Man Make Dinner

I would like to begin this essay with a bit of audience participation. I would like you to imagine, if you will, two things. First, a chef. Take a moment here to bring together a bold mental image, really think about what your chef looks like: how they’re standing, what they’re wearing, their face and their body. Then let that picture float back into the cerebral ether and bring together, in its place, the image of a cook. Again, really think about those same features: their body, face and clothing – how they differ from the previous.

Now, due to the unilateral nature of this medium, the next rhetorical step is rather easy for me. Because you cannot, dear reader, tell me what it is that you saw I can simply suggest what I think it was, and you can’t tell me otherwise. I can put a picture in your head, if not quite words in your mouth.

Your picture of a chef, I suspect, is tall and proud, imposing in crisp, starched whites. I imagine you imagined thick arms folded over a broad chest; a gleaming knife or spatula held confidently in one hand; a towering, ornately folded hat. There is no other word for it – your chef is ruddy: kind but strong eyes, thin lips creased into an assured smile, a thick brown moustache completing the look. He is strong, master of his domain, a picture of professionalism; a picture, like Ratatouille’s Chef Gusteau, of an industry.

The cook, in contrast, is short, hunched, easily overlooked in plain clothing and a cheap butcher’s apron. Overworked and bedraggled, the cook is unkempt, grease stained, with dirty hair tied up in a messy bun. With luck, the many loose strands will be contained by a hair net; often, as in Matilda, they are not and might well end up, along with sweat and blood, in your chocolate cake. For the cook is not proud, has no team of underlings beneath them, commands no respect. From the tired, patient eyes to the civilian clothes and the heaving bosom undercut by apron strings, the cook is domestic, matronly, and female.

Sweepingly broad and citing only children’s films, these descriptions should nonetheless be readily recognisable. The latter, in particular, is all but universal. All human societies divide labour according to gender and one of longest standing and most consistent arrangements places the domestic chore of cookery firmly in the feminine sphere. Growing, perhaps, from the plain biological fact that before pasteurisation – that is, until 1864 – all humans were fed by women in infancy, dinner has been the domain of women since, some believe, the Palaeolithic.[1] Our image of the caveman may not be quite right – we may rather speak of the cavewoman or even the cavewife.

The masculine image of the chef, while much younger, is, in a sense, the same age: it has been around since the beginning. Despite food having been feminised for thousands of years prior, at the first suggestion that there was money and acclaim to be won, in swept the men to codify, professionalise and profit. In France, the cradle and spiritual home of ‘classical’ (read: European) cuisine, Marie-Antoine Carême’s seminal 1833 tome L’Art de la Cuisine Francais is prefaced as a guide offered by the generous male author to the nation’s blundering housewives. Carême cannot make it through a single sentence without reminding his readers that they haven’t ‘the slightest notion of chemistry.’[2] Such literal patronisation is thankfully, rather rarer in cookbooks nowadays, but that divide, between the professional and the domestic, the competent and the masterful, the masculine and the feminine, remains strong. Our celebrity chefs – White, Ramsay, Waring – are overwhelmingly male, while female food stars like Nigella Lawson and Nadiya Hussein are often burdened with additional requirements to feed the kids and look good doing it. So entrenched is the pattern that even in 2024 The Female Chef was a provocative title for a cookbook.[3]

Discussions of the female chef I will happily leave to the women; I am here concerned with the inverse. As I have mentioned before, I do not consider myself a chef. But I do, undeniably, spend hours of my working days preparing and serving food, which must make me a male cook. Just as those bold women blazing trails in the professional kitchen are entering spaces from which they have long been absent, I now often find myself in spaces which have traditionally been populated by women.

As far back as I can trace it, the lineage of predecessors in my kitchen is all female. When I inherited it, the Portico Kitchen was primarily a tea and lunch service for the then-overwhelmingly elderly male membership: men of the generation who would hardly know how to boil an egg for themselves. The women who did it for them in my kitchen also did a fair bit of mothering: sympathetic listening, emotional support, and the like. While I quickly made it clear that I was not going to offer this additional service any more than I was going to wear the lace pinnies I found in the attic, the years I have spent modernising my kitchen have drawn me into other feminine spheres.

A decade of cooking professionally brings with it certain social expectations. Whenever my family gather in large numbers, it is now very often me to whom they turn for feeding. Or, rather, I am one to whom they turn – the rest are almost exclusively female. Nowadays, at Christmas, for birthdays, on Sundays, I often find myself with aunts, sisters, and girlfriends in the kitchen.

This is something with which many men would struggle. The infamously fragile male ego varies across classes, generations, and ethnicities, but always strives to place itself above the shamefully feminine domestic chore of feeding. Think of the Lawrentian image of the working man demanding his dinner every night, or the gentlemanly dichotomisation of domestic work and the ‘life of the mind’, which labels food, writes John Berger, as inescapably trivial (a position, to be sure, held only by those who have never gone hungry)[4]. A man’s role is to provide for his family but, for reasons unclear, this does not extend to feeding.

Where a man is permitted to feed is in the professional realm, where doing so brings money and acclaim. This is the real difference between a chef and a cook. For his troubles, the chef is repaid in professional wages; authority over his team; access to the finest ingredients. If he is any good, he will frequently be complimented on his work – perhaps even celebrated, brought out for applause. The cook is not. Limited in budget and control, the cook slaves away without thanks or recognition. She is paid poorly, if at all. As suggested by the title, cooking is not just expected but demanded of the cook.

In this regard, there is yet one significant divide between those female relatives and me. Because I am a man, there remains a performative element to my cookery. I am always asked – or (on rarer occasions) offer – to cook. It is not presumed. To my own chagrin, I frequently serve elaborate menus of multiple courses and garnishes, even to large gatherings. For my troubles, I am celebrated not just on my food, but on my person. I have won over more than a few of my girlfriend’s friends simply by cooking for them. Even more impressive, even to contemporary women, is cleaning. Nothing attests to the persistence of the patriarchy more than the wide-eyed wonder with which women look upon a man in apron and marigolds. Indeed, I have often wondered why more men do not make use of this most foolproof technique in the eternal quest to impress girls.

The answer, of course, is masculinity’s strict prohibition of all things female-coded. Masculinity, like femininity, is defined as much in negative as positive; a man is defined as much by what he does not as he is by what he does. Man is not emotional, not weak, not timid. He does not crochet, paint watercolours, or bake cakes. Women clean up after men, not vice versa. Twentieth century feminism liberated (some) women from domestic servitude and brought them into the professional sphere, but there has been no inverse process celebrating man’s entry into domestic life. Their presence – my presence – in the domestic kitchen so often remains incongruous.

For my part, it is little surprise that I should now find myself so invested in something so female-coded. I am also vegetarian, wear my hair long, and enjoy bubble baths. I like reading and writing – an interest (and industry) which seems to lean more and more towards the feminine each year. I have attended plenty of literary events when women outnumbered men three to one; I have myself hosted several food-and-literature events where I was the only man present. Correspondingly, my interests in uber-masculine endeavours have always been few, and if I were to make a list of classically male traits, I would get a long way down before I found one I value highly. I consider stoicism self-denial; am distrustful of the overly confident and assertive; and believe we have evolved to a point where we could do away with aggression completely. I do not deny these things altogether, but I consider them problems to be exorcised in boxing gyms rather than celebrated on podiums. While I do not believe myself completely free of the bonds of gender – I don’t wear skirts – I lean, I think, as much toward the feminine as the masculine.

Dimly aware of this for a long time, I wondered for a while if I might be gay, but kissing several men in my early twenties only confirmed that I have no real interest in kissing men, let alone having sex with them. As transgenderism entered my sphere of knowledge, I considered this, too, but I am blessed to be fully comfortable in the body in which I was born. Then, as my 30s came along, carrying with them deeper self-knowledge, I realised my truth in all its wonderful simplicity: I think masculinity is a bullshit trap and I have no desire to perpetuate it. In my humble opinion, if you deny yourself the pleasure of a bubble bath because society tells you that it is not manly enough, you are a fanny. If you spend your Friday nights fist fighting in the streets or restrict your culinary intake to unseasoned beef, you’re probably a fucking idiot.

I also don’t think that I’m alone in this. I think the truth is increasingly out. As I first wrote this paragraph, looking out over a bar terrace in central Manchester at 3pm on a Wednesday, two large, muscular, heavy-drinking men were getting aggressive with a bouncer, having been moved on for sitting discomfortingly close to two young women. Every woman present looked simultaneously disgusted and entirely disinterested, thoroughly bored by a performance they have had forced upon them time and time again. They looked, those women, as though they were channelling the weariness of every generation of women behind them, stretching back to our ape-like ancestors. The look on their faces is the one I have seen in wildlife documentaries on the faces of female chimpanzees as the dominant males display their strength by hooting and screeching and banging on tree trunks. But there is something else there, now: a hint of resistance, a lack of resignation. A look that says, ‘at least it’s not forever’.

And I suspect it is not. The time of the woman, slowly, incrementally, through stops and starts and not infrequent backwards steps, is coming. Even against the rising tide of Trump and Tate, the so-called “soft” industries have already been won. Every one of the most successful and significant writers and performing artists of the 2020s are women, from Taylor Swift to Sally Rooney. The girls and women who they are inspiring, the girls who are being shown that it is not just permissible but entirely possible for them to dominate, will sooner or later find themselves in the corridors of true power. Once there, they may well leave the men behind. The uncomfortable truth is that the male brain may be becoming outdated. Our innate aptitude for launching projectiles and rotating objects in the mind’s eye was highly useful on the ice age tundra. But who would choose that over mental calculation and verbal communication? It does not even bear asking which is better suited to the professional requirements of the 21st century. I know my answer and I, for one, welcome our future female overlords. I fully intend to continue currying favour with them by keeping them well fed.

Notes

[1] Ivan Jablonka, A History of Masculinity, chap. 3

[2] Marie-Antoine Carême, L’Art de la Cuisine Francais, p. B, available at https://archive.org/details/b29338098/page/n47/mode/2up (p. B)

[3] See Claire Finney and Liz Seabrook, The Female Chef

[4] John Berger, ‘The Eaters and the Eaten' in Why Look At Animals? p. ? (this book is currently in storage in my attic)