This week is a little different. I simply needed to share this very personal essay from my heart. If you are new here or if you have been here for a while I hope this will give you more insight into my journey and how I might be able to support you on your own journey with cooking—which is ultimately about self discovery and learning to trust in your unique vision for your life.
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How Cooking Became my Worship
When I was growing up, until I was about 10, my parents were part of an evangelical church community. They were heavily involved. My Dad ran the kids church and this meant we were at church Saturday night AND Sunday morning, and even Sunday afternoon there would be a picnic, and weeknights there would be meetings or Bible study. We spent a LOT of time at church. My Mom was sometimes working with church administration, sometimes doing choir stuff or working on theater performances like the Easter production. They were doing stuff. They were busy. There wasn’t that much time to parent me directly.
As a kid I was often left to my own devices, bopping around the church or whatever space the church event was being hosted at. I remember hiding under piles of tables and chairs in dusty rooms in small-town churches I would explore when my Dad took me to help out his friends Christian rock band which would be touring in some nearby town. I didn’t really have a role so I would try to pass the time in whatever way I could, searching for small pleasures.
I did a lot of observing. I was a super shy kid and did not feel like I belonged or had much of a purpose. I was supposed to watch and figure out how to be a good kid. A good Christian. A good daughter.
I promise this is going to be about cooking eventually.
There was a lot of emphasis on worship in this church. Ecstatic and intense worship. People spoke in tongues and talked to God. My understanding of what was going on came through the lens of my parent’s explanations and my own physical experience of being in these charged atmospheres. I remember feeling tingles and beautiful feelings and I also remember feeling weird sometimes too, like people were pretending or forcing experiences. I have a couple of precious memories where I felt I was really talking to God as a kid. I remember it as the most comforting and relaxed and blissful feeling of safety. Like everything was completely okay for a moment and I could just trust in goodness and life.
As I grew from toddler-hood to school age I became more focused on being good and following the rules. I lost those moments of bliss in worship. Worship was the songs part we did before the sermon part. Sometimes it could be fun, but mostly it was boring and I felt like I was always being watched and scrutinized. To really fall into the ecstatic experience of those early years felt too risky. I felt that God would be mad at me if I did it wrong. The God of my early experience had been replaced by the God that I had built out of Bible stories and grownup explanations. And I wouldn’t want to sin, then get hit by a car before I could ask forgiveness and go to hell! Or what if my false worship led others astray?
Eventually my parents left that church for various reasons to do with disagreeing with church doctrine and discovering that the church leaders were engaging in some shady financial business. When we left I still felt like a Christian, but I knew that my father’s faith had been forever shifted and my mother’s was a mystery. So now I felt there was this new way to be Christian outside the church and I was being tested and had to somehow save my family from hell and it was all just a LOT.
I felt like I was on a mission. Like when my parents left the church that I had been baptized to now take over and make sure my family would be okay. They were off on the wrong path, and it would be my job to steer them back to the right way… whatever that was. And I had to do it all while respecting and being obedient to my parents wishes. Because that was also essential to being a good christian kid. It was a lot of pressure.
I didn’t really play as much after that. But there was one space where I felt my shoulders relax and I didn’t feel that sense that someone was watching for me to make a mistake.
And that was in the kitchen. There was nothing planned or conscious about my kitchen explorations. I was simply a kid following my bliss… or trying to. But looking back I realize that I was using cooking and baking as a space to be creative and free and feel my divinity again. Feel that connection to community, to a higher purpose. To that space I had touched in early childhood that was so safe and pleasurable and open.
I felt creative, but also useful. Not to mention, my Mum would let me bake desserts which we didn’t usually get to have so it felt like a special treat, like pleasure for pleasure’s sake. And pleasure was not something I allowed myself. It didn’t feel like the God I had built from the church people approved of pleasure. He liked duty. He didn’t smile much.
But somehow I had found a loophole and I could let myself loose in the kitchen. I could just enjoy it. I loved the way the butter and sugar scrunched against each other and got lighter and fluffier as I mixed them. I loved how it was just a little challenging and there were small problems to solve and there was an outcome and I could be free for a time. Free from that interminable pressure to save everyone in my life from hell.
Over the years cooking would be there for me. As I grew up and moved out on my own, and further away from Christianity, cooking was a way to gather my friends around me, to feel vital and safe. It was always a creative outlet when I was so unsure of how or what I should be doing in the world. I could always feel settled and capable in the kitchen. And because it was useful and had to be done, it was a hobby I allowed myself.
Then it lead me to New York and the masters in food studies and my career sprang from this book, Good and Cheap, which was ultimately me trying to share the practice I had of connecting with myself and worshiping in the kitchen. The vitality and safety and clarity I felt. I deeply want everyone to be able to feel this way. To feel free. To feel nourished. To feel empowered. Regardless of income or situation.
And when I felt overwhelmed and depressed and lost and hopeless, cooking has been there for me. Always a solid boat that will gently sail me to calmer waters. I wrote Good Enough to share that experience.
It all makes sense looking back. Cooking has been my worship in the sense that it has connected me with myself when I have felt most lost. The space of simmering and mixing and aromas and chopping creates an environment where I can always meet myself where I’m at. And what is there is always something bigger than just me. It is a connection to all of us and all things. And there is such safety and joy there I cannot properly express. But I do want to take each of you by the hand and lead you there, because it is our birthright to feel safe, to feel bliss, to feel the vitality of of being alive.
If any of this resonates with you I would love to hear from you about your experience. Ideally here in the comments, but please email me as well if you feel shy. Do you relate to any of this story? How do you find your way when life gets confusing?
If you want to build this kind of cooking practice for yourself consider joining my course in October, or joining the blissful cooking club weekly classes by becoming a paid subscriber.
Leanne, I am a long-time reader of your book, "Good and Cheap". I want to say thank you for doing your work and helping us all save money and be healthy through the magic of cooking. This post resonated with me, but not in a way you probably expected.
I was raised in a Pentecostal sect of Christianity, which is considered extreme by most other sects of Christianity--some may even say that it is cult-like. I would also describe it as such. It disheartened me to read that you, like me, were intensely concerned with the salvation of your loved ones, to the extent that you felt depression, anxiety, and needed an escape. I left my church, and Christianity, some time ago--I went to college and the rest is history. I became an Agnostic Atheist, and I've never looked back. It has given me boundless peace, and a framework from which to explore and reckon with this intense religious trauma.
Anyways, I'm writing all this to say that, in case you ever needed a sign to let go of your faith, here it is. A lot of what you wrote here feels a lot like a confession--a way to test the waters of non-religion. I just wanted to say that I see it and I feel it. When I was starting to let go of my faith, I would cling to any and every small thing that would help me validate it, because I was just so afraid of the unknown. I eventually ran out of things to cling to. In spite of it all, I feel much more at peace, and life seems so much more sweeter--because in reality, this brief moment in time might very well be all we have.
Thank you for reading.
This is so lovely, Leanne. Thank you for sharing it!