Cooking up diversity

What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It's a sure thing! It's sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles. Nora Ephron, Heartburn

AMONG my life accomplishments is an odd one, and one I'd never thought would be. As a newbie cook, I have conquered the broccoli.

The malicious vegetable behaves so badly, it deserves some personification. For the broccoli, with its mocking mop and stubborn stem, rears its literal ugly head against those who attempt to subjugate it as food.

My conspiracy theory is that its green envy comes after having to deal with centuries of body shaming from its vegetable pals. It is not that superfood kale or the elegant asparagus that both sashay to the VIP lane of upmarket grocery stores.

So the broccoli inflicts its own brand of revenge on amateur cooks, though admittedly with more grace than the kingpin on the street, the onion. Broccoli burns easily under a large fire, but takes an eternity to fry with a small flame. It doesn't do well in the oven. Steaming broccoli is just throwing in the towel. Slathering butter on it doesn't cover the shame enough.

Food produce has its natural way of punishing a disorganised household. It is in the kitchen that incidents most foul occur. I've seen maggots masticating on a potato, and tunnelling through rice with no hint of reverence for the Asian staple. Onions have disintegrated. And there is no greater insult than calling someone a rotten egg. I found this out the hard way, after being hit full in the face with hydrogen sulphide gas as I cracked one rotten egg open to attempt to bake brownies. It took hours before the smell of rot dissipated. The kitchen reeked for days of bruising defeat.

To cook is to master control: of heat, of seasoning, of best-before dates, of time. It explains how Asian mothers who cook are so cocky about their skills. There is no cookbook, no recipe, there is only perfection. How much salt, you ask? This much, they say, with an imprecise scatter of the white crystal into the pot.

The triumph for them is to turn your sceptical eye to grudging praise as the combination of proteins with a general flourish of salt, soya sauce, and some unlabelled black sauce, is turned into culinary art. It's the "so simple" humblebrag of the Asian household.

So you humbly learn cooking from Google, who welcomes your ignorance so it can aggregate data about confusion over the craft. Today, you measure with a teaspoon so that tomorrow, you can scatter the salt.

My broccoli brouhaha is in essence the struggle of homemaking, which has also earned a distasteful reputation in recent years.

A ferocious rejection of women wearing an apron seems to have accompanied the roar of feminism. I remember being much aghast at the idea that women should learn to cook. Oppression, I charged! Being 12 and not wanting to clean my room had something to do with the indignity.

It also does not help that some politicians, in a bid to support the urgent need for more babies, try to set up the domesticated life as "every women's dream to want to have a nice kitchen". Uttered in 2017, it echoes like a soundbite from sullen cavemen who say they are not born to cook. "Me hunter, me thump chest with broccoli."

What has ensued is a judgement sometimes - including from women - on women who enjoy being at home, for not being able to juggle domestic and office matters, for giving credence to cavemen comments and some Google memo.

What inevitably adds to the pressure for homemakers is the "like" orgy for those who cook in picture-perfect terms for the six-inch screen. The narrative now goes that those who are worthy of fame and praise are those who cook with ingredients sourced from abroad, with dishes adorned in matching crockery, primed for a flat-lay photograph.

It is a prized lifestyle without the unseen failures that get you to a level of mastery. Like Asian matriarchs, some of these images, too, serve up, unconsciously or otherwise, bite-sized fantasies - pretty hor d'oeuvres without the hot mess.

This illustrates what has been dubbed the anxiety gap for most ordinary women, in that whichever path you take, there is some unsolicited advice on what is the straight and narrow way - from work, to child taming, to household management.

That there are women who take joy in making their own imperfect home should be endorsed, in the same way that a woman chooses to delegate household chores because she thrives in the office. It seems the challenge of gender diversity today is to resist embarrassing women for their choices, and accept that women will do just fine with different skills and priorities.

Broccoli, as it turns out, can be contained. It does best under a gentle fire, sitting in a little bit of water once it turns bright green, spritzed with some lemon juice. What it needs is a little patience, and a little freedom to be.