My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.

Ephron uses a wry, autobiographical observation to sketch a particular mid‑century, aspirational attitude toward domestic labor: cooking is framed less as a daily craft or pleasure than as a task one hopes to outgrow. Calling her mother a “recreational cook” suggests she cooked when it felt like a hobby, not an obligation, while the punchline—“if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you”—satirizes the idea that success is measured by outsourcing the mundane. The line also hints at class mobility, gender expectations, and the tension between competence and convenience, a recurring Ephron theme when writing about food, family, and modern womanhood.