Feminism's fault that people can't cook?

[sethstarkaddersmum]

From a feature in today's Telegraph on Rose Prince's new book Kitchenella:

'Prince is championing a return to the feminine-inspired, nurturing kind of practical cooking that disappeared around 1962, a casualty of feminism.'

People often fling this claim casually around but it doesn't ring true to me - my working mum was always a better cook than her SAHM mother and anyway DH and I both cook and feminism doesn't seem to stop us.

The change in schools to food technology rather than cooking (design a pizza box rather than actually make a pizza) seems to me to be more of a factor.

WDYT?

Inmyprime - you're right, it's the journalist who says the most directly antifeminist stuff!

Prince still blames women for not passing stuff on though.

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

oh yes, the tablets, that's right.
Which we would eat while wearing shiny tinfoil clothes (unisex of course) and flying around in our personal hovercrafts.

it sounds a bit loony when you look back on it, doesn;t 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??

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.

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.

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....

at angry bald chimp

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

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

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.

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!

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

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!