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. 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 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.