Saturday, March 20, 2010
Restaurants Salon on country ham and men in the kitchen
Posted by Cliff Bostock @cliffbostock on Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 2:00 PM
Salon has been busy food-wise. The online magazine has published an essay by Francis Lam about country ham, which, of course, is becoming the new bacon.
I'm really glad to see the ham enjoying a renaissance, thanks in large part to Allan Benton. It has long surprised me how difficult it is to find good country ham in an Atlanta restaurant. Even Watershed, of all Southern places, doesn't serve true country ham at brunch -- just a reasonable facsimile thereof. It's great, but it doesn't approach the flavor of true country ham.
The deliciously salty, buttery, aromatic ham brings on major nostalgia attacks for me. My Uncle Inch used to cure the hams at his place in Rocky Mount, NC. He gave us one for Christmas every year and it became the centerpiece of our breakfast on Christmas morning. We weren't allowed to open presents until we'd eaten the ham and the red-eye gravy my father made.
I am craving the stuff as I write about it....
I reported about Gastronomica's essay on gender and chefs recently. Coincidentally, Salon has published an essay by Thomas Rogers about the new cooking magazine from Paula Deen's sons, Jamie and Bobby Deen. It's called Deen Bros. Good Cooking.
As if setting out to demonstrate the Gastronomica article's observation of the way good home "cooks" are stereotyped as female while good restaurant "chefs" are male, the title of the article is "Cooking Magazines Man Up." By observing the invasion of the home kitchen by men, Rogers may note the transgression of a historically female space, but he still reiterates the cliches associated with gender:
Writing in Britain's Observer newspaper last fall, Tim Lewis coined a new term for the male home cook called the gastrosexual -- a man who, "freed at last from gender expectations … [realizes] that tenderly preparing a meal does not pose a threat to our masculinity." These days, men are responsible for cooking 20 percent of homemade meals (a far cry from 1961, when British men spent an average five minutes a day on cooking and washing up), which may have as much to do with the increasing prominence of food politics as it does with the fact that many of today's young men grew up with fathers who themselves spent time in the kitchen.And what does this mean? According to Lewis, men's cooking, unlike women's cooking, involves macho showmanship, "elaborate, ambitious, multi-stage feasts," a strict adherence to shopping lists and recipes, and a fascination with formulas (see, for example, the rise of molecular gastronomy). It's not exactly the most convincing of arguments (most of the men I know seem to cook intuitively and practically), but the trend has gained some traction in popular culture.
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