This week I gave my Dad his first cooking lesson. It got me thinking about men in the kitchen. Why are restaurant chefs usually men (perhaps the long and unsocial hours?) whereas home cooking is mostly done by the woman of the house? How can men's attitudes and abilities in the kitchen differ from women's? Here are my personal thoughts and observations, supplemented by those of some of my friends (who shall remain anonymous). People tend to assume that the average man is a bit rubbish at cooking, but in my experience they often do better than you might expect.
Dad's lessons had been planned for a while as something he wanted to do but it was just as well because my Mum had had an accident the previous week and was still recovering. Mum is seventy three and she looks after my great aunt who is ninety nine,as well as doing the cooking, so if Dad could do some it would be a great help. He can make great fish in batter - his Mum's recipe (and she was a great cook), but is otherwise limited to putting things in the oven and basic vegetable preparation etc. We made pork with fennel and vermouth, by and large it went very well and he's looking forward to his next lesson.
My husband can cook but he has a limited repertoire, what he does he does well, he has his signature dish of pork chops with apples and prunes, he is good at cooking steak, and things with mince like bolognese and shepherds pie. If he is in the kitchen, it's his domain and help is not appreciated. I must go and sit down in another room with a glass of wine (oh, the hardship!) and await the results of his efforts. If I try to help, I get a disapproving "Who is cooking this meal? You or me?" He tries very hard not to use to many utensils and not make a mess, according to him using too many pans is a sign of weakness wheras I see it as a sign of creativity. He did once try to cook pasta in the microwave without any water, but that was a very long time ago.
In contrast, one of his brothers who is more into cooking and married to a trained chef really enjoys cooking together with his wife. I've been to their house for a meal and it's like poetry in motion watching them both. Another of his brothers cooks more than his wife, and she seems to like it that way. He is quite adventurous and this year is using a random number generator to choose recipes out of his collection to try new recipes. The third and last of his brothers lives on his own and makes a lot of soups, but is beginning with my encouragement and some books to try new things.
A survey of my facebook friends showed that men often have disasters in the kitchen (leaving the plastic bag of giblets in a chicken, boiling baked beans and simmering for twenty minutes, setting fire to dressing gown sleeves, or even the whole kitchen twice in two weeks), but that they are often very good at bacon sandwiches, curries and mashed potato - I think it's in the arm muscles. And of course, for some reason men are always the kings of the barbecue, even at breakfast time and in the winter!
Men don't often bake, I can't remember my husband ever having a go at anything sweet. In fact, he doesn't really like cake, he'd rather have cheese and wine than afternoon tea. One friend's partner is a brilliant baker though and pictures of his cakes on facebook make my mouth water on a regular basis. One cousin's husband has recently made his first sponge cake since school which was a great success, so maybe they just need to bite the bullet and have a go.
One friend's husband once made her a baked potato with cheese, can you tell from the picture below why she thought it was unacceptable? A little rustic perhaps? What improvements would YOU suggest?
Which finally brings us to the subject of washing up. My husband does not actually get the concept of looking at items to see if they're clean, so I usually do it myself. To be fair, he does his share of other household tasks, so I'm not complaining. Dishwasher loading even, is not always done to my liking and I have to either do it myself or at the very least rearrange it to a, make sure everything fits in and b, it will be clean at the end of the wash cycle. And take things out which I deem to be unsuitable for the dishwasher, it is very much a matter of personal preference as to whether you're precious about your wooden spoons, or not.
As in other aspects of a relationship, one has to find a happy balance in the kitchen, I hope you find it in yours.
Thank you for reading, more soon,
Caroline :-)
Yesterday I bought myself a new cookery book. I had resolved not to do this, because it is the one weakness I have above all others. I do not need any more cookery books. I have well over a hundred and not a great deal of storage space in my modestly sized house. I know there's over a hundred because I had to count them for a survey once. However, it was one of those moments where I stood quietly in the bookshop, smelling that lovely papery smell, and flipped through the weighty hardbacked volume, looking at the recipes and thinking that if I left this book behind I would miss out on so many wonderful ideas, and that it simply HAD to come home with me. And it was half price.
I have not bought all my cookbooks myself, a lot of them have been given as gifts from friends and family, and a few have been inherited. Once I have them though, it's very difficult to part with them.
The book I bought yesterday was "The Kitchen Diaries II" by Nigel Slater. I love Nigel and his cooking more than any other well known cook or chef at the moment. I think it's because I can identify with him, I'm not a trained chef, but more of an adventurous home cook, and I love how he writes about ingredients. It's much more than just recipes, it's the "why" as well as the "how" of his cooking. I can hear his lovely gentle voice as I read, he has such a calm attitude which is so refreshing compared to the "slap bang" style of for example, Jamie Oliver. Jamie has lots of good ideas and flavour combinations, but he can sometimes be a bit irritating. I've got a bit of the Raymond Blanc scientific attitude to cooking too - being a scientist in my day job that's not a great surprise. My parents went to Le Manoir once and got Raymond to sign my copy of his book "Blanc Mange" as a congratulations-on-gaining-my-MSc present, which was quite cool!
I also have a fondness for Nigella, although she can be irritating too, but she does have some tremendous recipes that are somehow greater than the sum of their parts, and I do have most of her books. She doesn't put enough sugar in her baking for my liking though. Two books that always deliver are the Riverford vegbox ones, they are totally reliable. I got their first book free when I started having my vegboxes delivered and had to buy the second one too.
Early additions to the collection when I first had my own kitchen were the invaluable reference bible - the complete Delia Smith's Cookery Course, and cheap and cheerful supermarket paperbacks on chinese food and curries. Current highlights include Larousse, The Greens Cookbook, The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook, Carluccio's Mushroom Book, the Delicious 5 of the best book, Economy Gastronomy, all the River Cottage Ones, Gok Cooks Chinese; and the Meat Free Monday cookbook. And many, many, more. I couldn't be without the Macaroon book which was super cheap from The Works and is the book I have made the highest proportion of recipes from, probably getting on for three quarters of them. I got Mary Berry's Baking Bible from my daughter for Christmas, and Baking with Julia Child from my Dad. Potatoes being my favourite food, I've got six different books dedicated to potato recipes.
What makes a great cookery book or otherwise? On the whole, I find it a bit disappointing if there isn't have a picture for every recipe. You can't tell what the finished dish is meant to look like, for a start. You get, an extra good feeling when your version looks as good as (or occasionally better!) than the one in the book. I get a bit cross sometimes when they say "until cooked" or are too vague, I would like at least an estimate of how long it might take. Great long lists of ingredients are a bit off putting too, unless there is the promise of something truly spectacular at the end. I love it when there are suggestions for variations and when you are encouraged to adapt the recipe too. Good photography also makes a huge impact, the Economy Gastronomy book has some stupendous recipes but the pictures all seem a bit grey looking and it does put you off a bit, I want my greens to look vibrant!
You can tell by looking which books are used most due to all the coloured paper tags sticking out of the top and sides of them. I try not to get them dirty and pretty much succeed, though there is the odd splat and fat stain here and there, telling a story. There are also post it notes stuck onto some of the pages, with annotations; variations, oven temperatures, even one that says "don't use this recipe - use the one on the card in the recipe folder". I forgot to mention those. I've got two folders, with twelve divisions in each so I can file in categories and find what I want more easily, housing a huge amount of recipes cut out of magazines, supermarket recipe cards and the like, and they are extremely heavy!
Storage is getting to be a problem. The picture above is the overflow bookcase, which has now itself overflowed. There is also a cupboardful, a pile on the worktop and a few upstairs. I might have to force myself to give some away... maybe to people who live close by and could let me borrow them back if I wanted... and I'll try not to buy any more. Not this week, at least.
More soon, thank you for reading.
Caroline x
