is the simpler recipes that I wish to praise here. Simple cooking, for most mothers and homemakers, constitutes the diet of an ordinary life, and there is a great gladness that can come from simple cooking done well.

On many social media platforms today – TikTok and Instagram especially – a certain kind of lavish cooking is lauded. Foodie influencers flaunt their cuts of short rib or narrate the best process for cooking scallops. Videos of cooking gourmet meals over campfires enjoy minor virality. Tradwife influencers share their best tips for making and baking with homemade cheese.

In many respects, however, the kind of cooking that achieves virality or popularity online is not sustainable. Even regularly making homemade cheese or yogurt, while an enviable goal, is not a viable habit for many homemakers (though it may be for those who have access to a dairy cow!).

In his masterpiece mixture of cookbook and theological reflection, “The Supper of the Lamb,” Robert Farrar Capon discusses the virtue of “ferial cuisine” – that is, ordinary cooking. Pasta, homemade soups and salads, beans and rice … these are “ferial cuisine.” Capon holds that the distinction between “fattening” and “healthy” meals is not as essential or helpful a distinction as that between “festal” and “ferial” cuisine, or the cuisine of special occasions versus ordinary life. Each, he holds, has its place in a well-ordered life. He writes:

The ferial cuisine, you see, was the poor man’s invention out of necessity, but it is light-years away from poor cooking. The poor man may envy the rich their houses, their lands, and their cars; but given a good wife, he rarely envies them their table. The rich man dines festally, but unless he is an exceptional lover of being—unless he has the soul of a poet and a saint—his feasts are too often only single: They delight the palate, but not the intellect. … Every dish in the ferial cuisine, however, provides a double or treble delight: Not only is the body nourished and the palate pleased, the mind is intrigued by the triumph of ingenuity over scarcity—by the making of slight materials into a considerable matter. A man can do worse than be poor. He can miss altogether the sight of the greatness of small things.

Capon holds that an ordinary dish done well is a delight to the mind because of the creativity with which it is made. When cheap ingredients are brought together with imagination and ingenuity and just the right amount of butter, a small but great thing results. Think of the best stew or soup you’ve tasted, or the most delicious crusty loaf of bread you’ve consumed: these are small but great things, and their beauty ought not be overlooked.

One of my favorite lunches is homemade egg salad or chicken salad on sourdough. In both egg and chicken salad, the ingredients are few and inexpensive. Likewise, too, with sourdough: flour, water, salt, and sourdough starter, together with some practice, are all that’s needed for a good loaf. When these few ingredients are skillfully arranged together, delight comes too.

Let us not despise that which is simple or mundane, and let us not chase after that which is lavish and unsustainable. Let us strive, instead, to cook and bake and make small but great things even – or perhaps especially – in the ordinary days of our lives. We ought to cook with thrifty creativity and eat with gladness. As Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes, “Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart.”

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

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