My Parents Had a Style of Cooking That Was Efficient, Reliable, and Adequate. We Could Really Benefit From It Today.

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It started one night, in the deepest of winter, when I made myself two fried eggs and called it dinner. I had kale wilting in the fridge and aspirations to make stew with beans, coconut, and fresh turmeric; past me had planned out my week’s meals to be fun and nutritious. But it was late and I was tired, and on that hungry Thursday evening it felt as if all my glossy cookbooks were bullying me from their shelf. So, instead, I fried two eggs sunny-side up, toasted some bread, and smeared it with ketchup—considering today’s expectation that we should be making balanced meals from scratch every night, it barely qualified as dinner.

But my scrappy solution, while not exactly delicious, sent me to bed full, and it got me thinking: Maybe it doesn’t have to be that complicated? When I was a kid, my dad would sometimes solve dinner in my mother’s absence by frying up a couple of meat patties, putting them on bread with ketchup. No potatoes, no vegetables, no place settings—just Dad and me eating by the wooden chopping board that pulled out of the counter like a drawer, sharing a moment together over the simplest of meals.

Weeknight dinners always seemed so much simpler when I was a child, I lamented to my mother a few days later. “I’m so over these ‘easy’ dinner recipes that pretend they’ll take just 30 minutes but never do,” I complained. “Back then we usually just had the same dozen-or-so things over and over, right?” She confirmed my memory—it was mostly variations of ground meat (game cakes in brown sauce, beef balls in soup) and ground whitefish (balls in white sauce, cakes in brown). There were also multiple kinds of milk-based porridge served with cold cuts (cinnamon-topped velvet porridge is delicious, I promise), as well as spaghetti with meat sauce and, in a pinch, tomato soup with boiled egg.

This was the Norwegian countryside in the 1980s, and my parents cooked the food of the time and place. “It was the food that we had,” said my mother. Dinner was simple, and that was by design. “No one got creative with food on a Tuesday night back then.”

I’d hazard to say I’m a somewhat more broadly skilled cook than my parents—though I’m still pretty slapdash in the kitchen and remain unconvinced that toasting nuts is worth the effort. But what they lacked in adventurousness they made up for in straight-up endurance, and frankly, I think we ate better. Food experimentation was for weekends and special occasions, and no one would dream of cracking a cookbook on a Monday. “Having so many ingredients in your meals makes it taste really good, but it can be a bit much sometimes,” said my mother. “Meat cakes with just potatoes and carrots are fine too.”

I remember my childhood dinners as good food, if a little heavy on the red meat, and though they may not have been innovative, they were certainly reliable—sustenance delivered with efficiency and care, and at a reasonable hour.