Blokes Shouldn't Cook

( This was written after reading John Phillip's Battle Of the Sexes pieces a couple of weeks ago. I know I'm way too late but, hey, I'm writing from Enzed. They don't call it Island Time for nothing. )

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Before I start, I just want to get one thing off my chest: men should not cook.

There. I said it.

Now before any distaff readers of this post - assuming I still have any - start getting their knickers in a twist, I did not mean to say that men are unable to cook. Nor did I mean to say that women ought to cook. Nor did I mean to say that they look fat in those jeans and we don't love them any more and they should get back into the kitchen. Nor did I intend any of the other misunderstandings that commonly occur when a man says a few words simply and clearly but a woman somehow hears a chauvenistic rant in their place.

I simply said men should not cook. And I say say this simply because male cooking sucks.

Back in the mists of prehistory, cooking consisted of a caveman killing a woolly mammoth, chopping off a leg and throwing it on the fire. Of course the woman of the cave was not satisfied with that for long. Pretty soon she wanted to add some roots and ferns for flavour. Then came the doilies under the stone slabs and cutlery made from mammoth tusks. Then she wanted to know why they couldn't go somewhere nice for dinner, just once in a while, like all the other cave families in the valley did.

Of course, the caveman couldn't see the point of any of this, so while humanity has evolved, male cooking hasn't.

Okay, there are exceptions to the rule. One or two men out there are pretty good at cooking and have made some fame and fortune from it: Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver, for example. But they are, like the three-toed sloth and duck-billed platypus, freaks of nature and in any case those who buy their books and watch their TV programs are mostly women.

Then there are married men. Much like the trained chimpanzee, they have been removed from their natural environment and learned by rote the secrets of the kitchen. They may know the motions of good cooking but will always fail understanding.

No, the man I'm talking about is the unreconstructed, as-seen-in-the wild bachelor, who should never be let loose with anything more complicated than a toast-n-grill.

Today's technologically savvy man grasps only two forms of cooking: microwaving and frying. Microwaving is simple: take food from box. Place in microwave. Punch in time. Open a beer and wait for the ping.

Frying is only marginally more complicated. Take food from tray. Place in frying pan. Open a beer and occasionally poke food with something sharp until it starts to smoke. Turn it over and repeat. If it needs extra seasoning, pour some of the beer over the top. Or whisky, for that flambé effect.

However with any other form of cooking - roasting, boiling, broiling, grilling, simmering or steaming - he'll be completely lost. As you will be when trying to navigate through the smoke-filled kitchen before the fire department arrives.

Women know all about the components of food and how construct them. I'll bet that for those languages which assign a gender to nouns, all food is feminine. Women know the difference between a pulse and a legume, and the meaning of words like julienne and roux and jus. That is why supermarkets devote their first half dozen aisles - the ones immediately after the fresh fruit and vegetables - to things like Sauces of the World and marinated artichokes in aspic.

Men don't know these things and they don't care. Men understand eating, and that the shortest distance between two points can be found frozen in a cardboard box. That is why supermarkets place the TV dinners next to the beer and the aisle that sells DVDs and gardening equipment.

Which brings me to the one thing that has enabled modern men to survive unaided: processed food.

Men are at their best with food that is at least partially pre-prepared. Take that bachelor staple, spaghetti bolognaise. Many is the male who would point to this and say Of course I can cook. Gordon Ramsay eat your **** heart out. But the pasta will have come boiled in a bag, the sauce will be out of a can and even the parmesan will be pre-grated. Give the same guy the raw ingredients that a woman would start with and he'll have to call his mother to find out that that is what a tomato is supposed to look like.

Consider also the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The bread is already baked, the peanuts buttered and the jelly jellied. All the master of construction has to do is slap them together, grab a beer and voila. Dinner.

Hell, for most men opening a packet of chips is about as much preparation as he's willing to endure in his search for sustenance.

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I was trying to find a way to end this diatribe, some sort line to draw under and highlight the gender differences in cooking that I have observed, so I took a walk through my local hardware store.

It says something, I think, that barbecues aren't sold alongside other kitchen equipment. You won't find these modern marvels of maleness displayed next to your latest wall oven or ceramic hob. You have to go to the other end of the store - the outdoor centre, near the ride-on mowers and the petrol-driven leaf blowers. Here, stainless steel behemoths line the shop floor, gleaming in the flourescent light, where an arms race of gas burners is waged. Just like the men that lust after them, size is king. There are coffin-sized hoods concealing rotisseries that could skewer a cow, and wok attachments that could take a Jamaican kettle drum. Barbecue utensils of a size suitable for Fred Flinstone are offered up alongside, next to gas bottles of Greek-god dimensions.

And walking among them sans wives and partners, were men being men: gently caressing the chrome and steel curves, fondling the knobs and switches, peeking under the grills at the gleaming, virginal burners, swinging the outsized tongs and prongs and barbecue forks like so many prehistoric clubs and spears.

Just then, I could see them crouching behind the racks in the electrical department, waiting for a woolly mammoth to come along ripe for slaughter and incineration on the altar of the GasMaster 2000.

Some things will never change.