“I didn’t cook dinner last night,” my sister mentioned to me the other week.
She has a one-year-old and a three-year-old, a combination of ages that practically guarantees a baseline level of perpetual exhaustion.
“Oh!” I replied. “Wait.” I tried to rationalize what that meant. My sister sounded too blasé to imply that they had all simply given up and gone hungry (and if that was indeed the case, it was an odd way to bring it up). “So… you ordered Uber Eats?”
“No, I made toast with scrambled eggs.”
This didn’t make any sense to me. “But that is cooking! You cooked!”
“I guess,” she countered. “But not from scratch — it wasn’t cooking. I didn’t cook like you cook.”
I have been thinking about this conversation for a while now. Why didn’t this count as cooking?
At some point society collectively decided (when I wasn’t paying attention) that cooking only really counts if it involves chopping up aromatics, blooming spices, and dirtying half the pots in the kitchen. If it comes together in under ten minutes, relies on a store-bought shortcut, or doesn’t match the idealised family dinner, we demote it. We didn’t cook, we merely assembled.
But anything you make to feed yourself or your family is cooking. It doesn’t need to be fancy, and it certainly doesn’t need to be from scratch.
When did this happen?
My sister, my mum, and I have always been massive fans of MasterChef Australia. During the years we all lived at home, we would organize our nights around MasterChef, arguing about what we would do with the mystery box ingredients, shouting at the contestants during the team challenges1, and in awe of the complexity of the pressure tests.
It is phenomenal television, but watching it for almost twenty years can subtly recalibrate your perception of what a Tuesday night dinner should entail. When you spend an hour every evening2, watching amateur home cooks frantically trying to execute a flawless ballotine of chicken, complete with a perfectly clarified consommé, micro-herb garnishes, and a savory tuile before the clock runs out, your internal benchmark for cooking quietly shifts3.
When the show first premiered in 2009, it fundamentally changed the country’s food culture, triggering what the media dubbed the “MasterChef effect”. Whenever a previously niche ingredient or specific cut of meat — like pork belly, beef cheeks, or pomegranate molasses — was featured on an episode, major supermarkets would famously sell out of it the very next day. The franchise elevated the everyday vernacular of the Australian home cook, injecting restaurant-industry terms like “plating up,” “sous-vide,” and “hero-ing an ingredient” into suburban kitchens. Australian cafe menus were permanently altered, with favourites like eggs on toast and smashed avocado making way for unique fusion creations such as slow cooked beef brisket rendang benedict, with curry leaf hollandaise (and, inevitably, dollops of fresh coriander oil, because nothing says breakfast like an herb extraction).
I actually had the rendang brisket benedict as described above at Cafe Yoka in Perth, and it was legitimately delicious. I quite like the Masterchef-ification of Australian cafes.
While it was a brilliant, much-needed celebration of Australia’s diverse, multicultural food scene, it also accidentally cemented a new, intimidating standard. It created an illusion that amateur cooking was no longer just about sustenance; it was about executing professional-grade gastronomy.
You can actually see this shift if you revisit past MasterChef seasons. The food in the early years was decidedly simpler. The season one finale famously finished with a whole chicken challenge: Julie Goodwin made a Sunday roast, and Poh Ling Yeoh made Hainanese chicken rice. This escalation didn’t go unnoticed in our house — mum would frequently annoy my sister and me in later seasons by despairing at the lack of actual home cooks. “These are not home cooks!” she would mutter darkly at the screen. “I bet they have secret restaurant experience.”4
Add to this the modern aesthetic of the Instagram and TikTok kitchen — gorgeous, cinematic reels of people fermenting their own hot sauce, folding laminated pastry dough, or making insanely intricate packed lunches for their kids — and the kitchen is no longer a place of domestic utility, but a stage. A place of competitive sport and lifestyle aesthetics.
When you are saturated in this media, you begin to compare your chaotic, weeknight survival tactics to someone else’s performative hobby. If you aren’t making the pasta or tortillas by hand5, the inner critic whispers, you aren’t really cooking.
It wasn’t always this way. For most of human history, cooking was an inescapable daily chore, primarily shouldered by women.
When the post-war convenience food boom hit in the 1950s and 60s, it promised a revolution. Products like jarred sauces, canned soups, and boxed cake mixes were explicitly marketed as liberators. They bought precious hours back from the stove, while making new techniques and cuisines accessible (store-bought gelatin crystals, for example, provided an easy pathway to impressive jellies that previously required grueling manual labor to extract).
But there was a catch — while some of these innovations were embraced wholeheartedly, home cooks felt guilty when using shortcuts that displaced the familiar, nostalgic recipes they had grown up with, like relying on a packet of instant gravy. For centuries, a mother’s worth had been tied directly to the stove; simply opening a cardboard box felt like a dereliction of duty6.
You might assume that as these convenience foods became cheap, ubiquitous, and the unquestioned backbone of the modern pantry, the stigma would have eventually worn off. But humans are remarkably efficient at manufacturing new and exciting forms of guilt. I suspect the stigma never really vanished; it just evolved.
Perhaps, as food delivery exploded and shortcuts became available to everyone, and social media and reality TV became parts of daily life, cooking from scratch ceased to be a grim necessity and morphed into something else: a status symbol. It seems to now signal that you possess the ultimate modern luxury — free time. The guilt surrounding convenience foods simply evolved: what used to be a dereliction of duty (the avoidance of hard labor) has morphed into a dereliction of status (the feeling that you aren’t really ‘cooking’ at all).
It is entirely possible that we never actually stopped viewing the jar of pasta sauce as a culinary failure; we just changed our reasoning for why it was a failure.
Whenever I catch myself slipping into this kind of culinary elitism, I think about my favourite lasagna of all time: my mum’s.
Over the years, I have tried making lasagna from scratch more times than I can count. I have put a frankly embarrassing amount of effort into it: braising beef short ribs for hours (once even overnight!) to make a homemade ragù, whisking my arm numb making béchamel, sourcing artisanal cheeses, and hand-cranking delicate sheets of fresh egg pasta.
These lasagnas were technically impressive, and they were delicious. But they always fell slightly short — they were not the lasagna I craved.
The lasagna I am nostalgic for is the one my mum made. She did not braise short ribs. She did not knead pasta dough. Her lasagna was constructed in about an hour on a busy weeknight. She used supermarket beef mince, a jar of Dolmio bolognese sauce, a jar of Dolmio béchamel sauce, and handfuls of pre-grated cheddar cheese straight from the bag, simply because that was what she always had on hand in the fridge.
Mum’s lasagna in her favourite Corningware casserole dish (the ‘Spice of Life’ pattern if I recall correctly).
Was it traditional? No. Was it from scratch? Definitely not.
But it was bubbling, golden, and deeply comforting. When I eat lasagna today, that specific mix of jarred tomato sauce and melted cheddar is the exact flavour profile my heart is searching for. My mum didn’t apologize for using Dolmio, or even consider that that wasn’t the ‘proper’ way to make lasagna. She put a hot, delicious meal on the table.
She cooked.
The problem with viewing cooking strictly as ‘making things from scratch’ is that it completely divorces the food from its actual purpose: nourishment (otherwise known as, keeping people alive and reasonably happy).
When my sister stood in her kitchen, undoubtedly exhausted after wrangling a toddler and a baby all day, she still cracked eggs into a pan. She still tended to the heat. She buttered the toast. She transformed those basic ingredients into a warm meal that sustained her family for another night.
That is the essence of cooking.
While there is nothing more I love than spending hours in the kitchen, exploring new techniques and, yes, sometimes making complicated dishes ‘from scratch’, we need to give ourselves grace to embrace the shortcuts. A jar of store-bought pasta sauce, a bag of pre-washed salad greens, a frozen pie crust, or a simple plate of scrambled eggs on toast — these aren’t failures of culinary ambition. They are just the practical realities of keeping ourselves fed.
The next time you throw together a meal using three ingredients and a microwave, or assemble a dinner entirely out of things you found in the pantry, resist the urge to say, “I didn’t really cook tonight.” You fed yourself. You fed your family.
You cooked.
I spoke to my sister a little while later, and she shared a funny update about that night.
After she plated the eggs and toast and sat down at the table, her three-year-old took a bite, looked up, and said, “Mummy, I really love this. It is so yummy.”
It was incredibly cute, but it made her laugh — her husband is usually the one who takes on the more involved, elaborate dinners in their household, and he almost never gets that kind of glowing, unprompted praise (this later made me think, there is a distinct lack of Michelin stars awarded by the under-five demographic).
It was a perfect reminder that the people we are cooking for aren’t grading our technique like MasterChef judges, and they aren’t checking to see if we made the sauce from scratch. They are just happy to be fed, and happy to be sitting at the table with us.
- Australians can’t talk about MasterChef Australia team challenges without mentioning the infamous white chocolate veloute incident, which seems to live in our collective pop culture conscience. During a relay challenge, where contestants take it in turns to complete a dish (with only 1 minute of allowed information changeover between contestants!), John decided to make a white chocolate veloute to pair with a shellfish dish, to the absolute horror of renowned chef Marco Pierre White (and the collective gastrointestinal distress of a watching nation). ↩︎
- In Australia, it is common for reality TV shows to be ‘stripped’ across the week, resulting in seasons having upwards of 50 episodes. ↩︎
- I’ve tried twice over the years to replicate MasterChef recipes; one dessert, brioche doughnuts with orange curd and latte ice cream, and one savoury dish, lobster and miso tortellini. Both were absolutely delicious, but a huge amount of work — I don’t know how the contestants fitted this into a single hour! ↩︎
- Mum would shout with delight and exclaim “Look! I was right!” whenever scenes from the personal lives of contestants would reveal that their parents owned a restaurant. ↩︎
- In later MasterChef Australia seasons, it would be treated as a mortal sin to not make pasta or tortilla by hand — even if the pasta dish came from a region of Italy where dried semolina pasta was the norm! There was a controversial moment where judges docked a contestant for not making their own tortillas, while viewers were left wondering why then would they tempt contestants with pre-packaged tortillas available in the MasterChef pantry? ↩︎
- To learn more about the clash between American housewives and the food industry in the 50s, I highly recommend food historian Laura Shapiro’s Something from the Oven. ↩︎