Like any good millennial, I like to pretend that I prefer cooking to takeout. I love to tell myself that I cook quickly and well. When my day in the spotlight finally arrives and I'm interviewed for a Refinery29 "Money Diary," the whole world will see how much money I save by cooking and how efficiently I spend my time in the kitchen.
My fantasy is a widely shared delusion. Nothing has crushed me and my fellow millennials harder than the popular "15-minute recipe" genre, which promises that you can cook a masterful meal (sometimes including prep time) in 15 minutes or less.
It's a chronic source of disappointment. Almost always, as if by design, these recipes take longer than the time they've been allotted. Your skill level is irrelevant. No matter how fast or how competent you are, you'll never be good enough.
Story of my life, and our generation.
The problem is everywhere you look
Most food blogs and sites are built for this kind of evergreen, highly searchable content. For the New York Times, these recipes are labeled "13 Crazy Fast Recipes Ready in 20 Minutes or Less." Food52 has a category called "Weeknight Cooking" with dozens of recipes promising maximum expediency, whether it's "The Ultimate Chicken Noodle Soup Only Needs Two Ingredients" or "12 Super Quick Snacks You Can Make for Tonight that Don't Feel Last Minute." (Can you imagine the shame if guests discovered you made your hummus dip last minute?)
Over at Country Living, they have easy "rustic" dinners you can make in 30 minutes or less.
And no one is better at optimizing your dinner management strategy than the Instant Pot, which was engineered to dramatically reduce cooking time and which has become the culinary cure-all for a generation far too busy working multiple freelance gigs (to pay for their Cracka-Pot health insurance) to spend time in the kitchen.
None of these recipes are inherently bad. Some are good and decent and unapologetically buttery. By and large, however, they take far longer than our 15-minute fantasies.
They require labor — one that time-sensitive recipes particularly struggle to catch.
No one lives in this culinary dream world
Some of this inequality is structural: Quick-fix recipes often rely on ingredients that most of us don't have lying around. Maybe that's pre-chopped vegetables, maybe it's something else. Take this New York Times recipe for Thai fried rice, which is supposed to take just 10 minutes to cook. The recipe assumes that you have five cups of cooked rice already in your kitchen, which most of us do ... not.
Cooking that much rice consumes at least 20 minutes, tripling your expected cooking time and setting you up for quick-fix dinner failure.
Same goes for this admittedly very delicious recipe for "Weekday Morning Rice," tagged as easy over at Food52. The recipe relies on the same inconsistent variable (not all of us have cooked rice on hand) and a similarly idealistic assumption: that any of us have the time to cook for 10 minutes in the morning. If only.
Then there's the genre of recipe that seeks to cut down on shopping (a generally unacknowledged form of labor/prep) by using ingredients you're likely to have in your fridge. The only problem? No one has this stuff. This frittata recipe, literally labeled "What's in the Fridge Frittata," assumes that you have at the ready minced parsley and the ever-popular can of lump crabmeat.
To be fair, 15-minute recipes aren't the the only ones with this problem (though they are often the worst offenders). Quick is a popular label, and one that can easy become misguiding. To attract home cooks looking for a speedy fix, some recipes are labeled as quick that clearly just aren't. This recipe for a "quick" minestrone, for example, still takes an hour to make. This recipe for "Quick roast beef and roasted carrots" consumes over an hour of your precious time that you could otherwise dedicate to television.
I'm sorry to make you depressed.
These recipes aren't disingenuous: They just exist in an entirely separate time-space continuum where no one has to perform outside labor.
Emily Moscato, Assistant Professor of Food Marketing at St. Joseph's University, knows this fantasy well:
"This genre [of recipe] is popular because it feeds into what we're looking for," Moscato told Mashable. "We live in this time-starved society that is all about us being as productive as possible and yet we're nostalgic for a slow, agrarian lifestyle... What we don't think about is the work associated with it."
In the real world, a meal never takes 15 minutes — it requires budgeting, shopping, prep, cleaning, serving, and cleaning again. In the perfect 15-minute recipe universe, however, you don't need to go to the store to pick up ingredients. You'll never have to take the extra 10 or 20 minutes to run to the cheap Trader Joe's, where you'll stand on an extra-long line so you can buy an extra-cheap bag of expired Brussels sprouts on the discredited theory that if you save money on food, you can one day retire.
In this world, you won't waste time cleaning up as you go, because your kitchen counters are long and expansive and pure. Mincing vegetables takes moments with your stainless steel Williams-Sonoma mincer, which you always have on hand.
Here, your Instant Pot is actually instant. It cleans itself, magically! You don't need to spend 40 minutes of your day building up enough pressure so that meat can cook "instantly." Depressurizing just happens on its own.
Most of us don't have access to this universe. But that doesn't mean we want it any less.
The time has come to lower your standards
Face the facts, folks: "Slow cooking" is a culinary ideal and a nostalgic fantasy. Having one partner (typically a housewife) who could stay home and cook was once a middle-class phenomenon. Now that most American households need two earners to thrive, speed cooking is the only option left.
Moscato compares this slow cooking to someone taking a photo of themselves in the perfect yoga pose: It might look easy, but we don't think about all of the labor — the strengthening, the stretching — it took to create this image of casual perfection. Cooking, even the most formulaic cooking, takes skill and practice and education.
"A huge issue is familiarity. How fluent are people with the ingredients they have?" Moscato asks. "If part of your life was spent not eating fennel, how do you know what it looks like? Do you know how to cut it? Prepare it? Do you even know if you'll like it?"
Consumers are expected to perfect the 15-minute recipe with minimal food literacy. Even when they do have some cooking vocabulary, they may lack the financial resources and social capital necessary to cook speedily and well.
"Do they have partners who can help cook? Do they have access to a grocery store without transferring to two buses? Do they have a knife? A cutting board for meat and vegetables?" Moscato wonders.
It's a monumental undertaking. But that doesn't mean we should give up on cooking weeknight dinners. In her research, Moscato has argued on behalf of food pleasure: People enjoy the food they make more when they take the time to savor it. I, for one, pat myself on the back every time I cook SpaghettiOs in a pot in lieu of a microwave.
Self-doubt and unrealistic cooking standards aren't healthy for any of us. We need to set more obtainable benchmarks: doubling the time we give ourselves to cook, for example, or tripling a recipe so we have leftovers (and minimize our cooking time) for the rest of the week. If you need to Seamless, Seamless. If you don't have time to make split pea soup in your slow cooker, buy the Trader Joe's one. High sodium be damned.
As the great Maxine Waters once said, it's time to reclaim your time.
