Better Kisser Than a Cook

Of course I am a better kisser than a cook. Kissing is full presence; cooking is not. Kissing floods you with a rush of oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin, and it lowers cortisol. The other is exhausting labor. Kissing soothes a headache; cooking causes it.

If you choose cooking over kissing, you are a fool, just like me. I know this truth is hard to digest, but in my house, cooking isn’t just cooking. It’s an equation I keep solving:

Cooking = (shopping + chopping + dishes + mess) × (time thief + mental load)² + ∞(start over).

Before I was married, my feminist notions and peacock pride could not be fooled. A can of tuna was my manifesto: open, fork, done. If I felt ambitious, I upgraded to an omelet or cheese sandwich. Hunger handled. Life resumed.

Back then, I saw cooking as domestic torture that pushed my panic buttons: Run, woman. Run. And I did.

Until marriage and family happened. And cooking boomeranged back with a vengeance. It became a necessity, the job hazard attached to something I held sacred: my family.

“What happened to your vows to the can of tuna?” my sister would tease whenever I called her, frantic, trying to troubleshoot yet another ten-step recipe that ended in disaster.

Looking back, it wasn’t the cooking that gave me heartburn—it was everything cooking turned into: being displaced, distracted, constantly interrupted, trapped in my own Hell’s Kitchen. Cooking often came at the expense of the parts of my life I loved most, the things that made me feel like myself. I overthought flavors, rewrote menus, and postponed actual stories, on the page and in my life.

If I need an alibi for this, I can start with my grandmother. Her blood runs in mine; this is my inheritance.

My grandmother lived in a perpetual state of cooking and feeding people, as if food was oxygen. She marked life with food before, during, and after every holiday, and every ordinary day.

She also honored the memory of the dead through food, not only on their anniversaries, when she laid out a long table, but in her daily cooking too. Whenever she fried something, especially fish or kuku sabzi, she called aloud the names of loved ones who had passed, saying each one as someone’s child, with their father’s name attached: Mousa ben Yousef, Ester bat Davoud… then the next, and the next, and the next.

In her kitchen, bodies and spirits stayed together.

If she spoke the names of the dead to keep them near, she fed the living to keep the world turning. With pregnant women, she took that duty to another level. She believed that if a pregnant woman smells food and craves it, denying the craving could harm the mother, the baby, or both. When our next-door neighbor got pregnant, every time we barbecued, I was sent over with a plate: meat, rice, and grilled vegetables.

“This is the last time I’m delivering food,” I’d grumble. And my grandmother would look at me like I was ridiculous and say, “Avoun dareh, it’s a sin not to…”

After she died, I cooked more of her dishes, the complicated ones, the kind that steal time and energy. Not for sustenance.

I cooked them because I missed her, and I missed what she had been for me: home.

Sometimes it is enough to breathe in the smell of my version of her saffron tomato rice. Or to put a few savory leaves in my mouth and be carried back in time. I close my eyes and feel my heart expand. In that pause, I return to a childhood home that no longer exists, and to a country I cannot visit safely anymore.

Often I cook for the smell more than the taste. Her shefteh berenji, dense with fresh herbs, unlocks something sealed in me—a joy that arrives like a childhood spirit and wraps warmth around me again.

It took me a while to understand that her cooking wasn’t about cooking. Neither is mine. It explains why I don’t love cooking and why I keep doing it anyway.

Physical hunger is one thing.

And then there is another hunger.

In my grandmother’s kitchen, emotional hunger was fed on purpose, done with attention, with intention.

In her kitchen, I learned what the women in my family already knew: to show up, remember, and close distance with cooking.

The women in my family forgive with a stew. We say “I’m thinking of you” with a container left on the porch. At night, we calm worries with mint tea and nabat. In the morning rush, we make love by lingering over a cup of coffee. And when all else seems to fall apart, we chop onions for chicken soup and call it kindness.

Which is why, when my kids come home from college, the freezer that once held popsicles and frozen pizza turns into a departure lounge: labeled containers stacked like luggage, rice and stews ready to go. I go on a cooking marathon: prepping, spicing, freezing, vacuum-sealing, and double-wrapping.

Before each flight, they pack a suitcase half with clothes and half with food, as if they’re moving to a deserted island. TSA opens it and gives them that look. “It’s just food,” my kids say.

But it isn’t.

It’s home in Tupperware, a Friday-night taste in a Ziploc, a frozen hug to be defrosted in absence. Wherever they go, there must be at least one thing that tastes like they’re not alone.

I didn’t realize how much of that language I carried until the girl who ran from the stove became the woman who stands beside it. It didn’t happen all at once. It crept in, showing up in daily routine.

I crossed a line I once swore I never would. I became the woman I used to roll my eyes at: the one who overcooks, overfeeds, and sends her children to deliver food to neighbors.

I admit, slowly and without deciding, cooking has taken time from kissing. Smelling like garlic or wearing a turmeric-stained T-shirt isn’t sexy. Devotion doesn’t flirt. Staying for the messy parts of life isn’t romantic.

But a kiss is not only lips.

Somewhere along the way, without my permission, cooking learned to do what kissing always did: stay—be present—linger, especially when something went wrong, when comfort needed a shape and nothing else could contain it.

When I ran out of words, I cooked for them, without expectation, without making it about me. Food could arrive quietly, a soft presence, an invisible steady care felt in the heart before it reaches the stomach. It’s the welcoming aroma of a favorite meal simmering on the stove, whispering, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

Sometimes love arrives ahead of you, in spite of you. Cooking slowly became a way of being there for the people I love. A wordless language that says: I see you. I hear you. You’re worth the onion-chopping.

I have cooked and fed for over two decades. The feminist punk in me hasn’t left. She watches all of this in silence. We stare at each other across the kitchen counter, knowing the truth that was slow to reveal itself: we didn’t choose cooking over kissing.

While we fed everyone, we were doing both.

Hilla Gohary Kerendian is an Israeli-Iranian American essayist whose work explores Jewish identity, memory, and the human heart. She writes Change of Heart Stories on Substack.