Songs about cooking are quite few and far between, so we’ve collected some stand-out rock and pop songs centred around the theme of cooking to inspire your mood, no matter how sweet or sour you might be feeling.
Songs About Cooking
1. Tessa Violet – Kitchen Song
Tessa Violet’s sweet indie pop track, Kitchen Song, lifts the retro concept of housewifery, rooting its romanticism in the modern age; an aspect artfully mirrored by her reinvention of a classic chord progression within her innovatively quirky, youthful context.
This bright and heart-warming piece details the longing for your partner’s return, no matter how far the distance, her kitchen scenery evoking the traditional and timeless themes of family and unconditional love;
“If you’re going to the kitchen leave the door ajar a crack, ’cause I just wanna keep on listening and I can’t wait until you’re back.”
2. JJ Cale – Boiling Pot
JJ Cale’s vintage pop track, Boiling Pot, captures the warm, smoky rock sound of the late ‘60s, his vocal performance swelling and decaying in dynamics, reflecting the simmering and boiling of the heart in love;
“Now she don’t know where she is, how sexy she can be, she don’t realise what her eyes do to me, she keeps me hot, like a boiling pot.”
Carrying hints of country inspiration within its soundscape, Boiling Pot hides countless cooking-themed innuendos within its lyrics, crafting a sultry anthem for romances new and old;
“She keeps me hot, like a boiling pot, burning right through the night, it don’t take long for her to catch my eye, when she wants to suck me in, it’s easy as pie.”
3. New Rules – Pasta
New Rules’ pop track Pasta is fashioned around a peculiarly cute chorus lyric, showcasing the simple happiness of sharing home cooked food with the people you love; “All she wanted was a bowl of pasta without anybody looking at her, so I asked her, ’Baby what’s the matter with that?’”
Crafted around themes of not needing impulsive, outlandish adventures to gain satisfaction from life, New Rules include a cosy anecdote surrounding the nourishment that comes with bonding time, and understanding when your partner needs peace rather than productivity;
“I don’t wanna go out tonight, so we can stay in and I can make you something, we ain’t gotta dress up for nothing.”
4. John Prine – The Frying Pan
John Prine’s vibrant country track, The Frying Pan, is composed against a classic soundscape, embellished with banjos, folksy string sections and a characterful Southern accent.
Prine devotes his lyrics to a tale of a wrecked marriage, his heartbroken narrator describing the moment he realised his wife had left him for another man; “I come home from work this evening, there was a note in the frying pan, it said, ‘Fix your own supper, babe, I run off with the Fuller brush man.’”
The Frying Pan is an up-tempo anthem for anyone trapped in their heartbreak, craving a feel-good song to reflect their misery as much as inspire hope for better days ahead; “Sat down at the table, screamed, and I hollered and cried, and I commenced a carrying on ’til I almost lost my mind.”
5. The Human League – Being Boiled
This sparsely padded, yet powerfully atmospheric 1980 electro-pop track by The Human League features a pure composition of analogue synths, each retro element still retaining its original resemblance of distant futurism.
Woven with an array of strangely hypnotic sonic details, Being Boiled hosts an equally striking lyrical theme against sericulture and silk-production based in animal cruelty, their title referring to silk moths being boiled alive in order to harvest their silk.
Being Boiled is adorned with religious sentiments, stemming back to the Buddhist interpretation of reincarnation, and that by slaughtering silk moths, you might be slaughtering your own offspring from a past, unremembered life;
“Listen to the voice of Buddha saying stop your sericulture, little people like your offspring boiled alive for some God’s stocking, Buddha’s watching, Buddha’s waiting.”
6. Naïka – Sauce
Naïka’s radio-style pop single, Sauce, embraces all things enticing and delicious, moulding sauce into a lust-driven metaphor for having the secret ingredient; “Don’t tell me you’ve tasted anything like this, don’t tell me you’ve felt this fire on your lips.”
Naïka details her lyrics with an abundance of self-empowered sentiments, flaunting her skill and appetite under the guise of cooking; “I got the recipe, hit a hundred degrees, better get on your knees, drip gon’ have you begging for my love.”
7. Angie McMahon – Pasta
Angie McMahon’s grungy indie rock single, Pasta, contrasts the common, high-speed cooking pace with late-teen lethargy, her lyrics illustrating the day-to-day happenings of someone feeling hopelessly lost in life;
“My bedroom is a disaster, my dog has got kidney failure (failure), I’ve been sitting at the bar too much, kissing people in my head and saying rubbish things I should not have said.”
McMahon’s title evokes the bleak monotony of worthlessness when suspended in-between two worlds and belonging to neither, cementing her track’s overarching theme of feeling drained, overspent and craving something new;
“I’ve been lost for a while, and I spend so much time eating pasta, although I’m probably allergic and other people seem to move so much faster.”
8. Aarzemnieki – Cake To Bake
Aarzemnieki’s 2014 Eurovision Song Contest entry for Latvia, entitled Cake To Bake, compares successful cooking with completing the impossible.
This cute acoustic indie pop track is fashioned with the humour of a man destined for domestic mishaps and incapability when it comes to cooking, Aarzemnieki’s narrator detailing his countless superman-style accomplishments in contrast to his abysmal baking skills;
“I melted the ice of the polar caps, found the raiders of the lost ark, solved a case for the genius from Baker Street, helped to clean the Central Park … I’ve got a cake to bake, and got no clue at all, I’ve got a cake to bake, and haven’t done that before.”
Cake To Bake matches its blissfully youthful and optimistic soundscape with an equally adorable theme of struggling to complete something your child has likely learnt, dissolving your sense of adulthood despite your own exceptional achievements in other areas;
“I talked to a unicorn the other night, took me up on a lonely star, did the moonwalk on the milky way, realized I’ve gone too far … Go, come on and ask your mother, how to bake, bake that cake.”