FemiNoshing: To Cook or Not to Cook?

In our quest to unchain ourselves from the stove, are we cheating ourselves out of a useful and creative skill?

By A.K. Whitney

Im not a big fan of Gordon Ramsay. I have limited patience for his arrogance, foul mouth, even his usually sulky looks. That is why, when I came across a story that quoted him saying, Women cant cook to save their lives, I was ready to get out my best Henckels and show him a thing or two.

You see, I love to cook. I have been doing it since I was a child, and though I have never gone to culinary school, I have taken a number of classes from professional cooks. Baking is a therapeutic outlet for me, and a perfectly cooked meal gives me the same creative satisfaction as writing a great article.

Ive even made a living off it. For seven years, I was food editor for a California newspaper, and I still write a weekly food column for two newspapers.

Therefore, when I hear the likes of Ramsay spouting off about such things, I get infuriated. Its yet another way to put down womens skills, to ignore the culinary contributions of generations of women (and many top male chefs credit their mothers for their love of cooking), to undervalue womens work. Then I came across the full quote: Seriously, there are huge numbers of young women out there who know how to mix cocktails but cant cook to save their lives, whereas men are finding their way into the kitchen in ever-growing numbers, he told Radio 4 while filming his show The F Word.

What a difference a few extra words make! Now, I will never be fond of Ramsay, even if, as it turns out, he has nurtured the careers of a few female chefs. But I will concede his point. A cursory look at the women in my larger acquaintance, who straddle both Gen X and Y, shows me Ramsay is right. Quite a few have zero interest in cooking, though I cant name a single one who, like the fictional Carrie Bradshaw, uses her oven for storage. [Editors' note: The two of us who run this site may have both lived in an apartment once upon a time wherein we might have used the oven for storage. And the refrigerator as a convenient place to stash white wine and face lotion and nothing else. It's really nice to have chilled lotion in the summer. What can we say?]

As someone who loves cooking, I wonder why so few of my cohorts can even muster a vague fondness for it. I think cookbook author Nigella Lawson may have put it best: Freedom from kitchen servitude is recent enough for women to flaunt their undomesticity just as women of an older generation often refused to learn to type or learn shorthand, she writes in her introduction to How To Eat: The Pleasures And Principles Of Good Food.

That makes perfect sense to me. For generations of women, knowing how to cook was considered a secondary sex characteristic, like having breasts. In the 50s particularly, a woman who couldnt cook was automatically a bad wife, a bad mother, maybe even a Communist. Just read the magazines of the day for yourself. Not cooking while female was just not on, particularly with the many conveniences of cake mixes and new-fangled appliances.

An allegedly charming, and possibly suspect retro kids book making the rounds on the Internet lately is full of sentiments like Girls cook! Boys eat! I remember my mother telling me horror stories of Italian friends in the 1970s women whose husbands would refuse to eat a plate of pasta if one noodle was broken. If the wives objected, their husbands would simply call their mothers. La Mamma was always happy to drop everything to provide her baby boy with whole noodles, glaring at her clearly incompetent daughter-in-law the whole time.

My friend Antonia is Greek, and comes from a long line of perfect housewives, or nikokyra. A nikokyra doesnt just keep a spotless home, but is a gourmet cook who doesnt balk at making phyllo dough from scratch or spending all day making spanakopita. Antonia has her own horror stories, such as the one of the relative who thought it was perfectly acceptable to throw a dish of rice at his mother because he didnt like the consistency. Nevertheless, Antonia is a marvelous cook. Like me, she gets satisfaction out of doing it and sees it as a creative outlet. But during those times when her husband and two sons just wolf down what she cooked without thanks, or guests disregard her efforts and start being picky, she also sees the logic of her cousin Connie. Antonia describes Connie as a Greek Carrie Bradshaw. She refuses to cook on principle, Antonia told me. She says that once you start to cook, your man never wants to take you out anymore.

Many would counter that by saying a dude with that kind of tude needs to be kicked to the curb. After all, Ramsay is right men are taking more and more of an interest in cooking, and not just professionally. My friend Mandy doesnt cook very much, mainly because her husband William is such a great cook, and cooks for her and their daughter. But Mandy says she also doesnt cook because she never really learned how. Mandys dilemma is one I have heard echoed by other women. These women, often born in the 70s and 80s to working mothers, are less likely to have culinary skills because, in their case, it was their mothers who took pride in flaunting their lack of domesticity. Again, I understand that rebellion, considering how undervalued domestic work was and still is.

Home cooking is still very much womans work, especially once children enter the picture and you become a bad mother if you dont feed them properly. As Current TVs Sarah Haskins puts it in one of her episodes of Target Women: Not feeding your children right means they will turn into members of Al Qaida. Haskins is a pro at skewering sexism in media, particularly at commercials meant for women, and I confess I get annoyed that, in 2009, the messages are essentially unchanged from the 1950s. (Well, as long as you swap Communist with terrorist.) And honestly, if I were dealing with a picky family, a husband who bitches at me that my cooking isnt as good as his mothers, or just the expectation that shopping, planning, and cooking meals is always my job as a woman, would I love doing it as much?

I get the feeling not.

But I still contend that cooking can be a lot of fun once you rid yourself of all the baggage. Knowing how to cook is a valuable skill that, apart from being creative, taps into math, chemistry, physics, and other allegedly male-dominated fields. Or to quote Lawson again: It certainly makes life easier if you can cook, but it seems to me to be a distinct advantage that your prospects are no longer dependent on your ability to do so.

After all, why should boys like Gordon Ramsay have all the fun?