There are two kinds of cookbooks in bookshops today. There are thick, compact ones, printed on thin paper with many, many words and hardly a picture in sight, which teach you how to cook everything from fried eggs to veal blanquette. Then there’s food porn, colorful, coffee table books with glossy pages and an abundance of macro photography. Guess which ones tend to be written by men.

There are two exceptions to the rule – professional cooking textbooks, which are fat, text heavy, and now, liberally illustrated with color photos, are written by men. And Mark Bittman wrote a neat, practical text called How to Cook Everything. The implication is, of course, that men are still not the ones doing day to day cooking, unless they’re doing it professionally. Even as more and more men start to cook, it’s still not something we do in the thoughtless, habitual way our mothers do. Modern male cooking is very much a choice, a recreational activity, centered on foods and techniques that are indulgences rather than staples.

In fact, it’s precisely through recreational cooking that modern men have come to be active cooks. We make something ours by declaring that it’s not work. If someone found a way to make ironing a hobby, you’d start seeing more men ironing their own shirts. As more and more activities become optional, it becomes more and more okay for men to do things – what matters is that an activity is a choice rather than a chore.

Tags: Modern Man

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"Palatable" was written on 17 Sep 2006 and filed in General, Memory / Consciousness, Modern Man