DEAR CAKEBREAKER...

My husband and I have an agreement that he cooks dinner and I clean up. I feel like I should be grateful that he cooks and do my part, but I can’t help feeling resentful. Does he have to be so messy?

-In the Dish Pits

Dear In the Dish Pits,

Within a relationship, we gravitate towards certain household tasks, cleaving the cleaning into separate parts. But with this kind of specialization, it is easy to become careless and oblivious to how our choices affect the next person in the cycle. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the cooking and cleaning trade-off. Cooking and cleaning are one, the motions of the former creating the latter, the cycle beginning again, endless as our hunger. We are losing the skills to feed ourselves efficiently, and part of this efficiency is mess mitigation.

Our love of culinary entertainment has created a view of cooking sterilized of its end stages. Our viewing experience is scrubbed of scouring, an invisible dishpit somewhere absorbing the detritus without thought.

There are myriad of ways to cook with what we might call “cleaning awareness: countless one pot meals and strategies to simplify. But one cannot cook with this awareness when the cook does not actively take part in the cleaning.

For a cook to create in a way that uses less dishes, he must first identify with the dishwasher. In the restaurant business, the best chefs begin in the dish pit. It is where they sharpen their attitudes against waste in all its forms, from that of the careless prep cook with too many bowls, to that of the overly ambitious diner.

While cooking and cleaning can feel burdensome, so too can cooking without cleaning. When we subdivide cooking and cleaning, we sacrifice the relief of transitions. How dull a job when there is no other job to relieve us? How does cooking preserve its melody if there is no base note of cleaning to contrast its sweetness. Cooking instead becomes merely the work it is and can be. 

Cooking has its own natural deadlines, the school bus arrival, the lunch hour, bedtime. Our digestive and cultural clocks demand a certain production schedule. As a procrastinator, these time constraints have been helpful in forcing creativity and productivity. It is also conducive when it comes to cleaning. Within these finite deadlines, cooking generously makes space for cleaning: the preheating oven, the roasting bird, the simmering pasta water, are all a gentle background track for dish cleaning.

I once saw cleaning as an optional second act, the dishes piling into landforms in the sink. Cleaning was once an invisible imperative, but I now see it clearly within the inactive cooking time. I sometimes marvel at how precisely a recipe allows for cleaning within its steps.

Make space for your husband to cook and clean in all its glory -  to move across a kitchen floor free of dogs and children, to drink wine, to warm his hands in a sink of soapy water, to stare idly out into the yard.

You may take out the trash, unpack groceries or offer your important contributions in countless ways, but stay away from the dish pit. Give him the kitchen in its wholeness, replete with all its freedom and responsibility. You can sharpen the division of labor elsewhere, but strive to mend the wholeness of stove and sink, fire and water. Oh, how we would be lost without their balance.

 Love, Cake Breaker

 I have one final strategy. When I find myself with a kitchen full of dishes, I sometimes bake something. What is one more bowl, when I have to clean the rest of the kitchen? While the cookies bake, I set to work. The 25 minutes feel manageable, giving me a timeline that does not feel endless and daunting. I will probably be done enough by the time the cookies are, but if not, I can enjoy a sweet reward for the efforts I have put in and reassess.

Skillet Cookies to Clean your Kitchen By

Melt 3 oz. unsalted butter in a cast iron pan over low heat. Add a 1 cup of sugar, 1 tsp. molasses, and ½ tsp. salt. Turn off the heat and mix together with a wooden spoon. It will look dry and sandy. Add 1 egg, 1 yolk and mix. Dust 1 cup of flour and 1 tsp. baking powder over the top and mix. Push dough around as evenly as possible and pour 1 cup of chocolate chips, raisins or nuts (or all three) over the top.

Bake for 20 minutes at 350

Cake Breakers were a kitchen tool popular in the 1950s. They look like decorative combs and were used to cut slices of delicate cake with the least amount of pressure. 

Cake Breaker, also known as Paige Lindell, has worked in restaurants in California, Louisiana and New Hampshire. But the kitchen she has worked in the longest is her own, spending time washing dishes thinking about love and food, and how they are one in the same. 

Send her your questions about Food and Relationships at cakebreakeradvice@gmail.com  

This article first appeared in ELF, a publication of the Keene, Sentinel. Keene, New Hampshire.