tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1052576720837454793.comments2009-06-12T15:06:11.118-07:00wordy appetitesGwen Hymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15041232152191885133noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1052576720837454793.post-59430895070919823162009-06-12T15:06:11.118-07:002009-06-12T15:06:11.118-07:00Gender Police Academy Dropouts, unite!
I agree t...Gender Police Academy Dropouts, unite! <br /><br />I agree that gender in cooking influences how we think about women’s and men’s roles in the kitchen, but I don’t think they’re quite the same. If by “gender in cooking” you mean “gender roles inherent in the act of making food” I get what you mean. But the finished dish is separate from the act of preparing it, which feeds into my “woman grills a steak” example. You’re right that there’s a gender confusion appeal to steak, so that I can appropriate a bit of masculinity if I order a T-bone at Peter Luger. <br /><br />But of course that doesn’t mean that I can tell if it was a man or a woman chef who prepared that steak for me. I think that asking whether a diner can somehow *tell* the gender of the chef by his/her food is just not a question that will yield an interesting answer. The only way for an eater to guess is by picking up on those durable gender stereotypes in the food itself, (e.g. the ol’ “salads are for girls” stereotype) and those were constructed long before the chef picked up her knife. I’m fascinated by how and why they were constructed; seriously, why are salads for girls? <br /><br />Food is a rugged and versatile cultural symbol, and so your rigatoni with pork ragu can be both something grandma made for her family and a big porky dish for dudes. These issues do come to the fore when women seek to enter professional kitchens, as you note quite astutely. Men defends themselves from the female onslaught in two ways: by cultivating a sexist reaction (saying women don’t belong in kitchens) and by retreating a smaller, more exclusive all-male space (haute cuisine, steakhouses, the upper echelons of wine connoisseurship, and to my mind Anthony Bourdain’s entire oeuvre… hope I’m not being unfair) to keep out the chicks. Of course, this reaction is by no means exclusive to the food world. These are barbed questions, probably more uncomfortable than Astor wanted to get into at the forum. I don’t really blame them! Looking like a sexist, or like a feminist bomb-thrower, would harsh everyone’s mellow. But there you are.Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18053435713716349317noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1052576720837454793.post-28925259564094248042009-06-11T06:22:59.711-07:002009-06-11T06:22:59.711-07:00Very interesting point about the same dish being i...Very interesting point about the same dish being interpreted multiple ways - great example, absolutely right on. And it's funny - think about someone like Mario Batali, who freely admits that he's largely inspired by the family style of cooking, and yet his dishes are generally characterized, like in your example, as "bold" rather than nurturing/homey.<br /><br />Your point about steak reminds me about a NY Times lifestyle article awhile back all about how women were choosing to eat steak on first dates because it made them seem not "girly" or high-maintenance, like eating a salad would.<br /><br />And in the restaurant where I used to work, there was this unspoken assumption that the grill cook's word was law, and anything he asked you to help out with, you would, no matter how busy you were - because it was all in the service of the meat, which took priority over all things.<br /><br />A lot of interesting points made, thanks for being so thoughtful! And yes, it's a discussion I look forward to seeing continue...annahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09496429265414806006noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1052576720837454793.post-25869386544807365942009-06-10T21:49:38.754-07:002009-06-10T21:49:38.754-07:00mslaas, I'm intrigued and thinking about the d...mslaas, I'm intrigued and thinking about the differences you're articulating. I guess my point is that gender in cooking is not really separable from the ways that we think about women and men in terms of their roles in the kitchen. to wit: let's choose a dish--say, rigatoni with pork ragu. now, depending on who you ask, this is either one or the other of the following:<br /><br />1. a great example of cuisine grand-mere, the sort of dish a farmwoman would make, from scratch, for the hard-working men in her family; a vehicle for cooking from the heart, making a virtue out of poverty, bringing love and soul and sustenance into the kitchen<br /><br />or:<br /><br />2. hearty, meaty, ballsy, manly cooking, by men for men; all about big appetites and big flavors <br /><br />...you see what i mean? <br /><br />steak is a funny one--and a great example--because it *is* so widely perceived as manly, and is so strongly historically associated with eating houses and so forth, bastions of manly dining. And I do think the idea of a woman cooking a steak has the effect of, for instance, Mariska Hargitay smoking a cigar on the cover of Cigar Afficianado--it's a little sexy, a little cross-dressed, a little tough-chick outre. (Sometimes this is how it feels to be a woman *eating* a steak, too.) But does that mean you can tell the difference between a woman cooking a steak and a man cooking a steak, or is the effect all in the visuals, so to speak?<br /><br />So glad you're not the gender police. The written exam is really a bitch, huh? <br /><br />And Anna--maybe I'm over-reading--I hope so! I think the panel was a great way to kickstart a discussion that's clearly of pretty serious interest to lots of people. Let's hope we can keep talking productively about it.Gwen Hymanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15041232152191885133noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1052576720837454793.post-5160776495379502022009-06-10T17:24:29.778-07:002009-06-10T17:24:29.778-07:00Hi Gwen,
I'm not sure you're fairly chara...Hi Gwen,<br /><br />I'm not sure you're fairly characterizing the commenters on Serious Eats, who aren't calling you a gender essentialist. My only information about the event was initially via the SE post (which is self-contained, not leading to a link with a more thorough explanation or alternate perspective), and this post does not make the points you're making here. <br /><br />I do think the setup itself was flawed (because of the self-consciousness on the chefs' parts), but the SE post made it seem that the panel started with gendered assumptions and finished with gendered assumptions. (And I still haven't figured out what, exactly, this means: "Gender certainly affects how chefs cook, but neither the chefs nor the panelists could articulate how and why exactly.")<br /><br />Having read what you've written here, it does seem like this event was set up with much better intentions and involved more thoughtful discussion than the SE post led me (and, I think, many of the other posters there) to believe.annahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09496429265414806006noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1052576720837454793.post-87254446733260990942009-06-10T15:12:44.175-07:002009-06-10T15:12:44.175-07:00Hello, mslaas here, poster from Serious Eats. Agre...Hello, mslaas here, poster from Serious Eats. Agree with you completely that there's no difference between men's cooking and women's cooking. And, I might add, I'm not a member of the Gender Police (I tried to join, once, and failed the entrance exam). <br /><br />I just read your post on SE about sexism in kitchens and gender in cooking. You're def. right that they're both social constructions that affect the real world, but surely they're slightly different social constructions with different real world effects? If a lady cooks a steak, that doesn't de-masculinize the beef, right? Maybe you can talk about how one led to the other - perhaps labor-intensive sauces in the French repertoire were created in part to differentiate “men’s cooking” from humble pot au feu made by the chef’s mother – but they’re still not quite the same thing. <br /><br />If I'm wrong about this, would you explain to me why?Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18053435713716349317noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1052576720837454793.post-11183320406251795992009-06-10T14:25:13.457-07:002009-06-10T14:25:13.457-07:00Wait, now I'm confused. I thought the whole po...Wait, now I'm confused. I thought the whole point of that movie was that Catherine Zeta-Jones needed to learn to love before she could be fulfilled as a chef ..?Norm Wilnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05934541124243285245noreply@blogger.com