Baking as a Love Language
Graphic by: Christina Hara
Everyone shows love differently, but you can boil it down to whether they speak or show their love. I have always been better at showing my love than saying it. The words feel awkward and clumsy. When I say, ”I love you,” it feels like I'm just an actor in a show, making sounds hoping for audience applause.
But I know what I mean when I present my friends with espresso cupcakes. I can be confident in my chocolate chip cookies and express how much I love my friends with each chocolate chip placed on top.
My mother taught me how to bake and speak with food without saying a word. With her hands over mine, she taught me how to knead the dough. And she taught me precisely what it means when giving that freshly baked loaf to a loved one.
Baby Lea stirs a mixing bowl.
It's not that my mother never said “I love you”, it's just that she only ever said it in a specific context. Clipped 'I love you's at the end of every phone call, just in case it was the last time we talked to each other. 'I love you ' in conjunction with an apology after my mom and I got into a fight.
I know the words 'I love you,' but they are not words my mother used unconditionally. She did show her love unconditionally. It was not said flippantly, and she didn't say it without reason, but she showed it, and it was given unconditionally - often through the form of food.
When I was about eight or nine, I asked my mother if she would make me brownies. She gave me a look, a look I remember because she was deciphering in that moment how grown up I was, and how much she trusted me.
She trusted me enough to drive me to the store, buy me a brownie box mix and set me free in the kitchen. It was my first time completely alone in the kitchen. My mother was at her desk, not so far away as to abandon me, but far enough away that the feeling of independence I had just gained was palpable.
Some stories come before this brownie one: my mother tells of the two of us baking together, my mother's hands enveloping my tiny ones. And there are photos to go along with them; old printed photos of two-year-old me mixing cookie dough with a mischievous smile on my face.
However, the time with the brownie mix is the first coherent memory I have of what became a lifelong passion for baking. Everybody has a toolbox to navigate the world; books helped me understand and empathize with other people and the world around me. Writing helped me understand myself; running kept me from wanting to kill myself. Baking allowed me to tell someone I cared about them without saying anything.
My ability to bake, and bake well, was something that found me in many good situations. People often wanted to pay me to bake for them, I could always easily make a friend by showing up with a plate of freshly baked brownies, and generally, adults were impressed by my independence in the kitchen.
This was all nice, I soaked in the compliments, was ecstatic that people liked my baking enough to pay me for it (though I don’t remember ever taking up anyone’s offers of commission), and once or twice I have resorted to forming bonds via baked-good-bribery, but none of this was the reason I enjoyed baking. I liked baking because of the emotional component, the way I could put a piece of myself into a dish, and walk away a little bit lighter with a treat to make someone else’s day a little brighter.
I prefer baking to cooking. I consider cooking a form of artistry, and in my senior year of high school, I was in a sophomore art class. Baking is a science; everything is exact, you follow the recipe to a tee, and you have the perfect baked good. I couldn't tell the captain of my soccer team that I hoped she "gets well soon" after she broke her hand, but I could bake her a dozen perfect cupcakes, and to me, that was the surest way of telling her I cared for her and respected her. You can't stutter through chocolate cupcakes, and a dozen cupcakes will last much longer than a couple of words.
When you look at it from a scientific perspective, it makes sense that I and so many others consider baking and cooking a form of love. In the article, How Did Our Brains Evolve To Equate Food With Love? By Jon Hamilton for NPR, John Allen is quoted saying, "gut-brain connection probably exists because our ancestors were more likely to survive if they remembered clearly where they got their last good meal." Love is not just an emotion but a physical feeling; the human body reacts to our food and learns to remember who we get it from. Biologically, it's beneficial for our brains and bodies to connect love with food; it is a survival mechanism.
It might not make sense to some people how a homemade cinnamon roll can be the same as a spoken 'I love you.' Hannah Nguyen says it best in her personal essay for the Michigan Daily, "Love isn't some easy emotional or affective state, but something that takes time to build. You can't just love, you have to create it, prepare it, and cook it up into something amazing to make it worth giving because empty I-love-yous don't mean anything."
When I bake for someone, I pick out ingredients I know they'll like. I think of when I'll give it to them as I knead the dough. I imagine their faces, brightened and joyful with a nice treat for their day. Mostly, I think about how I have given them something to eat, something to help them go on for a little bit longer. To me, a good morning looks like papas con huevos and love looks like a messy kitchen with fresh baked goods cooling on the stovetop.
Source(s):
Nguyen, Hannah. “Labor of love: Care and sacrifice as told through food and feeding others.” The Michigan Daily, 6 December 2021, https://www.michigandaily.com/michigan-in-color/food-is-love/. Accessed 25 February 2022.