John Lethlean: why women rule in the kitchen

It’s been a while since women cooked at home and all the restaurant chefs were men. But it’s time to honour the true influence of female cooks.

Australian cook and restaurateur Stephanie Alexander in her kitchen garden with kids Riley, Clara and Lucy. Picture: Nicole Cleary

Generalisations should be made with the same care that goes into a perfect souffle: thought through in advance, delivered with confidence. This, despite the advice of the late William Blake who said that “to generalise was to be an idiot”, and he died back in 1827.

And yet one William Marbane, then parliamentary secretary to the British Ministry of Food, went out on a particularly greasy limb of generalisation back in 1943 declaring: “Fundamentally men are better cooks than women, but this is no reason why some women should cook as badly as they do. Many people in this country have never really tasted vegetables; all they know is the sodden pap produced by over boiling unprotesting vegetables in a bath of water”.

We note The Lord Marbane, as he became, lost his seat at the next election (1945) but did marry his second wife in 1944. Presumably, she could cook a vegetable.

This was a time in history when Australia was sending beef dripping back to an Old Country on wartime food rations; there were more important things to consider than the texture of a boiled carrot. Which, of course, was a woman’s work, unless the carrot was to be cooked in a professional kitchen, in which case it was done, with few exceptions, by a man.

Women cooked in the home, men in hotels and restaurants; the former were called housewives or homemakers, the latter, “chefs”. And for all sorts of reasons, the French word for “chief” has continued to evoke images of persons with both X and Y chromosomes, be they in a tall silly hat (think Paul Bocuse in a toque) or with short silly tips in their hair (Gordon Ramsay).

If I ask you to name a famous chef, it seems unlikely you’ll come back at me with Dominique Crenn or Claire Smythe. Celebrity chefdom of the modern multimedia kind has been very good for the male of the species.

Indeed, since Georges Auguste Escoffier through to now, the great restaurant chefs have, in the main, been male. The list is long and multinational.

But the truly influential?

I’m going to suggest that whatever you sit down to at dinner tonight will owe a debt of gratitude to a woman, not a man (and I’m not talking about your wife or mother).

Some amazing women have shaped the way many of us in the developed nations of the West eat today. They are the real influencers.

Think Julia Child, who moved to France from the US with her urbane husband in the ’40s, did Cordon Bleu and subsequently co-wrote a book that introduced a generation of Americans to the joy of classic French cooking — sauce bearnaise, salade Nicoise — as seen through American eyes. The television show it spawned made her a household name in her homeland and way beyond.

Elizabeth David, the Englishwoman whose relentless sun-drenched research in post-war southern Europe combined with evocative writing, brought the courgette, the aubergine and pistou into the drab grey kitchens of a generation of English — and Australians.

Lesser-known but hugely influential in the US, Irma Rombauer, whose The Joy of Cooking, in 1931, set out to provide American housewives across the country with a one-stop manual that preserved the canon of American cooking and introduced millions to continental food. Sales at last count: 18 million.

Marcella Hazan, the Emilia-Romagna native who moved to Manhattan for love in the late 1960s, started cooking for the first time in her life out of necessity and subsequently published some of the most important books on Italian food for a non-Italian audience — including Australians — the world has known.

It was a not dissimilar story for the multiskilled, multi-tasking Madhur Jaffrey who, transplanted from India to the US, not only learnt to cook but subsequently published the groundbreaking Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973). Jaffrey has launched a billion chicken kormas on the happy tables of Westerners everywhere, her work remaining the gold standard in cooking Indian food for non-Indians.

The flavours of the Middle East you so often enjoy — the hummus, the couscous — the Cairo-born Briton Claudia Roden can take much of the credit.

Alice Waters, the Californian chef whose Chez Panisse restaurant has spawned a thousand notable alumni who took her “market fresh” approach to cooking around the world, along with a fair dose of food activism, too. A squeeze of lemon, a slug of olive oil and … Thank you Alice.

What about middle England’s Delia Smith, an early adopter of television and the Mrs Beeton of her times? She enabled home cooks to recreate the English food of their childhood with failsafe methods and unique approachability. Or her 21st century counterpart, Nigella Lawson? Her unlikely combination of food smarts, intellect and lust for the camera has made her an essential companion/inspiration to millions everywhere.

And in Australia, both Stephanie Alexander and before her, Margaret Fulton — determined women with a vision for helping Australians understand and cook good food — have shaped more of our lives than any of the above. We eat their food daily.

So you can have your Ferran Adria and your Rene Redzepi, arguably two of the 21st century’s most famous chefs; when I come to your place for spherified vegetable juices or lichen from the forest, I’ll smile politely, nibble it, and go home to coq au vin or a steak with salsa verde.

Thank you, ladies. You rule.