Video: Does Food Have a Gender?
Food is an indispensable part of culture and a symbol of profound socialand political realities. Using Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own as a jumping point, Barbara Haber and Lydia Shire will discuss the connections among culinary history, women’s history, and social history, highlighting how food and cooking have been—and continue to be used—to mark gender roles.
See more about the related exhibition, Resetting the Table: Food and Our Changing Tastes.
Presented on 11/12/20 by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology in collaboration with Let’s Talk About Food.
About the Speakers
- Barbara Haber, Food Historian
- Lydia Shire, Chef, Restaurateur, and Entrepreneur
- Moderated by Louisa Kasdon, CEO and Founder of Let’s Talk About Food
Barbara Haber is the former curator of books at the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where she developed a large collection of cookbooks and books on the history of food. She both writes and speaks publicly on the history of food.
Lydia Shire has launched six acclaimed restaurants including BIBA, Pignoli, Excelsior, Blue Sky, and Scampo. She has won three James Beard awards, most recently “One of America’s Top Five Chefs” and has been named “One of America’s Top Ten Chefs” by Food & Wine Magazine. Shire’s kitchens have been a training ground for some of Boston’s finest culinary talent, such as Jody Adams, Dante de Magistris, Gordon Hamersley, Amanda Lydon and Susan Regis. A powerful creative force, Lydia Shire’s passion for excellence and culinary talent is evident in all that she does.
Louisa Kasdon is a journalist with over 500 published articles and several books on food, business, and health for national, regional, and international publications. She is CEO and Founder of Let’s Talk About Food. In this capacity, Louisa has created over fifty food- and health-based public events in Boston that bring the public and experts together to deepen their understanding of the role of food in our world. Kasdon was the food editor of the Boston Phoenix for fifteen years, and a senior editor at Natural Health and Boston Magazine.
Transcript
Does Food Have a Gender?
[00:00:08.48] Good evening. My name is Jane Pickering, and I'm the director of the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology. And I'm delighted to welcome you to this evening's program sponsored by the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. Tonight, we will learn how food and cooking have been and continue to be used to mark gender roles, and we're honored to be partnering with the Boston-based nonprofit Let's Talk About Food to bring this program to you.
[00:00:38.00] Established in 2010, this organization engages people of all ages in conversations about food. In November of 2019-- which feels such a long time ago-- [LAUGHS] the Peabody Museum opened a new exhibition called "Resetting The Table," which explores food choices and eating habits in the United States, including the sometimes hidden but always important ways in which our tables are shaped by cultural, historical, political, and technological influences. And we worked with Louisa Kasdon, founder of Let's Talk About Food, to plan events to highlight this exhibition.
[00:01:17.96] And we originally hoped to presents tonight's event on campus back in March where you could have seen the exhibit. But as we are not yet open, we decided to move forward and host the event online instead. And so it's now my pleasure to introduce Louisa, who will, in turn, introduce tonight's speakers and program.
[00:01:39.77] Louisa is a journalist with over 500 published articles and several books on food, business, and health for national, regional, and international publications. She was the food editor of the Boston Phoenix for 15 years and a senior editor at Natural Health and Boston Magazine. As CEO and founder of Let's Talk About Food, Louisa has collaborated with the Museum of Science, the New England Aquarium, Project Bread, Northeastern University, the Boston Public Library, the Harvard-MIT Broad Center, and the Cambridge Science Festival, among many others, to create over 50 food and health-based public events in Boston that bring the public and experts together to deepen their understanding of the role of food in our world. So please join me in welcoming Louisa Kasdon
[00:02:34.37] Hi, and thank you, Jane. That was really quite an introduction, and I feel taller already-- or thinner, or healthier, or happier. But I'm very excited about tonight. I've been excited about tonight since about last where we first started planning it. And it is a great pleasure to introduce and to have a conversation with both Barbara Haber, who has been a mentor and cultural icon for me for about the last 25 years, and Lydia Shire who has been a culinary icon for me for almost as long.
[00:03:09.56] The topic we're going to explore tonight is, loosely, food and gender. And we're not going to talk about whether or not bananas are sterile, and we're not going to talk about whether or not women don't like food and men do, and all the other things that happen. We're going to talk about the whole process of how your gender-- and women's gender in particular-- has influenced the world of food, both professionally and personally.
[00:03:41.18] And we're going to take our first spin back into a cultural realm a little bit of a historical room with Barbara Haber. Barbara is a historian and a librarian who created the concept of food as a central temple of culture. She understood early on, before anybody else did, that cookbooks, and people in the food world, and foodways, were central to the understanding of American culture and, beyond that, culture around the world.
[00:04:13.73] And it is my great pleasure to first of all-- I'm not going to give her her full bio, because that is on our website, and we'd love for you to turn to that-- but I'm going to introduce Barbara-- or, I'm asking them both to start the video. We have Barbara, so Barbara's going to speak, and then we'll introduce Lydia and bring her up as well.
[00:04:33.90] So Barbara, I asked you a very broad question. And this-- wave at the crowd here, because we actually have a lot of people who have joined us on Zoom. Lydia, I'm going to turn your video off for a minute, so you can chill, and drink your wine, and do every other thing. And we are good.
[00:04:56.67] Barbara, when I first asked you about this, you said, oh my god, how will I ever fit what I want to say to a short talk? Do you have hours? And I said, no. So Barbara, I'm going to turn it over to you. And we don't have hours, but I know we have some very, very interesting minutes ahead. So there it is.
[00:05:16.41] Over to me, right. Thank you. Thank you so much. And I really have tried to limit this to exactly 10 minutes.
[00:05:25.77] Let me start with a Virginia Woolf quote. She was an early inspiration for my exploring how food and culture intertwines, or how food, really, intertwines with gender, coming from her book, A Room of One's Own. And in it, she examines what she sees as the reasons for the limited achievements of women novelists throughout the centuries. She argues that women have systematically been prevented from getting the necessary opportunities to produce great art-- education, economic independence, private spaces. All those were necessary-- in other words, having a room of one's own.
[00:06:05.74] And one of her examples-- the one, I of, course most remember in the book-- is how she describes a typical dinner at a university dining hall. She says, "Everybody was assembled in the big dining room. Dinner was ready. Here was the soup. It was a plain gravy soup. There was nothing to stir the fancy in that. One could have seen through the transparent liquid any pattern that there might have been on the plate itself. But there was no pattern. The plate was plain."
[00:06:35.07] "Next came beef, with its attendant greens and potatoes-- a homely trinity suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market, and sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge, and bargaining and cheapening. Prunes and custard followed. And if anyone complains that prunes, even when mitigated by custard, are an uncharitable vegetable-- for fruit they are not, stringy as a miser's heart, and exuding a fluid such as might run in a miser's veins, who have denied themselves wine and warmth for 80 years and yet not given to the poor. Biscuits and cheese came next, and here, the water jug was liberally passed around. For it is the nature of biscuits to be dry, and these were biscuits to the core. That was all; that meal was over."
[00:07:26.19] And then, Woolf makes the point that, "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well if one has not dined well." And I find this inspiring. As for our topic tonight, does food have a gender? I always point out that in English, gender distinctions for nouns have disappeared. Articles are neutral.
[00:07:45.06] So we say "the apple," whereas in French, for instance, foods still have a gender. Nouns are preceded by either la or le. And so foods such as apples, peaches, and bananas are designated female. Other essential foods, as bread, rice, milk, and cheese, are male. That goes for cookies and cake too. I am not sure why, but it's for the linguists to figure out.
[00:08:08.28] What I am going to talk about is how food is used to make gender distinctions, because the consumption of food is universal. It serves as an ideal tool for interpreting human history, and human behavior, and more. This is why anthropologists have always used food to help them understand a culture, and why various other academic disciplines have been catching up to gain and express insights within their fields.
[00:08:34.80] My own background is in American women's history, and I'm going to talk about the ways that cookbooks reveal gender distinctions. I think of cookbooks as documents of social history, uncovering social norms at any given time and place. In the 19th century, for instance, cookbooks make clear that a woman's place is in the home, while the public sphere is reserved for men alone.
[00:08:58.44] One of my favorite examples comes from a preface to a book called That Full Dinner Pail: What To Put In It. It was written in 1991, and the author tells us that, quote, "In hundreds of homes, there is at least one member of the family who daily takes his lunch and cheerfully sallies forth to labor for those he loves. Sometimes, the pail or basket is filled by a wife, mother, daughter, or sister. But you wives who do not like to pack a lunch, do you realize that many a man who starts to work well and strong may, in the days of numerous accidents and crimes, be returned to your door lifeless, or maimed, and hopelessly crippled? Then see to it that you do not have to reproach yourself someday with the memory of carelessly slighting your loved one."
[00:09:48.27] Almost threatening. These epigraphs appear in cookbook after cookbook throughout the 19th century, making very clear what women ought to be doing to save their households. The message enforces that. A woman's role in the home comes up again and again, and these thick books of household management, they also make the point that men are the brave ones as they face the dangers of life outside of the home in their duties to support and protect their families-- the separate sphere theory, as we have come to know it.
[00:10:21.19] As I identified scores, of such books I began to wonder if all women living in these times had happily followed this dogma. Was there a dissenting voice to be found, a Virginia Woolf-like voice? And I found one. I came across a remarkable book showing that not all 19th century American women writing on food were enthusiastic about being confined to the women's sphere.
[00:10:46.24] Published in 1878, Hettie Morrison wrote a book called My Summer in the Kitchen, a book that rails against the social forces that stuck her and other women in the kitchen as though it were their natural habitat. In particular, she deplored the quandary facing girls who were given no training in the domestic arts, yet were expected to be highly-skilled homemakers the minute they married. And she presents this diatribe.
[00:11:10.93] "The cunning of the serpent was nothing to that of man when he founded the institution of the kitchen and then placed woman there to tend to him. Woman, left to her natural instinct, would satisfy her appetite with a few chocolate caramels and an occasional cup of tea. But when her lord and master appears upon the scene, then and there is hurrying to and fro, and fires, and things that blaze, and terror, and death, and destruction go forth among the feathered, and furred, and finny tribes."
[00:11:39.97] Morrison gives a colorful example of how she is misled by a cookbook writer who doesn't explain the amount of rice to use when preparing dinner, so she cooks up quarts of it, having no awareness of what she termed, quote, "The diabolically expansive qualities of rice." She launches a diatribe against the writers of cookbooks who set up false expectations, declaring that 2/3 of them should be hanged without benefit of clergy, and then wonders, "Why should they be more mercifully dealt with than a murderer who will kill you himself with a blow or so? But a cookbook maker will exasperate you to the sin of self-destruction and then complacently take on airs as the benefactor of the race."
[00:12:20.00] I Hettie Morrison, and though her 19th century voice never seems to have been heard, I think of her as being among the first in a line of women writers who focused on domesticity, often cooking, and were often funny. I think especially of Peg Bracken and Erma Bombeck, who are essentially humorists. In 1960, Bracken published a book called The I Hate to Cook Book. It was a bestseller that established her as a great humorist.
[00:12:51.73] She says in her introduction, "Some women, it is said, like to cook. This book is not for them. This book is for those of us who hate to, who have learned through hard experience that some activities become no less painful through repetition-- childbearing, paying taxes, cooking. This book is for those of us who want to fold our big dishwater hands around a dry martini instead of a wet flounder come the end of a long day."
[00:13:22.07] And she lights out after cookbook writers, as Morrison did. "There are the big fat cookbooks that tell you everything about everything. For one thing, they contain too many recipes. Just look at all the things you can do with a chop and aren't about to. What you want is just one little old dependable thing you can do with a chop besides broil it-- that's all. Also, they're always telling you what any chucklehead would know-- place dough in a pan to rise and cover with a clean cloth, they say. What do they think you'd cover it with?"
[00:13:51.91] Husband jokes are part of the fun of reading Peg Bracken, who sneaks them in as one-liners. In discussing good cooks who like to cook, those brave, energetic, imaginative people who are not frightened by rotisseries, say to them, invite us over often, please, and stay away from our husbands. And in a chapter on leftovers, she tells us that some women can keep a leftover going like an eight-day clock. Their Sunday's roast becomes Monday's hash, which becomes Tuesday's stuffed peppers, which eventually turn up as tamale pie and so on, until it disappears-- or daddy does.
[00:14:31.24] Bracken never questioned the social arrangement that put women in kitchens, while men were free to design their own fates. Her mission was not to create social change, but rather to find congenial ways to work within and around the existing system. Like other women of her generation who, as young adults, had lived through the Depression and the Second World War, she must have experienced the peace of the 1950s as a welcome respite from a world too long in turmoil. In her hands, the imperfections of domesticity are exposed to humor.
[00:15:08.04] I could say so much more about Erma Bombeck. She wrote articles throughout, really, the 1960s and '70s, similarly to Bracken. But I'll just give you one quote. She was married and raising children in the 1950s and began writing for a local paper when her youngest child started school. About this decision, she later said, "I was 37 when I went to work writing this column. I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security, and too tired for an affair."
[00:15:48.45] What was interesting to me is that Morrison, writing in the 1870s, took a stand, but Bombeck and Bracken accepted the role that they were played, the cards that were played. And it wasn't until Betty Friedan came along with The Feminine Mystique in 1963 when the whistle was finally blown.
[00:16:13.56] Now, I want to turn to the topic of men to see how the assignment of sex roles regarding food and gender affected them. What stands out in many of these mid-20th-century books-- many of them with excellent recipes, by the way-- is that the authors had to justify their interest in home cooking by disparaging women, by proving that their interest in food was loftier, a higher art, while women were mere drudges. They didn't want to look like sissies if they wanted to cook at home.
[00:16:43.63] So that meant who suffered restrictions imposed by the assignment of sex roles, it was OK to write about food if your perspective was that of an executive chef, or if you were writing about outdoor cooking, dealing with open flames and such. But home cooking was understood to be womanish. Nevertheless, men interested in writing recipes for home cooks did manage to do so without losing their self-respect. But in order to pull it off, they had to set themselves apart from women.
[00:17:11.04] In his book, The Best Men are Cooks, Frank Shea in 1941 gives us a perfect glimpse into the posturing men assumed in order to disguise and justify a passion for cooking. He tells us men should be good cooks, for they have a greater feeling for food that women have. They taste as they go along. They are adventurous and are willing to take chances, et cetera, et cetera. Women have reduced cooking to a science, while men cooks are working to restore it to its former high estate as one of the fine arts.
[00:17:45.45] In something of a tongue-in-cheek manner, he paints a picture of men as creative and innovative, where women are tied to constricting and boring rules. In short, he is an artist, while women are scientists-- presumably domestic scientists. Shea proudly claims that his book will not discuss vitamins or calories and that it will have no information about food for invalids, dyspeptics, children, or reducing diets-- that instead, he is writing about real food for the refined palate.
[00:18:16.17] Frederic Birmingham, another of such guys writing in The Complete Cookbook for Men in 1961, refers to himself as saying, "He is not a housewife in trousers. He is not larking away at what is essentially a woman's task. He is actually asserting his claim to an art, which is his masculine birthright."
[00:18:39.12] He puts himself, for instance, in the place of a steak or a double lamb chop, and he just knows instinctively when it's time for it to turn over-- something I refer to as the "method acting school of cooking." Today, such views seem rightfully dated and quaint-- and funny, really. And I want to stress that the recipes in these male cookbooks are terrific. These guys really knew food and where to find it.
[00:19:08.29] But I was surprised to come across a book in what, I think, was 1999, well after such prejudices were fashionable. David Bowers, the author of Bake It Like a Man: A Real Man's Cookbook, writes a latter-day book of macho cooking, and tells us, quote, "The kitchen is the last frontier for modern man, and women cook merely to put supper on the table. Men cook for nobler purposes, shrouded in mystery and smoke-- high priests of self-sufficiency." The book smacks of the same gimmickry earlier male cookbook writers use to assuage their self-consciousness of wanting to be in the kitchen, thought to be the exclusive domain of women. Bake It Like a Man uses that same teasing tone, referring as it does now and then to the wonders of testosterone in relation to charcoal cooking, and, at the same time, disparaging such a proclaimed "girl foods" as cupcakes, jams, jellies, and popovers.
[00:20:04.56] Bowers's Guy Food is heavy-handed and predictable, and therefore also old-fashioned. His chapter on vegetables deal only with potatoes, the baking chapter only on bread, nothing sweet, and most of the remaining recipes are given over to meat and fried foods. There's a chapter on hot, spicy foods, and one on beer and cheese-making-- we get it. There are he-man recipes fit for the appetites of a chain gang or members of the French Foreign Legion. Those looking for salads or steamed vegetables had better look elsewhere.
[00:20:36.54] To the modern ear, the book feels odd, a dislocated artifact suspended in a time warp, muttering stereotypes about men and women no one has dared to say in years. It reminds us how closely a cookbook can reflect the culture. When earlier male cookbook writer spouted these sentiments, they spoke with some authenticity at a time when men and women were locked into defined roles that were more or less accepted. Mr. Bowers's book is just posturing with nothing behind it. He wanted to publish recipes for hearty food at a time when such foods were out of favor, when people were thinking that meats, cheese, and fatty foods will lead directly to heart attacks. So he gave his book a macho spin to justify his kind of cooking, constructing a narrative about the preferences of real men, and taking the occasional swipe at women in order to do so.
[00:21:24.75] Our culture has evolved enough so that his sexist stance seems silly and detracts from the book. This is a shame, because Bowers's recipes for such dishes as crusty bread, pizza, gumbos, and stew are good, more honest than his narrative. He would have been better off just writing about his favorite foods without getting tangled up in questions of male and female identity. After all, it's the food that counts.
[00:21:50.46] Stereotyping may be over when it comes to cookbooks, but the US is still evolving in other areas. We are finally getting a woman in a top political position. When such an achievement stops being seen as remarkable, we will know we have evolved even further. Thank you.
[00:22:19.93] Wow, Barbara, I'm going to bring you back on for a second. That was-- I don't know whether I laughed more or I pounded the table more, but I love the idea of wrapping my-- how did you write it?-- wrapping my dishwater hands around a martini glass. That really worked for me. And I have to say, as true confessions, Erma Bombeck was my personal idol. I, from the time I was a small child, I used to read her in the newspaper, and she is what I would aspire to be if I could ever be a really fun columnist.
[00:22:59.49] That was such a great talk. Really interesting. The conversation about domestic food, what happens in the home, is kind of remarkable, because women have been cooking for centuries and centuries, and the profession of being a cook, being a chef, suddenly became quite male. And I'm going to turn for that conversation, we're going to bring Lydia Shire up, and then we'll continue the conversation from there. Lydia, are you ready for your close-up? I think she is. Hi, Lydia.
[00:23:38.89] Hello, how are you?
[00:23:40.54] I'm just good. I'm just good. Well, what do you think about all of that, domestic and professional cooking goddess? What is your take on-- I mean, you have straddled both of the worlds. You have been-- obviously, there's a wonderful story that you have on my podcast, which I will share with everybody on the podcast, about how cooking started as kind of a personal hobby for you when you were very young, and how it became a career. But tell me, let's have you talk about what it's like to be a professional chef in these incredible decades when women, and men, and chefs came to an incredible pinnacle.
[00:24:22.90] Well, I grew up in a home-- both my parents were artists. They were fashion illustrators, commercial artists. They did the illustration in books. My father, who was Irish-- and you know what they say about the Irish; they're not good cooks. Of course, there's always exceptions to every rule. But my father was an amazing cook.
[00:24:51.82] He was a very quiet man, not flamboyant. He would even wear a starched shirt on Saturdays, his days off. But he just had an elegance to him. But he loved to cook, and when he would let me chop garlic, when I was four years old, we didn't have a chef's knife. We only had a big cleaver in the house. And I would peel the garlic, and I would take this giant cleaver-- and I was four-- and I would chop the garlic.
[00:25:26.59] And just the smell of the garlic, and that just-- that's, I believe, what really drew me into this business. And then my father would go on, and we would have flank steak. And he would take a pancake griddle, the old cast-iron pancake griddle with no sides to it; it was just flat. He would put it on the stove.
[00:25:55.55] And he knew right away that-- he just intrinsically knew that he had to get it really hot to cook a flank steak, because a flank steak, you know, is so thin. And he also knew you had to dry off the meat, because once you dry off the meat and you season it very heavily with salt and pepper, the seasoning will actually stick to the meat. And then, when you put it in the super hot pancake griddle, he knew-- again, intrinsically, he knew that he shouldn't move it. So he would let it sit there so it would create a crust. And he also, by the way, would put newspapers around the stove, because, of course, some grease would splatter, and my mother was around, so he had to be aware of that.
[00:26:57.71] And I just watched him. I watched everything he did. And I got it. I just-- I understood what he was doing. I understood all those little steps. And I honestly believe for me, it was love at first sight. I wanted to be like my father. I wanted to be great artists like my parents, but I also wanted to be a great cook like my father.
[00:27:27.02] And it was really special, then, when I was married at a very young age. I had my first baby at 17. And my marriage did not last. And I knew at that point, well, the only thing I really want to do to support myself is to be a cook.
[00:27:51.40] And I applied to Maison Robert, and I baked a nine-layer cake and brought it to my interview. And they were so impressed-- it was back in 1971. And I had to order an air-conditioned cab, because it was in the middle of the summer, and I had made French buttercream. And I knew that these nine layers would just fall over and slide onto the cab in some great fashion.
[00:28:21.43] So I did find an air-conditioned cab, and they gave me the job right away. They were very excited. And for me, the rest was history. I will honestly say, though, I listened very closely to what Barbara said, and that was so entertaining. And she was so spot on.
[00:28:47.82] As far as, can you feel the gender of the person when you taste their food or eat their food? Truthfully, in my opinion, I don't think so. I feel that if you are a smart cook, and you're coaxing flavor out of something, and you're not afraid to season something, you're not afraid to be bold and brassy and maybe keep adding something until you taste something, and you say, ah, that's it, stop, no more, I feel to me, that's what a professional is. And I think a man professional and a woman professional, to me, they're the same.
[00:29:37.38] Now, I will say-- and again, there are always exceptions to the rule-- but I feel that there are some women chefs that can go one step more, because they sometimes are more artistic. And then, once they take the plate, and once they take the table, even set the table, and the plate, and the food on the plate, and how they want to serve the wine, in what glasses, and what flowers, and everything that's on the table, I think that's where sometimes, you get that extra shine from a woman.
[00:30:25.95] What do you--
[00:30:26.18]
[00:30:28.67] Lydia, do you think that women diners want to eat any differently than male diners? Can we look at their palate, maybe?
[00:30:36.61] I think, well, unfortunately, nowadays, we're dealing with-- I think, personally, me, I think, a little too excessive, you know, watching this and watching that. And then, of course, you have the whole culture of gluten-free. I mean, people are not celiacs. They're not allergic to gluten. They just don't want it because they think it will be healthier for them.
[00:31:10.05] And that's sometimes frustrating for us in the kitchen, because I think they lose out and miss out on a lot. I mean, pasta. I mean, my restaurant, Scampo, is an Italian restaurant. We have a woman who's been making our ravioli that are so thin, they're paper-thin, the pasta. And she has this amazing recipe that we've given her, and she makes this three days out of the week. And these ravioli, she just made some lobster ravioli today, and they were paper-thin. And they just slip down. And for six little pieces of flour in the skin of the ravioli, it's so sad that somebody who is gluten-free would give that up, or avoid it. Oh, I can't hear you.
[00:32:15.31] Sorry, I can't speak to the non-celiac gluten-free people. I think there are people who make choices. That's not a choice I would make. But I'm curious, just thinking back a little bit to your experience in the kitchen and to the experiences in the kitchen, if we take Barbara's point that there was a general cultural expectation that women dominated domestic food, which was then calibrated as being less exciting and less fabulous than professional food-- and men, then, aspired to professional food-- do you find, what was the culture changing in the kitchen as you came into it? Now we have, in Boston in particular, and I'm sure in other places around the world, many, many incredibly well-trained and very successful female chefs. But what was it like at the beginning when women started to rise?
[00:33:23.40] Well, obviously, there were many more men in professional kitchens. There were very few women. That's changed dramatically. That's a big change.
[00:33:37.41] I feel that you cannot take away the greatness of the great male chefs and of the professional chefs around the world. I mean, look, where do you find Jean Georges in New York? Where do you find Wolfgang Puck? Where do you find Joachim Splichal in California? His food is amazing. Marco Pierre White in London, he was a crazy guy-- wonderful. I just-- men have been great, and now, because the food world has really opened up to women, my god, women are amazing. My co-chef, Susan Regis, who is now actually cooking for John Henry and Linda Pizzuti she has a great job. She goes at the heart of the matter.
[00:34:40.84] That's a good thing.
[00:34:41.73] And she's having a ball. I think Susan is one of the most creative female chefs I have ever seen or worked with. Her mind is amazing. And the two of us, we had a great 19 years together. And so the point is, who would ever say a woman can't do something as well as a man can? Of course, they can.
[00:35:15.30] But I don't think it's either or or. I just think I look at it as, we're just a country of great cooks. And I don't know, but thank God I'm a woman. I kind of like being a woman.
[00:35:31.88] Unlike the Jewish prayer, which is, thank you, God, for not making me a woman, I'm glad to hear that. I'm going to bring Barbara back into the conversation, because I'm sure she's peppering with thoughts about all of this. And she doesn't have her hand grasped around a martini. We'll forgive her for that. But I have to say, I love the vision of women with a few chocolate caramels going up. It's really just quite incredible.
[00:36:04.31] What is your sense, looking at it from afar, about how cooking moved from domestically being female, to professionally being male, to where we are now, that it feels to me not entirely, but closer to coequal? How did all that happen?
[00:36:23.76] Well, how does anything change? It's gradual. I mean, we've seen a lot of change in the last several years-- gay marriage is another example-- that seemed so impossible to imagine a generation ago. And with the appropriate social movements, things change.
[00:36:47.24] I think feminism, of course, across the board, has made changes. The #MeToo movement, you've seen what's happened to a lot of abusers. We're seeing it, I hope, with the Black Lives Matter movement. It takes activism, and it takes the gradual appreciation by the public at large to create change. And I think that's what's happened with the separate sphere hokum that I described in my piece.
[00:37:24.00] And let me ask you, back to thinking about all of the books that you've looked at-- because I've seen your library-- when is it-- I mean, women have written a lot of cookbooks. Have women written more cookbooks than men? Has there been-- I mean, there are a lot of shelf cookbooks, but there are a lot of cookbooks for use in the home. And I wonder how that plays out from a gender balance.
[00:37:47.97] Yeah, I think I covered that, sort of. I think that home cooking was seen as women's work, the domestic science books. I alluded to them earlier, the books that dealt with dyspepsia, and invalid cooking, and how to polish your stove. You know, they were enormous books that are prescriptive, but you get a sense of what women were expected to do. And it was usually other women who wrote them. It gave them a livelihood, having-- a lot of the women who were establishing and continuing the roles were making money off of that very same kind of stuff. Themselves, they were professional women.
[00:38:26.61] So I would say that the domestic cookbooks were, by and large, written by women, with the exception of the ones that I talked about-- these gifted male cooks who had to disguise that fact. The professional food books are mostly male. We have a lot of-- I still say "we" about the Schlesinger Library-- a lot of French material, and most of those authors are male.
[00:38:53.66] I didn't even get into community cookbooks, which would be a whole other half hour, and I don't want to start that. But these, of course, are charity cookbooks written by groups and sold to the same groups, and they're written for a cause. And a lot of those will be fireman's cookbooks and books for schools and libraries to make money for all kinds of community organizations. Those will sometimes be offered by them.
[00:39:22.60] Excuse me, Barbara?
[00:39:23.93] Mm-hmm?
[00:39:24.49] Barbara? I have a great collection. I particularly love books, the little community cookbooks from churches from Maine.
[00:39:35.23] I'd like that a bit.
[00:39:35.93] Oh, I love them! And some of the recipes that I've taken out of that-- for instance, lobster deep-fried in homemade lard. Sound great?
[00:39:48.08] [LAUGHTER]
[00:39:48.47] Oh, yum! Bowling me over.
[00:39:53.27] No, but they're-- I love those books. You find, really, some diamond-in-the-rough recipes. They're wonderful.
[00:40:03.02] I agree. I have a comment from Mary White. And first of all, she says that her class is online listening to this. So everybody, be on your toes. We have academics paying attention to us.
[00:40:18.99] And she recounts that when she introduced Boston food to Pierre Franey and Craig Claiborne many years ago, Pierre Franey almost walked out of one restaurant, saying, I know there's a woman in the kitchen. He was offended, evidently, by the idea that there was a woman in the kitchen.
[00:40:37.46] How do you think that that has shifted, and has it shifted? Are there restaurants, are there chefs now who feel apologetic about-- are there women? I have said it incorrectly. Are there women who are trying too hard to compete with men in terms of the style of their food, or the level of energy, or the level of command in the kitchen, and women-- have we feminized food enough? That is my question, I suppose.
[00:41:11.40] Would that be for Lydia, do you think?
[00:41:13.41] I think that's what Lydia.
[00:41:15.04] OK.
[00:41:15.34] OK. Oh, boy, again, that's hard, because I just focus on the excellence of each chef that I meet. And if I'm eating their food, I'm really thinking to myself, did this chef take it to the highest point that they could? What did they leave out? I mean, was it boring?
[00:41:45.47] I'll never forget-- and I don't mean to say anything bad about Thomas Keller-- but I went to Per Se, and I had one of those 21-course meals. And I'll never forget, the last course was a lamb chop, and that was it.
[00:42:06.65] [LAUGHS]
[00:42:08.83] And I've had those before, but I've been in Sicily, in Palermo, way up in the mountains, where they grilled the lamb chops over an outdoor wood fire grill, and those lamb chops were amazing. This one I had at Per Se in New York, I'm sorry, but it was boring to me. And I don't know. It's nothing against Thomas Keller; he's a brilliant chef. But I just look for, have they done the most that they could? And again, to me, that's not gender. It's really the person.
[00:42:50.26] That's about food.
[00:42:52.61] There's an interesting question in the Q&A, and I commend the Q&A as a good place to ask us questions-- to the audience-- about whether or not-- whether gendered notions of food have influenced the conversations around sustainability and plant-based diets. I mean, there is the stereotype that women eat salads. But do we think that, in fact, the whole consciousness around non-meat food has been impacted by gender?
[00:43:29.75] Should I answer this?
[00:43:31.10] Yeah, and then I'd like to go over a couple more things.
[00:43:33.62] Yeah, well, I definitely see way more women eating salads, and I think there is a hardiness associated with male diners, quite often. I mean, when I was out in California, and women were eating skinless, boneless chicken breasts day in and day out. That was pretty distressing to me. And then, when they were eating asparagus in the winter, I think, we don't serve asparagus at Scampo in the winter. We wait until the spring. To me, that's the right thing.
[00:44:19.59] And sometimes, I worry about women a little bit and what this whole health trend has brought to their brain. I have more fun sometimes with men and what they order. And I'm able to get into them, and of challenge, them and I have fun. But I do that also with women. I have lots of women friends that come in that are not afraid. So maybe those are the type I hang out with more.
[00:44:52.99] [LAUGHS] Could be. Barbara, what do you think?
[00:44:56.38] Well, I was thinking, again, of social trends and movements, of back to the farm and the whole thing that went on with people moving to Vermont in the '60s, and so on, and the commune setup, and so on. And I think they were both men and women. And there's still part of American culture that thinks about, I should grow my own food. And men and women are both involved in that.
[00:45:20.38] I don't see any glaring gender distinctions that I've noticed. But apropos to what Lydia just said, I came across a quote of somebody was commenting on how sad it was that, when the Titanic sank, there had been women aboard who passed up the dessert trolley-- saying that it was unfortunate, because they missed it.
[00:45:44.08] [LAUGHTER]
[00:45:47.23] Oh, boy!
[00:45:48.37] Going to a watery grave without having had the eclairs, wow!
[00:45:52.14] [LAUGHTER]
[00:45:54.69] I'm glad you said eclairs! They're my favorite.
[00:46:00.22] Wow. A question from one of our listeners, Ellen. She says, would we agree that men did not become interested in cooking until they realized it could be monetized?
[00:46:15.69] I don't agree. A whole group of male cookbook writers came along when Prohibition went away. And so they came through as epicurean. They were writing about how to pair wine with food and all that kind of thing. It was still a lot of guy talk, but they didn't disparage women. They just ignored women, because they were talking to the other men in their clubs-- that kind of thing.
[00:46:48.24] Interesting.
[00:46:50.22] Louisa, just traveling-- for instance, when you go to India, the cooks, the chefs in restaurants in India are pretty much all male. And however, when you go to Morocco and you go to the restaurants there, they are all women. Now, why would there be such a difference? I mean, you could-- India and Morocco are close enough in the whole geographic world to share some-- clearly, they both love spices there. But it's interesting how one country has women chefs, and the other country has male chefs.
[00:47:39.00] Well, I have a thought about that. It's interesting. I spent a lot of years, as you both know, interviewing chefs, writing a weekly column about chefs. And so many of the male chefs said to me, well, I grew up cooking with my grandmother. Not so much even their mothers, but their grandmothers-- that they watched their grandmothers cook. And I've always wondered, well, why was it their grandmothers and not their mothers, and why was that-- that essentially gave them permission? Have you noticed that, that that seems to be kind of a-- that was cultural permission for men to become chefs in the latter part of this century?
[00:48:20.55] Oh, I definitely have heard that a lot, quite a bit.
[00:48:27.30] I have to say now, that I have a grandson, I am trying to be mindful of that, [LAUGHS] so that's one of the career options open to him. He seems a little interested.
[00:48:40.53] There is also a question here that has to do with what it feels like in a kitchen. And this is from Leah Klein. And it says, there's definitely an aggressive masculine chef stereotype in professional kitchens that, maybe, female chefs have been expected to emulate or tolerate. Have we gotten to the point where both male and female chefs are changing the language and body language in the kitchen?
[00:49:05.44] Definitely. I think there's a little more respect happening. I believe-- in fact, my first restaurant job was in a French restaurant, Maison Robert, and they pretty much all spoke French all the other chefs. And I would listen to their swear words-- "merde," and all the particular ones I knew at the time. And I knew they were swearing, but I just ignored it. I just worked harder than they were all working, because women always have to work harder than their male counterparts do. That's a fact. But now, you don't see that as much, because now, kitchens are far more integrated. And there's definitely more respect in a kitchen now.
[00:50:02.17] How do you think that Julia Child impacted the vision of a woman as chef? Barbara, you were someone who knew Julia Child quite well.
[00:50:10.75] Right.
[00:50:10.96] As did Lydia. What do you think?
[00:50:14.12] Well, she never thought of herself as a chef. She was a home cook, really, who wrote a book that took off. And she was so highly respectful of all chefs. And she was, I think, especially supportive of women chefs. I've heard stories from Boston-area women chefs who have said such beautiful things about Julia.
[00:50:37.93] And I don't think Julia was a feminist, per se, in any kind of way that we've come to expect the definition. She was for everybody. And she loved young people. She loved the profession. She loved the fact that graduate work in gastronomy was going on. She thought there was an intellectual part of this whole enterprise. And she was just so open-minded and generous with everybody.
[00:51:12.76] Absolutely.
[00:51:14.84] But it does not escape my attention that she was the first sort of breakthrough woman chef on TV. I mean, before Julia, there had been Dinah Shore doing some things. But she owned the kitchen in a way-- this is my guess; I can be corrected-- like no other woman had done in accessible media.
[00:51:37.99] I think this has to do with Julia being Julia. Those of us who know her-- knew her-- realize that she was she was the same person when she was at your house or you were at her house that she was on television. She was just so genuine, and so really funny, and so really welcoming. If she would be invited to three different parties the same night, she'd go to all of them. And she had just a lot of energy. And I would--
[00:52:05.94] I would, too.
[00:52:08.08] I would say you're in that category.
[00:52:11.80] What do you think, Lydia, about Julia's role in all this?
[00:52:16.15] There's a word that I don't like, and the word is "networking." I don't know; for some reason, I just hate that word. But she was the actual true networker in my era. She would open up her home. She would host these get-togethers. She'd have wine. She'd have hors d'oeuvres and everything.
[00:52:43.25] But it was really so the people there would meet each other and work off that. It wasn't for her own ego. She was not an egomaniac who wanted adulation. She just really wanted person A to meet person B and make something happen. She was always--
[00:53:07.63] Yeah. I just wanted to add to that, Lydia, she would always send journalists who came to her house for a visit on to me at the library, because she wanted that story to get out, that food is a serious subject, and here's proof. There's a library that's collecting food books.
[00:53:26.72] Right.
[00:53:27.63] She was such a good friend. She was terrific-- to the institution, not just personally.
[00:53:35.28] Barbara, I have a question for you that's been percolating in my mind since I first saw this exhibit. And let me make a plea that, when the world opens up again, for everybody to go and see the exhibit, because it's really quite interesting. And I saw it soon after I had seen the Downton Abbey exhibit. And there's this grand table that has all sorts of annotations on it.
[00:53:58.47] But I've been thinking a lot about the idea that women were always told to hold back on food, that the food in-- especially before we had the culture of plenty, women didn't have the ability to say, I don't want to eat this. I only want to eat that. I'm eating an endives said. I'm eating whatever I'm making for everybody, and if there's enough for me, great.
[00:54:23.43] And then, I thought about the emergence of ladies' tea salons, like Schrafft's and other places, where the expectation was that women really only wanted to eat Jell-o, salads, and desserts? And I wonder what your sense of that is. When did the generalized rule culture change, that there was a different rule of eating for women than for men?
[00:54:51.33] Well, I'm thinking of the little yea restaurants in department stores. And so now, we're seeing the disappearance of department stores. So a lot has changed. Schrafft's, I think Schrafft's was a perfect example of ladies' food. Because women were not-- didn't hold outside jobs, middle class women who would go to Schrafft's. And so that, lunchtime and teatime places were open, and there was plenty of time and plenty of people to attend those things.
[00:55:26.76] But like everything else that I've been mentioning, trends come and trends go. And as women got working, they had less time for lunch out with lady friends, and so on, and so on.
[00:55:42.55] Lydia, do you think you would have become a professional chef if you had stayed married, if money wasn't an object? Do you think you were always driven to be who you became?
[00:55:54.05] Oh, no. I think I had three children right away. My last was born when I was 21.
[00:56:05.08] That's early.
[00:56:06.25] No, I would have stayed a housewife. I always cooked, though. I love to cook.
[00:56:13.64] I remember making my first veal stock. And supermarkets didn't carry veal bones. You had to go to the supermarket. I had to beg them to get me some veal bones.
[00:56:26.53] It was when Julia came and would talk to Ron at Savinor's-- or Jack, I'm sorry, Jack. And she kind of got a lot of that percolating. And that was when I was at home, watching her on TV and making my own things like that. But I don't think I would have been a professional chef. I think that happened because my marriage fell apart.
[00:56:55.06] But women now do-- I mean, the world has changed. Most women have ambition to do something, and so many more women are coming into the food world. And they are driven; they are very much driven to succeed as much as men are. So I think that that-- back to what Barbara said about things change, cultural shift-- we have a cultural shift that women are expected and expect themselves to work, and to be productive, and to succeed and fulfill their ambitions. And it is a different world.
[00:57:29.74] Really, a different-- I need to acknowledge that we are at the end of our allotted time. I could go on for another hour, and I would be happy to for a few minutes if there are other questions that people want to pose to us. I have, as I always do, a million questions, because--
[00:57:47.74] That's who you are.
[00:57:48.74] That's how I wake up in the morning. [LAUGHS] Whatever. So I'm just curious, so what do you see happening in the future? Will gender, in what either people choose to eat or how they choose to cook, be different? When we all come back from COVID, and the world of hospitality and dining really opens again, do you think that there will be a realignment in either the food or in the gender balance in professional kitchens?
[00:58:15.97] I mean, one thing that I have to ask is I see-- this is the first year that many more people-- this is the second quarter of this-- that many more people are cooking at home and eating more of their meals at home than they are ordering out or eating off-premise. How will that change us when things come back to what we consider to be normal? Barbara, what do you think?
[00:58:40.60] Well, we're seeing a lot of closings-- all over the world, I'm sure, and certainly in the major cities, small businesses are closing. We're in for some tough times, I think. But at the end of the tunnel, I see younger people coming along, and getting into those spaces, and reopening businesses. And I think that people are very anxious to get back to eating out, to being together outside of their own kitchens. They're tired of cooking-- they will be tired of cooking-- and that new people will be opening up these spots. And I'm hoping rents will be attainable for young people, and that we'll get a whole new generation, a whole new wave of restaurants, food shops of all sorts, both started by women and men as well.
[00:59:41.30] But still and all, people's cooking skills are improving at home. Home cooks are improving what we bring to the table.
[00:59:48.53] Some are; some are not.
[00:59:49.73] [LAUGHTER]
[00:59:53.15] I have friends who order all their stuff delivered to the house, and then they don't know what to do with it. One of my friends got a beet the size of her head, and she called me up, what should she do with it? She had it in the oven, and nothing was happening. I get these requests read aloud.
[01:00:13.79] So funny!
[01:00:14.64] They're not getting better.
[01:00:16.49] Right. What do you think, Lydia? What's your crystal ball?
[01:00:21.08] I think that as far as young chefs working their way up, it'll be equal-- equal men, equal women. People will always have to go out. People have to celebrate. You get tired-- you do get tired of cooking at home. And I can't wait for that to happen.
[01:00:47.42] We're at half capacity right now. Our restaurant is doing half of what we used to do, even a little less. And it's very sad. We've had to let go a lot of people. Very sad.
[01:00:59.67] Right, yeah. Well, I want to thank you both. I want to point out to those of us who are listening at home, as we say-- because we are actually all at home, so we're listening at home-- that we are launching our Let's Talk About Food podcast. And you can find it at-- by visiting letstalkaboutfood.com or by going to Heritage Radio Network, which is this wonderful network of food podcasts that we've joined. And one of our first guests on our first episode is Ms. Lydia Shire.
[01:01:35.56] So thank you so much. This has just been fabulous, and let's keep talking about food. Thank you.
[01:01:43.96] Thank you.
[01:01:45.01] Thank you, Lydia. Thank you, Barbara.
[01:01:46.72] Bye-bye!