Tom Junod's personal essay was nominated for a James Beard Award. Read the full, unedited essay (originally published in our September 2010 issue) below...

I cook for my family. To put it another way: I am my family's cook, and so I cook almost every night. I cook three hundred days a year, and have cooked three hundred days a year for years. I cook for the three of us—for my wife, my daughter, and myself—and before there were three of us, I cooked for the two of us. I am a husband who cooks for his wife, which makes me a man who cooks for his woman and now his women, which in turns makes me a man who to some extent cooks like a woman: out of love and generosity, yes, but also out of service, out of duty. I cook because it's my job. I don't get many days off from cooking. I don't take many days off cooking, because I only like to eat at restaurants that serve food better than my own, or that serve Mexican food or sushi. Hell, I don't even take days off from cooking when I go out for days on the road, because before I leave I prepare my family food to be eaten in my absence. I cook so that there is no absence. I cook so that I am always there, even when I'm gone, even when I die, and my cooking translates in my daughter's memory as, simply, this: time.

This is not to say that my cooking is selfless. It is anything but, because in order to endure cooking like a woman I have to cook like a man—which is to say, for myself. The food I cook for my family is the food I like to eat. The food I like to eat is the food I cook for my family. I cook out of hunger, and so, to the degree that I am selfless as a cook, I am also despotic and fanatical. I do everything myself, make everything myself, from salad dressings to chili powder. I do not ask for help and I do not consider shortcuts. I want to take time, not save it, aware of the paradox born of my driven dedication, aware that if the time I spend at the stove is time given to my family, it is also time taken away.

This, however, is not a story of my cooking, or the odd combination of freedom and thralldom it confers. It's the story of what—or who—inspired my decision to be my family's cook, gave me the will to do it, and made it both a practical and, apparently, a psychological necessity. It is the story of my mother—of my mother's cooking.

My mother, Frances Junod, was not just a mother, not just a mom. She was a dame. She was a broad. She was a beauty from Brooklyn who wore fantastic hats, when they were in style, and furs, even when they were not. She went through her entire life as a Harlowesque platinum blonde, and I never knew the real color of her hair. She liked go to the track, and she liked to go out to restaurants. She did not like to cook. That she did it anyway—that she had no choice—owed itself to generational expectations, and to the fact that if my mother was a doll, in the Runyonesque sense of the word, my father was a guy, a pinky-ringed sharpie who spent many nights going to the New York City restaurants my mother longed to frequent, but who, on nights when he came home, loudly expected food on the table. So my mother put food on the table. She was my family's cook. She cooked three hundred nights a year.

She cooked for my father, and, when he was away, which was often, she cooked for me and my brother and my sister, and then, when they, both ten years older than me, left home, she cooked for me. She cooked me spaghetti with butter and cheese. She cooked me hamburgers, "pan-fried" without added fat on a hot, salted cast-iron skillet, until they formed a hard crust. She cooked me scrambled eggs, made idiosyncratic by the addition of a teaspoon of water. She cooked me shell steaks sprinkled with salt and Ac'cent—MSG—and she cooked chicken parts lathered in a sweet-sour sauce called Saucy Susan and she cooked me chicken or veal cutlets bought "scallopini" style at the supermarket and coated in Progresso Italian-Style breadcrumbs. For dessert she made Junket or Jell-O or My-T-Fine chocolate pudding. Except for Friday nights, when she served a cold meal—what she called a "platter" of cantaloupe slices, cottage cheese, and tuna fish salad—she never cooked for herself, to satisfy her own hunger.

It took me a while to figure out that she hated cooking, and a while—much—longer to figure out that she hated cooking because she couldn't cook. For one thing, she was my mother, and mothers were supposed to know how to cook. For another, I was her child, and so for most of my childhood she was the only cook in the world. I had to like her cooking, and I did, as long as she observed the Mashed Potato Rule. The Mashed Potato Rule, simply stated, is this: There is no such thing as bad mashed potatoes as long as they're actually potatoes, mashed. We had mashed potatoes a lot when I was a kid—I can still see the blood and, better, the clear juices from the pan-fried hamburger running into them on my plate—and it didn't matter that they were lumpy and grainy and that my mother had no talent for making them; they were Edenic so long as she did. I loved them, as I loved her. That she was not the kind of mother who made everything from scratch, the way the mothers of my Italian friends did; that for her the words "homemade" and "gourmet" were virtually interchangeable, to be pronounced with the same dreamy covetousness she employed when she pronounced the word "Paris" or "Aruba" or some other exotic destination she knew she'd never visit; that the only vegetables I ever ate came not from a field but rather from a can (LeSeur) or a freezer pack (Jolly Green Giant); that she favored convenience foods to the extent that I came to fear them, and cringe at commercials for the Pillsbury Doughboy: All this was not forgiven but simply forgotten when the mashed potatoes were potatoes, mashed. But while on my plate they formed the barrier between the battleship-gray lamb chops and the olive-drab green beans, in my heart they formed the barrier between the discovery that my mother hated cooking and the altogether different discovery that my mother hated cooking so much that she even hated cooking for me.

See, I had figured that my mother hated cooking for the obvious reason that she hated cooking for my father. She could never satisfy him. Indeed, she hated cooking for him so much that he kept their marriage intact by absolving her of the responsibility—by taking her with him to Roosevelt Raceway, where they ate at the Cloud Casino, while I stayed home and panfried a shell steak in the salted pan and made spaghetti with butter-and-cheese. But I was absolved of responsibility as well. I was in high school, stoned and rapacious and suddenly free to be disloyal, by which I mean I was suddenly free to tell the truth. Like most human beings, I grew up making the connection between food and love; what I began to realize when I started cooking for myself was that the more necessary connection was between food and honesty. My parents were both charmingly dishonest people; my father's lies were such that he couldn't admit them except to urge me to develop, like him, "a little larceny in your soul," but my mother could, since most of her lies were about food. "Oh, I'm a terrible fibber," she'd say, and then blithely assert that the Mott's applesauce she'd doctored with lemon and cinnamon was "homemade" or that she'd spent "hours over a hot stove" cooking the package of frozen Banquette fried-chicken drumsticks on our plates. She'd say this with a knowing cackle that served simultaneously as an admission of guilt and as a warning that we must never say that she was guilty. Food was love, all right, and we had to tell my mom that we loved her by buying into her "fibs" about it. To do otherwise was not only to make her cry but also to risk the wrath of my dad, who was as fearsome in his defense of my mother as he was in his attacks upon her. And so dinnertime became an exercise in swallowing a fiction that everybody knew was untrue, and the story that was repeated over and over and over again in my family (the other enforced fiction in my family being the fiction that the story you were hearing for the hundredth time was a story you'd never heard before) was the time my mother made a huge vat of her "homemade" applesauce for my brother's wrestling-team dinner and my brother ate the whole thing in order to spare my mother the knowledge that nobody else did.

I was still in high school and living at home when my mother first broke the Mashed Potato Rule: when the mashed potatoes she served started tasting like the mashed potatoes that were served in my high school cafeteria; when it was clear that, in fact, they were neither mashed nor potatoes. From another perspective: I was in high school when I first broke the rule that if food was to be love then so was the obligation to accept my mother's untruths about it. Me: Ma (I always called her Ma), what's with the potatoes? My mother: What's wrong with the potatoes? Me: They're not potatoes. My father: Just eat the potatoes. Your mother slaved over a hot stove to make those potatoes. Me: They're not potatoes. They came from a box. My mother: So what if they come from a box? They're still potatoes. Me: They're not potatoes! My mother: You can't tell the difference.

And with that my mother uttered the signal words of my culinary existence, which happened to be the signal words of my familial existence as well. I could tell the difference, and I spent the rest of my life proving that I could. My mother, for her part, spent the rest of her life trying to prove that I couldn't. I refused to eat the potato flakes that she served me, or the potato buds, or the potato powder, and my mother refused to admit that they were potato flakes and potato buds and potato powder. I mean, she would hide the box. She would peel a potato and put the peelings on top of the garbage, and the box of French's at the bottom. I used to think that she should have used her ingenuity just to mash the damned potatoes, while using my own ingenuity to find the box and to produce it, with prosecutorial flourish. "Come on," my father said, "enough's enough. Just eat the potatoes. You're breaking your mother's heart." But enough was never enough, because just as my mother had come to the conclusion that It's not worth it, I was coming to the conclusion that It is. The only thing left to be decided was the matter of what that mysterious "it" might be, and the only thing we both understood was that a lot more was at stake than the authenticity of my mother's "mashies."

My mother was a good mother. I was a good son. My mother was a betrayed woman—I think I knew that, from an early age—and so I was careful never to betray her, as she, by instinct, never betrayed me. But now I felt betrayed, and I betrayed her in return, by learning to cook. No: by cooking. No: by marrying a girl who had no interest in cooking, and cooking for her. No: by cooking for my wife as I wished my mother had cooked for me. No: by cooking as my father would have cooked, had he taken up the toque—by cooking unyieldingly, despotically, ball-bustingly, hungrily, not just selflessly but also selfishly, as an assertion of prerogative. When my mother came to visit, I made her chop, according to specification. "How's this?" she'd ask, showing me the cutting board of haphazardly chopped broccoli, and when I'd say she had to chop it smaller, finer, more uniformly, she'd say, "You're some pain in the ass" or "What a pill." I was perversely proud of her exasperation, perversely proud to be addressed in terms heretofore reserved for my old man. A pill? I had never been a pill before. I had always been, in my mother's estimation, "a good egg," but now I'd become a pill by insisting that my eggs taste good. My mother wasn't college-educated, but she wasn't stupid, either. She knew what was going on. When, much later, I wrote a flattering profile of my father for a magazine, she dismissed it tersely: "Don't forget who raised you, kid." But my cooking—my decision to cook—was a rejection of the way I'd been raised, a rebuke of the way she'd raised me. I had been on my mother's side, but now, unforgivably, I was on my father's, by taking my mother's job.

And yet hunger won out, as it always does in human affairs. As I learned to cook, I eventually learned what to cook for my parents—what made them hungry and satisfied their hunger at the same time, without carrying an implicit statement meant to divide or offend them. It was pot roast. On Sunday nights after they moved near us, we'd have them over for Sunday supper—a term that seemed the province of a family not my own—and I'd serve the one meal that, as any novice cook knows, obeys its own variant of the Mashed Potato Rule: There's no such thing as a bad pot roast as long as you put enough stuff in the pot and you roast it long enough. But my mother didn't know. Because she'd become too old and uncertain to chop, she'd watch me do the work and laugh to herself, as was her habit: "What are you laughing at, Ma?" "Nothing. Just laughin'." But she was interested not just in what she still regarded as my folly but in what made my folly worth it—what made the food good. There was a word that my mother used in restaurants, used, indeed, almost anytime she was eating food she didn't have to cook, and that was "delicious," as in, "Hey, Ma, how's that pork chop?" "Delicious." She said it with a combination of relief, wonder, and her own kind of hunger, which was the hunger to be free—to be what she was when she first married my father: a pampered beauty, a spoiled child. Now she used it, admitted it, in regard to my pot roast, and she wanted to know why. "What kind of meat do you use?" she'd always ask, and when I wondered why she wanted to know, she said, "Well, it's always so tender." And that's how I knew what I wasn't supposed to know all along: My mother didn't know how to cook. She didn't know the rule that can get you through just about any meal, the rule that's even more fundamental than the one governing the preparation of mashed potatoes: If it's tender, cook it fast over high heat; if it's tough, cook it slow over low. I used to wonder why my mother hated cooking so much. I used to wonder why she cooked salmon fillets for two hours and pot roast for one. I thought for a long time that it was because she was a bad cook, because she rejected cooking as a way of rejecting us, because she was, at heart, a liar. Now I understood that she hated cooking because she didn't know how to do it and so had no idea how a meal might turn out. I understood that she simply wasn't cut out for it, and yet, because she was part of the postwar suburban vanguard, she knew she was going to be judged on it—and so she demanded to be judged on it, meal after awful meal. Hence, the fibs; hence, the lies. She was as innocent of culinary knowledge as the housewives of her era were supposed to be innocent of sexual knowledge, and once I figured that out, I came to the same conclusion I came to when I figured out the extent of my father's infidelities: They were in over their heads. They were more unhappy than I ever allowed myself to know. They deserved the love they got, and the forgiveness they didn't.

Did she forgive me? Did she forgive me for being a pill and a pain in the ass—for taking my father's side? I know damned well she never thought of it that way. I was her son, after all, and I was a good egg. But that's how I thought of it, and I can tell you that the narrative arc of a life is more unforgiving than a mother could ever be. After my father died, my mother went into assisted living—or, to be more precise and unsparing, I put her there. She flourished, though food was an issue. "Ma, eat something." "I'm not hungry." "C'mon. The food's not bad"—and to prove it, I'd eat large platefuls of it, including the mashed potatoes that were neither mashed nor potato. "It stinks," she'd say, and that was that. One day, in her ninety-second year, she simply stopped eating, and when she went to the hospital for intravenous fluids, she suffered a stroke that deprived her of her ability to feed herself. I had a conversation with her gerontologist, in which he told me the way she would die, in which he told me that unless she was fed via feeding tube she would die of the complications of malnutrition—of hunger. He didn't want to give her a feeding tube. Neither did I, versed as I was in the letter and spirit of her living will and her medical directives. But I never asked her about it. I never told her that we planned for her to die. I simply went every day, and tried to spoon-feed her cottage cheese that dribbled from her mouth like sand. I even cooked for her—the spaghetti with butter and cheese that was the first food I ever loved; the pot roast that was the last food she called delicious. I was the family cook, which meant that I was driven to preserve my family by making them care about something they had to do: eat. But my mother didn't have to care anymore. She didn't even have to eat. The family cook, I fed her tenderly to the last, and she starved to death.