Yes, this scene is sad–Dean is being sad and drinking beer sadly and looking at the pictures sadly, but let’s see it under a different point of view.
Dean here needs a moment to be alone with his pictures and his thoughts and his emotions. He needs to be in a safe place where he feels comfortable. Where do we go when we need a moment to be alone to deal with our sadness? Somewhere private that we feel a connection to, like our bedroom or a place that means a lot to us, right? Dean picks the kitchen.
Dean’s cocoon, Dean’s safe place, has become the kitchen. He goes there to be alone with his feelings. He goes there to be emotional.
We have discovered that Mary doesn’t use the kitchen, she doesn’t cook. But Dean does. Dean loves his kitchen. He feels safe and at home in his kitchen.
Dean needs a moment to be alone with his emotions and crouches against the kitchen cabinets, in front of the stove, a place where his legs fit just right, in fact. He feels at home in his kitchen, he kind of entrusts the kitchen with his feelings; he used to do that with the car, but the car means life on the road, and what Dean craves stability (which parallels him to Rowena, who calls the Ben guy “stable”). He feels home in the bunker now, he’s going to be pissed if the British Men of Letters try to get him out of it (which will likely happen, poor Dean).
Mary has “burst his bubble” about her meals; he has realized that Mary wasn’t the perfect housewife and mother he thought her to be. He assumed her to be; it’s not like Mary ever pretended that the meals were homecooked, she doesn’t say “sorry I lied to you”, she just says that reality was different than what Dean had assumed. Dean built the image of what a perfect housewife and mother is like–he assumed a mother homecooks, for instance. Something he loves to do for the people he loves. Basically, Dean projected his own nurturing instincts on her.
Dean is what he imagines a perfect housewife to be. Providing Sammy - whom he was a guardian for, aka a parent figure - food he makes on his own, more or less. Remember what he told Tina–“My Dad was always working, so I came up with about 101 different ways to make macaroni and cheese”… he invented recipes (within his skill range as a kid of course), he did his best to come up with personal recipes for the food he gave to Sam. He didn’t just buy food from the supermarket and place it in front of Sam, he made his own recipes and variations. Even in Something Wicked he’s shown mixing stuff in a pot, if I’m not mistaken.
Dean makes food for the people he loves and he gets all proud and happy about it. Dean made the airplane thing to Sammy. “First tooth, first crush”–we don’t really know about the teeth, but Dean gave Sam advice on how to talk with girls when he met Amy Pond.
Dean also gave John emotional comfort when he came home from hunts, something that one should get from a partner, not a child.
Dean is what he believes a perfect housewife and mother should be. The queen of the kitchen. The provider of emotional support.
The traditional gender roles assign to women the role of provider of housework labor and provider of emotional labor. And those are Dean’s roles in the family. He’s the angel of the hearth of the Winchester family. Now with Mary back, the dynamic between the actual mother figure and the “surrogate mother figure” will be interesting to see.
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