Men in Aprons

My kitchen is the crime scene and I am the culprit. To underscore this, a strip of yellow police tape cordons off the cooking area, where the crime was perpetrated. The tape, emblazoned with black lettering reading “Do Not Enter,” is a stray tassel I picked off the ground near a condemned building and tacked up myself. Behind it sits Natalie, contentedly sipping a glass of wine.

I am paying my debt to society, or at least Natalie. Victim’s Reparations. Boyfriend Community Service. Natalie’s mad because I cooked for another woman--Jessica, an old girlfriend, visiting from out of town. Bad move. I should’ve gotten rid of the evidence. But Natalie followed the trail and found the sauce left over from the trout Veracruz I made for Jessica. I guess it was pretty good, because when Natalie discovered it, her eyes brimmed up. “How come you’ve never cooked for me?” she said with a sniffle.

Well, there’s a reason I’ve never cooked for Natalie. She’s the only girlfriend I’ve ever had who can cook, and so we cook together. So now I’ve tacked up this yellow tape to make it clear I am the one doing the cooking, not her, not us, no collaborating this time. I am here to prove that I am a full-service boyfriend.

Cooking can be a touchy subject between men and women. On my first date with Jessica, the old girlfriend, I asked her if she liked to cook. I remember her responding in her gentle, understated manner with something like, “What kind of redneck, inbred hillbilly are you, anyway?” She thought for a second, then added, “I’ll bet you’ve even got bank robbers somewhere in the family.” Well, actually I do have bank robbers in the family, but somehow this didn’t seem like the right time to admit it. We were, after all, talking about cooking.

At least I thought we were. I was wrong. I was talking about cooking. She was talking about the gender war, which I thought was already over except for a few minor skirmishes.

For my money, the kitchen ranks with the bedroom as the most romantic room in the house. The sizzling of scallops as they’re seared in a skillet, the scent of spices, the sensuality of it all--what could be more seductive? But for Jessica, any mention of kitchen duties conjured issues of domestic servitude. She assumed I was sizing her up as a household slave, probably expecting my next statement would be along the lines of, “I like a woman with a strong back!” Granted, we had a culture gap between us; a nice Jewish girl from New York, she thought anybody from below the Mason-Dixon line had serious gene pool issues. On our second date, though, I cooked her arroz con pollo, and by dessert she finally stopped calling me “Sling Blade.” Still, it was a long time before I dared ask a woman if she liked to cook.

From where I stand--which is over the stove--it’s the men who wear the aprons these days. Men started cooking because women stopped, and because even males can only eat so many Tombstone pizzas. Men also started cooking to get women into bed with them. It’s a pretty good gambit, assuming there’s already some harmonizing of flavors. Women stopped cooking because Gloria Steinem told them to, and because they entered the work force and didn’t have time anymore, and probably because their collective ancestral memory was just plain fed up with doing all of the cooking.

By now they’ve forgotten how. I have a friend, a product of the ‘60s, who thinks she can cook. She puts something on the stove, turns up the flame and sits down to watch television. She knows instinctively when it’s done: when the black smoke rolls from the kitchen into the living room. (I’ve tried to explain to her that the smoke alarm is not an oven timer, but to no avail.) She hardly ever lit a burner when we were roommates, but she’d get pretty surly if dinner wasn’t ready when she got home from work.

So call us Men in Aprons. As a matter of fact, I have an acquaintance, Rochelle Fleck, founder of Chicago-based Chefwear, who designs kitchen garments for professionals and amateurs, including, of course, aprons. According to her national sales manager, Carl Nordberg, purchases are--get this--”pretty much dominated by males.” The trend even extends down to teenage boys who watch the Food Network (50% male viewership) and who Nordberg says “want to look like Wolfgang.” I suppose if you’re a parent, this represents an improvement over hip-hop garb, but I’m not sure.

In other ways, I suspect this is a fairly boomer-centric proposition. I was born in 1960, the last gasp of the baby boom, and my unscientific assessment is that women ranging from my age to 10 years older are about as comfortable in the kitchen as my grandmother would have been in a bar on V-E Day. (This probably tilts more toward singles and couples without children; once you’ve got kids, cooking is usually an economic necessity, even for two-income families.) But we men who’ve learned to tell a whisk from a spatula don our aprons not to bury feminism, but to praise it.

Upon reflection, that previous sentence is a baldfaced lie. It sounds good, but what I really meant was: Honey, I’m tired. Do you really think they’d revoke women’s right to vote if you went in there and fried me an egg?

It’s strange how not being able to cook is such a point of honor with so many women I know. “I use my oven for closet space!” a woman recently boasted to me at a party.

“So you don’t cook?” I asked, though the answer was obvious.

“Why don’t I just join the female mud wrestling team at the Tropicana Club?” she replied. At the further extreme are the women who don’t even like men fixing them dinner because . . . it’s too intimate! “She said it was just way too heavy for this stage of our relationship,” a friend complained to me recently after he’d invited a girlfriend to his house for dinner. Suffice it to say the pair had already shared a toothbrush.

I suppose it’s been only in the past 30 years or so that, in terms of putting dinner on the table, the balance of power has even come into question. A few generations ago, most men were as enthusiastic about preparing their own meals as assisting in the birth of their own child. The kitchen, like the birthing room, was strictly the domain of women. When women abandoned the kitchen, they cleared out of there like a fraudulent telemarketing operation with the cops on their trail. I think we men initially entered it with a sense of desperation, but once inside, we got to like it. And this happened a good long time before “Emeril Live,” with a coterie of hungry construction workers salivating into his toque, made the spectacle of men cooking look like a cartoon version of the men’s movement.

So just when I was coming into my full glory as Male Alpha Dog of the kitchen, along comes Natalie, julienning, chiffonading and rondelling her heart out--and enjoying it.

We’re a pretty good team. She’s mastered lots of techniques I’m still fumbling with, but I’ve got the better palate and call the shots when it comes to seasoning. Whatever the dish, she always dumps a half bottle of Tabasco sauce into it. (She carries the stuff in her purse.) This makes kissing her like puckering up to a lit Weber grill. But since she has worked in a professional kitchen, she has a way of herding me out by dint of her superior skill. I know my way around a bechamel sauce, and a lot of other things for that matter, but I’m amateurishly slow. So when the knives come out and the chopping begins, when the oil begins to sizzle in the saute pan, and as Natalie goes to work, I’m often left standing on the sidelines like a doddering old man watching a gang of 14-year-olds engaged in extreme skateboarding. “Can I, um, do something?” I stammer. “Honey, just find the caraway seed,” she’ll reply.

So that’s why, in her judgment, I’d never cooked just for Natalie. Then she found the smoking gun, that Veracruz sauce. I guess it was pretty good because she was only half-kidding when she said if I ever cooked for another woman again before I made dinner for her, I’d be yesterday’s mashed potatoes.

Now I’ve met my match, and she’s sitting there on the other side of that strip of yellow police tape. I’ve rubbed the pork chops with spices and put them in the oven, along with yams au gratin, and now I’m glazing baby carrots in Pernod. I notice her starting to fidget; she wants so badly to step in and help. “Here, let me just--”

“Hold it right there,” I tell her. “No tampering with the crime scene.”

“You know something, Mister,” she says. “You just might get lucky tonight.”

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Yams Au Gratin

Serves 8 to 10

2 or 3 yams sliced 1/8-inch thick

1 1/2 cups cream

1 cup shredded Gruyere cheese

4 tablespoons butter, plus more for greasing dish

1 shallot, thinly sliced

Salt and pepper to taste

Butter the inside of a gratin dish. Place sliced shallots on bottom. Cover with half of the sliced yams, then place half the butter in thin pats over top and half the cheese. Dust with salt and pepper. Layer remaining yam slices over top, add butter, top with cheese and salt and pepper. Pour cream over top. Bake at 400 degrees for 25 to 35 minutes.

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Spice-Crusted Pork Chops with Port Reduction Sauce

Serves 4

2 teaspoons juniper berries

1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

Freshly ground pepper, to taste

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon Calvados or cognac

2 teaspoons Dijon mustard

2 boneless thick-cut pork chops (12 to 15 ounces)

1/4 cup port

2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

1 1/2 tablespoons butter, cut into small pieces

In a dry skillet, toast the juniper berries until they are shiny, taking care not to burn them. Transfer to a mortar or spice grinder and let cool. Add nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, pepper and salt and grind to a fine powder. Pour ground spices into a small bowl. Stir in the cognac and mustard to make a paste.

Coat the pork chops with the paste and refrigerate four hours to overnight.

Place pork chops in a nonstick skillet and bake at 375 degrees until meat thermometer registers 160, about 25 minutes. Remove pork chops from skillet and pour drippings into a smaller skillet. Add port and balsamic vinegar to skillet and cook on medium heat until sauce is reduced to about 3 tablespoons. Add butter and salt and pepper to taste. Slice the pork chops and fan out on warmed plates. Spoon sauce over the pork and serve.

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Martin Booe is a frequent contributor to the magazine.