Preparing the Next Generation of Cooks
by Janet Peterson                                             

Do our young women know how to cook? Do they have cooking in their futures? Will their husbands and children know what a homecooked meal is?

Too many brides tell their new husbands “I don’t cook,” and  young couples don’t eat dinner at home. Rather, they go out, drive through the fast-food stops, or bring home take-out. Way too many children think that dinner comes in cardboard boxes with a toy inside. Cooking dinner doesn’t appear on the job descriptions of far too many young wives and mothers.

Strengthen Home and Family

Several years ago four words were added to the Young Women theme: “strengthen home and family.” The Young Women theme now reads in part: “We believe as we come to accept and act upon these values[ faith, divine nature, individual worth, knowledge, choice and accountability, good works and integrity], we will be prepared to strengthen home and family, make and keep sacred covenants, receive the ordinances of the temple, and enjoy the blessings of exaltation.”

This addition is timely and supports the Proclamation on the Family, which is included in the new Personal Progress handbooks. The Proclamation not only strongly affirms the worth of women’s contributions, it also outlines specific responsibilities: “Parents have a sacred duty to rear their children in love and righteousness, to provide for their physical and spiritual needs. . . . Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.” ^[1]

Numerous are the ways that mothers can “nurture their children.” Included, but often overlooked, in “providing for physical needs” is preparing nutritious food vital for growth and development of children. A mother who thinks home cooking is not a high priority is shortchanging her family.

Homeless

Cheryl Mendelson, the non-LDS author of Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, said: “Good meals at home satisfy emotional hungers as real as hunger in the belly, and nothing else does so in the same way. They promote affection and intimacy among those who share them. Characteristic, familial styles of cooking and dining, foods that ‘taste like home,’ are central to each home's feelings of security and comfort and to its sense of itself as a unique and valuable place. Cooking at home links your past and future and solidifies your sense of identity and place. When a home gives up its hearth, which in the modern world is its kitchen, it gives up its focus. (The word ‘focus’ is Latin for ‘hearth.’) And the people who live there lose theirs too. . . .           

“The emotional comfort of home cooking for children is something every parent discovers. Sharing meals with the children in the privacy of your home, meals that you have prepared, reinforces your authority and beneficence in their eyes and helps increase their trust and pride in you and your abilities.” ^[2]

In D&C 29:34 the Lord tells us, “I say unto you that all things unto me are spiritual, and not any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal.” Thus, the physical efforts a woman makes to create a pleasant and functioning home for her husband and family are really spiritual efforts.

Preparing

Susan W. Tanner, the Young Women general president, gave a very insightful address  to Young Women leaders at the April 2004 Conference Open House.  She said, “We must prepare young women with skills, both temporal and spiritual, that will bless their future homes.”

She discussed how Captain Moroni prepared his people both temporally and spiritually by fortifying their cities as a places of refuges, preparing the minds and hearts of the people by strengthening their testimonies, and preparing soldiers with strong armor and skills.

Establishing a Refuge from the World

Our young women today, who will someday soon be wives, mothers, and Church leaders, need to be strengthened just like Moroni’s people. They need to understand how vital it is to establish a home that is a refuge from the world. Their testimonies need to be continually fortified and strengthened by exercising faith, studying the word of the Lord, and keeping the commandments. Our young women also need to be armed with temporal and spiritual skills.

Sister Tanner said, “Homemaking skills are becoming a lost art. I worry about this. When we lose the homemakers in a society, we create an emotional homelessness much like street homelessness with similar problems of despair, lack of self-esteem, drugs and immorality. Bryce Christensen, the author of The Family in America, wrote that the number of homeless people on the street does not begin to reveal the scope of homelessness in America. For since when did the word home signify merely physical shelter, or homelessness the lack of such shelter? . . . Home signifies not only shelter, but also emotional commitment, security, and belonging. Home has connoted not just a necessary roof and warm radiator, but a place sanctified by the  abiding ties of wedlock, parenthood, and family obligation; a place demanding sacrifice and devotion, but promising loving care and warm acceptance.”

She also stated, “If a young woman learns how to cook delicious, nutritious meals, she will acquire skills to bless her future family, not only temporally but spiritually. Cooking skills can provide young women a way to create enticing times in her home where people gather to talk and to bond with each other. Cooking skills provide a chance for important spiritual things to happen in a family. Those who learn to make homemade meals have a skill that can help them also make good homes.

“So we must teach homemaking skills, including practical ones like cooking, sewing, budgeting, and beautifying. We must let young women know that homemaking skills are honorable and can help them spiritually as well as temporally. Making a home appealing physically will encourage loved ones to want to be there. The temporal preparation is spiritual to the Lord, for it will create the kind of atmosphere that is conducive to the Spirit.” ^[3]

Many women, both young and old, are whizzes at the computer, can play the stock market successfully, or sing and dance in professional productions, but they haven’t the slightest idea how to keep a home, especially how to regularly prepare tasty meals.

Homemaking Takes Smarts

Along with attaining a university education or specialized training, young women need to gain a home-centered education as well. It takes a smart women to be a homemaker. Managing a home and family requires expertise in numerous areas, including finances, time and resource management, child development, interior design, teaching, nutrition, and cooking.

Too prevalent is the pseudo-sophisticated notion that “women’s work” is of little value, something to be shunned or given to someone else. The skills to provide a peaceful, functioning home are not difficult to learn. Bright young women can accomplish anything they set their minds to.  It only takes desire, learning some skills, and practice.

Ideally, mothers have taught their daughters much about managing a home, especially cooking dinner. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened enough. Anne C. Pingree, a counselor in the Relief Society general presidency, told the women at a stake education day that needed classes at the MTC are on “Things My Mother Never Taught Me.” She also said girls need to know what to do with flour besides make chocolate chip cookies.

A Lifelong Process

Improving homemaking skills is a lifelong process. No one expects young women at age 18 or 21 or 25 to be gourmet cooks and skilled homemakers. Women of all ages can still learn much from a multitude of resources such as the Internet, books, magazines, classes, cooking shows, and Enrichment meetings.

Modern food preparation is so much easier than it was just twenty years ago. Processes do change, and better equipment and easier ways abound. We live in such a marvelous technological age with the best homemaking gadgets the world has ever known, from food processors and convection ovens to computerized sewing machines. Young women just entering adulthood can look forward to even better days in the kitchen and in the home.

Proverbs 31 describes  a virtuous woman. Among the many attributes are these: “She worketh willingly with her hands,” and “she looketh well to the ways of her household.” ^[4]

Julie B. Beck, a counselor in the Young Women general presidency noted in her April conference address that a mother “believes that to be ‘primarily responsible for the nurture of her children is a vital, dignified, and sacred responsibility. To nurture and feed them physically is as much an honor as to nurture and feed them spiritually. A mother is ‘not weary in well-doing and delights to serve her family, because she knows that ‘out of small things proceedeth that which is great.’ “ ^[5]

Church President Harold B. Lee proclaimed, “The most important work you will ever do will be within the walls of your own home.” ^[6] If mothers, leaders, and young women themselves more fully understood and acted upon this prophet’s counsel, they would make the home their central focus. Then Latter-day Saint homes, both current and future, indeed would truly become refuges from the world. Families would be fortified, and children would thrive both spiritually and physically, thus providing a firm foundation for the next generation.