You could say that cooking is an inherently masculine activity insofar as it can support a tool fetish. It’s kind of obvious, but it must be said. This is one of the few traits I share with my father and the men of his generation, this love of things which offer us mastery over our little worlds, which extend our powers and require from us, in turn, care and respect.

It’s a bit of a paradox, because anyone who knows what they’re doing will tell you that you don’t actually need that many toys to be a good cook. In fact, we’re almost luddite in our resistance to gadgetry.

We talk instead about efficiency, mastery of your (minimal) gear, and making sure the gear is of a certain quality and well maintained. We like gear that you have to take care of, like copper or cast iron pans, and carbon steel knives. A good car is one that never breaks. A good knife is one that needs sharpening constantly. Ceramic knives, which never need sharpening and can go through bones like ripe peaches, have never caught on among professionals. We’ve taken our maternal instinct and channeled it into inanimate objects.

The look of the modern kitchen, of course, owes much to the professional kitchen, in which efficiency is beyond paramount. The look is familiar and masculine – we see it in machine shops and mechanics’ toolchests, a certain cold angularity which can be aesthetically magnificent, but which was not born from aesthetic concerns. So we’ve found ourselves in a paradoxical situation where we are making cosmetic changes to flimsy gadgets that wouldn’t last a day in a restaurant to make them look like they belong there. Mass market design at its worst – boring and impractical.

But we’re getting somewhere now, with companies embracing the idea of making products which work like they belong in restaurants and look like they belong in galleries. I’m thinking of Shun knives, and Culinhome’s gorgeous metal canvases, and the way color is creeping back into kitchens through Le Creuset, and Kitchenaid’s brilliant, almost heraldic palette. Ornament is not, in and of itself, undesirable, but simply something which has too often been used to distract from fundamental, functional shortcomings. It makes me wonder if we’ll ever see a pro camera designed by Gaultier.

Tags: Modern Man

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"Gear" was written on 09 Sep 2006 and filed in General, Memory / Consciousness, Tools, Modern Man