SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Domestic cooking is changing the world over. Kitchen technologies and the smartphone transform the way we cook and whom we cook with. Coupled with urbanisation and the shrinking of households, cooking seems to be an increasingly solitary practice. At the same time, these processes did not change who cooks; across the globe it is mostly women who prepare the daily meal for their families. Yet, rather than treating domestic cooking solely as a gender relations issue, this article presents ethnographic research with low-income domestic cooks in Marrakech, Morocco, to argue that unequal generational relations are also important drivers of change in family life. Paradoxically, rather than cook alone or simplify meals, kitchen appliances and social media were employed to continue preparing elaborate family meals. Through a thick description of the preparation of a spread called amlou and of pizza, this article explores why domestic cooking remains centralto idealised notions of womanhood and family life in Marrakech and beyond. It introduces the concept of culinary connectivity to understand how new technologies were employed ininter-generational negotiations of cooking knowledge and power. Moreover, while the crafting of culinary connectivity enables young generations of low-income womento emancipate themselves from age-based power in the home, these practices also enmesh them in new relations of dependence on money and the market. By making cooking central to understanding the (re)production of everyday family life in the context of poverty, this article contributes to cross-cultural studies of food and to regional debates about the family.