PicoBlog

I’ve recently become obsessed with watching a headless woman in South Korea on YouTube make gimbap. She goes by Honeyjubu, and her page is filled with videos of her cooking for her family and cleaning their apartment in Seoul. She never shows her face, just her hands diligently chopping onions, rinsing rice and saving the water, and packing her husband’s lunchbox in regimented fashion every morning. I am obsessed with her.

And she is not alone in her tasks. According to the New York Times, since the pandemic, there has been an influx of these types of videos, ones that embody a kind of “Danish hygge meets Marie Kondo’s decluttering.” They’re videos, made almost exclusively by women, that show the bliss of domestic life for women. And while South Korean women seem to have a corner on the market, it seems like women of all races and ethnicities are sharing their love of an organized home. Just search your TikTok for videos tagged “Clean With Me” or “Cook With Me.” Women, including young women, are taking to social media to share their love of these domestic tasks. Men, on the other hand, appear to be mostly absent from these videos.

I find the timing of the rise in popularity of this trend interesting, too. Sure, lockdown kept us in our homes for long periods of time. The more time you’re in a place, the more it needs to be cleaned. And it’s obvious that some people would find comfort in the simplicity of those tasks.

But these videos do feel incredibly gendered, in that I haven’t really seen people who identify as male find the same satisfaction in cooking for their entire family and folding laundry. Yes, there are obviously male chefs on TikTok and YouTube and in the world, but their content is rarely, if ever, focused on food as a means to feed your family and keep a “good” home. It’s much more Anthony Bourdain style, or has some other kind of schtick.

The prevalence of this type of content also comes at a time where the algorithm seems to be propping up misogynists like Andrew Tate, who was recently deplatformed for his radicalized videos. Some of his ideas? Women are inferior to men, and that they are property of men, and that their sole jobs are to procreate, take care of the family, and take care of the man. (I won’t be linking to these videos for obvious reasons, but if you really feel like going down a misogynistic wormhole, please be my guest and have a Google.)

So if I’m finding these videos of women cooking for their husbands comforting, and it’s encouraging me to find comfort in my own kitchen again, am I, in some roundabout way, also perpetuating the idea that women belong in the kitchen? To be clear, I don’t do all of the cooking in the house. Ben likes to cook, and he’s good at it, and we split the responsibility of making dinner pretty equally. (He makes a cold peanut noodle that I dream about on super hot days.) But the kitchen does feel like more my domain, mostly because I just really dig being there.

I’ve struggled with this idea for most of my adult (and, tbh, teenage) life, because that idea of a woman’s place is also prevalent in Italian-American cultures, too. I grew up in a house where my father went to work and my mother kept the home. That was her choice, mind you, and she is always very clear about that. My mother went to school to be a teacher, but since we were able to live on a single salary (a great privilege, I realize), she chose to forgo work so that she could have time to spend with us kids when we were home from school. She has always told me to choose a different path than her, too. Not out of regret, but because she recognized pretty early on that I was going to be a woman who wouldn’t be satisfied if I didn’t have a career.

And she’s right. And I rebelled against the gendered idea of family for a really long time. (Especially as I grew up and didn’t fit the stereotype of an Italian-American woman, which is an essay for another newsletter.) But as I have gotten older, and my world has gotten a little smaller, and I have a man in my life who I love creating a home with, I’ve started to recognize the simplicity and the comfort of those tasks I saw as regressively feminine. And I struggle with that almost every day.

I don’t have an answer as to whether or not this is good or bad. I land somewhere in the middle. Like my mother, I choose to focus on the things that I enjoy, and at the moment that’s cooking, and building a life with my partner, and writing about food for all of you. It’s my choice. I don’t think it’s for everyone, and don’t think these tasks are exclusively female. I just so happen to identify as female, and have always identified as female, and love to be in my kitchen, preferably barefoot. And that is that. I’m sure my feelings will continue to evolve and I’ll be pulled to revisit them. And I’d love to hear what you all think of this mess.

But in the meantime, we have Vodka Sauce. This is probably the recipe of my family’s that I have tweaked the most, mainly because it’s the first recipe I learned to cook on my own. (I took a cooking class in high school and one of the projects was to cook for our families—the original recipe for my grandmother’s vodka sauce is what I made.)

I’m a bit of a vodka sauce enthusiast, and have cooked through dozens of recipes in the past 10 years. So the one I’ve adapted from my mother’s (above) is wholly mine. I’ve added garlic, and I let the sauce take its time, adding one ingredient at a time and allowing it to cook down. I also toss a little basil in there, too. You know, for giggles.

Maybe it’s appropriate, then, that you guys voted for me to make this recipe during a time when all of these thoughts are roiling in my brain. It’s my own version, my own take, and an example of my choosing a different path, just like my mother encouraged me to. And to me, that can only be a good thing.

Vodka Sauce

INGREDIENTS

• 1/2 cup vodka

• red pepper seeds, to taste

• 2 gloves garlic, minced

• 1 stick of butter

• 2 Tbsp olive oil

• 1 1/2 cups canned whole peeled tomatoes, crushed with your hands (See notes)

• 1 pint heavy cream

• 1/2 cup grated parmesan, plus more for topping

• basil, roughly torn, for garnish

• 1 lb pasta of your choice (See notes)

INSTRUCTIONS

NOTES

• You’re probably thinking, “Why crush whole peeled tomatoes with your hands? Why not just used crushed tomatoes?” When you buy crushed tomatoes in a can, to me, they are mushy and don’t have any uniform texture. I like a vodka sauce with some tomato chunks in it, and crushing whole peeled tomatoes with your hands creates the best results, in my opinion. Plus, it’s super soothing to smoosh those bad boys between your fingers.

• Since this sauce is thick, I prefer a pasta with a lot of nooks and crannies for it to cling to. Look for a fusilli or a cavatappi—those are my favorites.

• Vodka sauce is notoriously hard to reheat, because the sauce separates thanks to all the dairy in the recipe. But if you don’t think you’re going to eat all of your pasta in one sitting, reserve an extra cup of the pasta water and stash it in the fridge. When you’re ready to reheat, add a drizzle of olive oil to a pan and then toss in your pasta. As it warms, add in a few splashes of your reserved pasta water to reconstitute the sauce. It’s magic!

We’re article-heavy this week, because your girl has been doing a bunch of reading!

• I loved this Vanity Fair profile on Mario Carbone, the guy behind the restaurant Carbone in NYC. (Which also has a *legendary* spicy vodka sauce.) It was interesting to read Carbone’s take on the difference between Italian and Italian-American cooking, too, and how he chose to lean into the latter at his restaurant. (Reminds me of my newsletter from a few weeks back, which basically means I’m the next Mario Carbone, correct?)

• As a millennial who is often trying to figure out her place in social media, this article in The Atlantic made me feel seen.

• Did you guys read The Cut’s amazing deep-dive into Tinder’s 10 year anniversary? If not, please do immediately—and not just because I stan Allison P. Davis.

ncG1vNJzZmirpaOxosXSmqycnV6owqO%2F05qapGaTpLpwvI6apGahXZZ6o63DZp2epZmjtrTA