The Rise of the Kitchen Bitch

Last week’s lecture from my husband—“Can I say something?”—concerned the baked potato. Apparently I had put the reflective side of the foil facing the wrong way and also had not wrapped the little darlings tightly enough, which makes for a defective steam. With only the humble potato at stake, the lecture was quick and mild. Nothing compared with the one on ghee or deglazing pans or the correct dose of umami on bitter greens. Nonetheless, any woman ever put to shame at her own stove will recognize the type. Yes, I am married to a kitchen bitch.

I first heard this term in Sandra Tsing Loh’s recent Atlantic story about her divorce [2]. She used it to describe a friend’s husband who was anal and fussy and altogether too feminine—he belonged to an online fennel club, for God’s sake. Loh’s bitch was wholly unsavory, a prop designed to justify universal divorce. Mine is not so easy to dismiss. My experience is more like Elizabeth Weil’s, who, in her New York Times Magazine [3] story this month, tells of a husband who lords over the kitchen in an all-too-manly way, with his scientific cookbooks and farmers' market snobbery and gadgets. My husband is less likely to freeze and label porcini-infused risotto—the Loh version—than to hover menacingly two inches away while I am chopping vegetables. “Shouldn’t they be smaller?” he asks, restraining himself so he won’t grab the knife. My mother would have been grateful. I am not. Instead, like Weil, I am often left seething with petty rage and self-pity.

When did a certain group of men take over the womanly art of home cooking? And why can’t we who are married to them just sit back and call their conquest of the kitchen a feminist triumph? If you had told a mistress of the house in the 1950s that one day her husband would julienne a carrot, she would have wept with joy. Perhaps she would have even held out a little longer against all those canned monstrosities designed to lighten her daily load. And yet, fast forward half a century, and some of us are starting to regret our lost dominion over the kitchen.

Not all of us, of course. I have some women friends who are relieved and even smug about their husbands doing all the cooking. Think of the time they save, and who cares what deglazing means? But for those of us who like to cook, who are attached to this traditionally female, primal way of showing love, the intrusion is a problem. We adore all the other gender-bending second-shift developments—men changing diapers and going to playgrounds, men vacuuming and straightening up (ahem, sort of). But male cooking is turning out to be one of those feminist-friendly changes that come with an unexpected, bitter aftertaste.

The first wave of feminists considered liberation from kitchen duties, along with liberation from housework and enforced vapidity, an absolute must. In the Feminine Mystique [4], Betty Friedan seethes about a comment she overheard from a male editor of McCall’s, about how women “aren’t interested in politics, unless it’s related to an immediate need in the home, like the price of coffee.” Poppy Cannon, who wrote for Mademoiselle, was reviled by James Beard for her Can-Opener Cookbook [5], which favored ingredients such as frozen mashed potatoes and creamed chicken soup. But she offered herself as a role model for the new “free spirited young moderns,” such as reader “Vivi,” who reported that “whippin’ around the kitchen gives me the gloops,” reported Laura Shapiro in her excellent book Something From the Oven [6]. Cannon paved the way for Peg Bracken’s I Hate To Cook Book [7], the crockery-smashing manifesto of the ‘60s.

As women fled, men started to pick up the slack. And Julia Child welcomed them on her famous cooking show, The French Chef, which premiered the same year the Feminine Mystique was published. Child addressed her audience as “home cooks,” not housewives, insisted on an evening time slot, and took care to praise men who wrote in. “It’s good to know there are some enthusiastic men at the stove these days,” she wrote. “Men always have more imagination and daring than women—even if I do say so.”

Would that she had kept that sentiment to herself. These days, Julia Child and Alice Waters are the cuddly matriarchs of a professional-chef scene that is otherwise manning up. “Imagination” and “daring” has, over time, morphed into “bare-fisted” and “potty-mouthed [8],” as the celebrity chef becomes synonymous with testosterone-fueled asshole. Anthony Bourdain jumped in early with his kitchen-noir memoir [9]. (“I dragged the razor.” “I suck.” “I’m a bestselling motherfucking author.”) Now it’s hard to keep up with the itinerant rage-aholics cycling through the Food Network—Gordon Ramsey, Marco Pierre White, David Chang, the Voltaggio brothers [10]. Even something as frou-frou as cake decorating is dominated by a goateed Baltimore thug—Chef Duff from Ace of Cakes—who is at best a lovable jerk. Women, meanwhile, are left holding the cupcakes.

With such studly role models, it was inevitable that men would start to see the home kitchen as a place to settle in. In the last 40 years, the average amount of time American married men spend cooking has tripled, from seven minutes a day to 22 [11], according to time-use surveys. At the same time, cooking has taken on a distinctly guy-hobby kind of feel. Christopher Kimball’s Cook’s Illustrated treats the kitchen like a garage, endlessly tinkering and perfecting, and his scientific method has triumphed over the lush, dreamy (now defunct) Gourmet. Michael Ruhlman took it one step further with Ratio [12], a baking book written in the voice of a high-school science textbook. This year, Guhner & Jahr—the European Condé Nast—launched Beef!, a kind of Esquire for cooking [13], complete with a manifesto for the men’s cooking movement: “If a woman is invited to a meeting of a men's cooking club, either a couple of guys chipped in to get another member a stripper for his birthday, or the evening's shot. "

Weil describes how the dynamic unfolds in her house. The story opens with her husband cutting apart a frozen pig’s head with his compound miter saw so he can make pork stock from scratch. He spends hours every night cooking and nearly bankrupts them with his demented hobby, whipping up truffled polenta and fried pig’s ears for dinner and then crepes with grapes and champagne sauce in the mornings, as Weil is “left to attend to our increasingly hungry, tired and frantic children.” She complains to friends but gets no sympathy, so she resorts to passive-aggressive measures such as leaving whole pigeons untouched on her plate.

My husband is not a tenth this bad. He is a food snob but not obsessive; he is fast and has dinner on the table by 6:45, in time for us all to eat together. The problem is more subtle and at least half my fault. Before we had kids, we both loved to cook and did it prodigiously and with great joy. After we had kids, everything changed. When we got home from work, we had the choice of cooking or hanging out with the kids. I always chose the kids. When I did cook, it was out of a sense of duty and obligation, while he continued to feel the joy.

Of course it’s always easier to have clearly defined domains in a marriage than to coexist uncomfortably. Over time, he slowly assumed dominion over the kitchen, as I resisted in my own minor, passive-aggressive ways. Now when people come over for dinner, they always assume he made the interesting dish and I made the chicken cutlets and green beans, even if the reverse is true. I’m reminded of what Shapiro wrote in her introduction: Men cook “to show off for an admiring crowd or simply for the pleasure of it. Women cook because they’re expected to and because the people around them have to eat.” Mostly I am just jealous.

Recently a friend took pity on me and bought me a cookbook for my birthday. I marked a recipe for a soup I wanted to make and bought all the ingredients. When I got home from taking the kids to a birthday party, the soup was already bubbling on the stove, thanks to my husband. I threw the cookbook across the room and stormed upstairs. Am I proud of this? Of course not. It was monumentally petty, and he was only being helpful. Nonetheless, he got the message and ceded some of the territory back to me.

So what does the balance look like now? I race to the kitchen at 5:59 p.m. without changing out of my work clothes so I can get to the stove first. I hold the cranky baby with one hand and chop vegetables with the other, keeping the knife away from his inquisitive little hands (the baby’s, not my husband’s). I cook chicken cutlets and green beans for the kids and sausage and bitter greens for us. This is somewhere between feminist pride and extreme stupidity, and it’s probably not sustainable. I am like the superwoman from the 1980 Enjoli commercial [14], wearing my business suit and flipping the shiny pan and keeping a slinky dress in reserve. I have pushed womankind back at least 30 years. But hey, I’m thrilled to have my kitchen back.