Why We Eat at Home

Obligation—the necessity to put something edible on the table for, say, clamoring teenagers—may get us cooking, but it won’t keep us cooking. (There’s always take-out.)

Even the best home cooking often starts out of duty, but it will continue only out of love, whether for the ingredients, the process, or the eaters themselves. Home cooks’ customers are family members and friends; their business hours are the moments between swim practice and bedtime stories; their training is tradition.

For home cooks, the kitchen is a place for resting, laughing, fighting and feasting. It is a place for creating better things out of good things. Whether their kitchens boast the shiniest Viking appliances or the avocado-green, sauce-stained stovetops of the 1970s, heaps of gadgets from lemon zesters to olive stuffers or just a wobbly set of knives, home cooks make the most of what they have.

Cooking is not just what they do; it’s who they are. And they are never more themselves than during the holidays, when their flavorful contributions are at the heart of every gathering.

Because sometimes even the best home cooks go unnoticed in the kitchen, we celebrate them here.