"+Food +Hot +Man +Cooking"

http://www.twitpic.com/191zn

Frombecca posted a photo of a marvelous-looking paella with the caption: "A man's job to cook paella?" (See URL above). Her tags, even more telling of the thought process, caught my attention:
Tags: +food +hot +man +rice +cooking +prawns +gas +paella +heat +cooking class.

I, for one, think these words stream so beautifully together. Starting with "+food +hot + man +cooking"....pick your word order. While I do Tweet with Becca, I can't speak to what intrigued her about paella and the tradition of men preparing the dish. Nonetheless, I am quite certain these ideas run together for many a female foodie and non-foodie alike. I know because I have been involved in numerous conversations in recent weeks exploring the simple concept of men and cooking. What intrigues us about an act so simple, so traditional, so unsurprising as men being personally and physically involved in food preparation?

I come bearing no answers, but do have an idea. We could pretend that the intrigue generates from the age-old conflict that gender roles have demarcated segments of our lives. Can we not move past the stereotypic "female in the kitchen" even at this point? You need not look past the kitchen door of pick-any-restaurant-in-your-city to find a number of males who are utterly food-savvy, yet when we peer through a home kitchen doorway we somehow still expect to see a woman standing there. While this does present a conflict, it is not what has my attention, or < I think, the attention of many women in my sphere.

Here is what I believe to be the real intrigue over men in the kitchen: I'd like to say it aloud (as loudly as one can on a blog page):
Women love to see men cooking.
Give me a man preparing paella and I'll show you a dozen voyeurs who'd gladly lean in to observe, giggling, oohing and ahhing, and not over the paella. Where the art and science of preparing food become alchemy in a man's hands, where he can be seen caressing ingredients, nurturing them, magically creating something delicious for a woman to taste, you've got a scenario more titillating than a paperback bodice-ripper.

Give me a man who loves to discuss how he culled radicchio from his garden and carefully incorporated it into a dish, or who had to rush to the herb sale for purple basil for a Thai dinner with his girlfriend that night, and I'll show you a swooning handful of ladies just drooling to meet said man. Regardless of looks or education or property or success in other areas, a man who can cook- better yet, a man who talks openly about cooking with a glint in his eye- comes very close to having any woman he wants. Let this be a lesson to my male readers: A man who cooks may cover a multitude of sins with his kitchen skills- provided that he exercises them often.

Forget whether it is a woman's job or a man's job to do the cooking. Do we really care any more? It's a relationship thing. Explore the pleasures of food through preparing it, talking about it, sharing it- and you'll find it can lead to a multitude of other pleasures. You can make your own list. Today, mine will simply be "+food +hot + man +cooking." Share