This article concerns the effects of the colonial encounter and recent changes in food availability on cooking practices in urban Zambia. Highlighting issues of gender and household dynamics, the article draws on my research into urban domestic service in colonial and postcolonial Zambia (Hansen 1989).1 The skills, including European cuisine, taught to male African servants in white colonial households were imparted with the assumption that this new knowledge would be transferred to African homes and thus contribute to introduce western-derived patterns of behavior and consumption.