Feminism's fault that people can't cook?

ooo apricot butter sounds fab! Spiced (cinnamon and nutmeg) apple and pear butters were a staple of my house growing up. We had fruit trees and butters are really the only thing to do with fruit that's bruised or a bit mushy. Now that I think about it, we always did fruit leather with the questionable apricots, but apricot butter spiced with cardamom sounds divine!

Oh and I totally agree, food post war was terrible! Britain was notorious for bad cooking until fairly recently.

Kitchinella makes me think of Cinderella. Not a good comparison really, although perhaps apt given this thread

My mother is a great cook, and so are all her children, my brother included. Only my eldest sister was taught at school, and my brother wasn't taught at all as he went to boarding school. The things my sister was taught weren't very useful, we all learned much more from watching my mother experiment. My dh when I first met him had no idea how to cook real food, having been left to fend for himself with a deep freeze of ready meals, however he taught himself and now makes excellent meals (I'm not allowed in the kitchen when he cooks though).

Reading that Telegraph article I'm smarting with just the sub header WTF is a "real women"? And aren't cookery books just for people who want to cook - perhaps it will have one of those dreadful "chicklit" pink covers.

There are lots of straight forward simple cook books, written by ordinary people. I think she is entering a very crowded marketplace. Most cooking isn't very complicated, or doesn't have to be. She's probably right about a lot of the celebrity chefs though, I think that there is a lot of wankiness going on there, and probably the female ones are expected to adopt certain roles for TV success.

Dunno what's wrong with apricot butter though - I've made a few butters myself, they are just sweet purees that you cook for a while (easy jam really). From the sound of it her cooking is pretty much like everyone else's at the moment (all that pancetta and polenta etc).

'Call to nuture' my mother taught us how to cook so that she didn't have to!

Didoreth, I heard it and nearly threw my shoe at the radio (was feeding DS at the time, ironically, so couldn't get up and turn it off). People aren't cooking properly, ergo it's the fault of all those uppity women. Surely if the ready meals are rubbish and contributing to childhood obesity, the culprits are the manufacturers, but no, let's blame the women. Oh, and you'd think that all these children only had one parent to hear her talk. In her world the fathers are presumably reading the paper in the sitting room, breaking off occasionally to say "Is dinner ready yet, dear?".

I am a feminist and an enthusiastic cook, incidentally - but I do it because I enjoy it. If I didn't enjoy it, DH and I would grit our teeth and share it as we do with other household chores, or buy ready meals. So shoot me.

(ps my DH used to chef at the Savoy!)

Must be feminisms fault that men relied on women to do all of the cooking?!!!

at angry bald chimp

didoreth - I did. I was shouting at the radio on my way into work. Talk about completely missing the point! Where are the men in this debate? I thought it was incredibly ironic that John Humphrys was sticking up for women while Stepford clone Rose Pince was saying it was basically women's duty to feed the family. Sigh....

Did anyone just hear the item on the Today programme on this? Unbelievable. Not a hint that male parents should be cooking and caring for their offspring.

I'm just gobsmacked that in this day and age there is the assumption that there's some connection between being female and cooking. What's with that? Is there someting on the y chromosome that makes a man incapable of weilding a saucepan?

Historically men have always cooked. It's just when they do it, they tend to make a big song and dance about it and get paid huge amouts of money for it.

lol! I'm loving the idea of cooking as a feminine art. Is that why chefs are mostly men? Perhaps the author meant to say BAKING is a feminine art, since pies and cakes are girly, right?

In my house, dad was the imaginitive cook. Mom can whip out a few standard dishes on cue, but it was DAD who would go to a restaurant, try a pie, and decide he needed to duplicate it at home.

To this day mom will rave if I do something like add some dill to a soup and ask me how on earth I knew it would be ok... well, see, I put the dill next to the soup and I smelled them and it seemed like a good idea...

Oh, crap, my parents were kids in the sixties. Clearly already ruined by feminists. Dear god, does this mean she wants me to eat my grandmother's specialty - a cherry gelatin filled with shredded beetroot and topped with sour cream and spring onions??

people can't cook because years ago in the 70s they told us we'd all survive on tablets so we didn't bother learning how to cook

My mum's a non-feminist and doesn;t much like cooking (she likes Cook-In saauces and packet mixes et) I am a raving feminist and like cooking though I am hopeless with recipes and more inclined to sort of guess at things and invent them - I remember taking a one-term adult education cookery course when I was 18 because we didn;t have it at school and I wanted to know about it before I left home.

Actually I do agree that parents ought to try to teach their children to cook the very basics (pasta/baked potato/boiled eggs). It's a useful life skill. Yes it is possible to teach yourself to cook but it's a hell of a lot easier if you have some pointers from your parents first.

The idea however that this is the mother's job as opposed to the father's is clearly ridiculous. As is the idea that feminism has anything to do with the decline in cooking.

This 'casualty of feminism' nonsense annoyed me but if you read the article, Rose Prince didn't say that. The journalist tossed it in as a casual aside with no justification. I actually like the sound of Rose Prince (never heard of her before and was geared up to hate on her due to the 'casualty of feminism' remark). She sounds pragmatic and no-nonsense actually, and fed up of the fake stuntmanship and posturing that passes for cookery shows these days.

She actually sounds quite feminist herself in the way she critiques how Nigella and Sophie Dahl are put on TV as sexpots rather than the serious chefs that Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver are seen to be.

Both DH and I cook equally well though so I do challenge her statement at the end that the small minority of young men who do like to cook today couldn't hack doing it every day. Not true in my case but maybe my husband is a rarity. I actually get annoyed with him because he can even bake as well as I can and I find myself getting a bit territorial about that... despite being a feminist. My mother baked all our bread at home and made scones, apple tarts etc and made her own jam etc so I feel like baking is something only I should be good at. Reverse sexism on my behalf!

I do always ask myum how to make crumble. Even though I know it's flour and sugar and butter, and ebb tough I probably made crumble more recently than sge last did. :)

Quite.

Does this woman live in the middle of nowhere? What is she so worried about? Or does she know tht that "OMG, this is a skill we're losing" angle will appeal to the "It's all going to hell in a handcart" audience?