I was recently watching a couple of talented male stars on the Food Network teach home cooking and was engaged by their amusing and very different personae. Alton Brown, the pop-history cookbook writer, comes across as part class valedictorian and part class clown, while Ted Allen, the former "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" star, explains ingredients and how to use them with a whimsical sophistication. I thought how lucky these two were to have 21st century careers instead of being mired in the pre-feminist years before the 1970s when men and women were stuck in prescribed roles. Men writing about home cooking from the 1920s through the '60s believed they had to justify their interests by posturing as super-macho he-men, bravely dealing with open flames instead of fussing over measurements like their wives who baked cupcakes, a sure sign of sissy girly food. And when they wrote cookbooks, men believed they could mostly write without embarrassment about the pursuit and preparation of wild game, perhaps, or the perils of outdoor grilling, but everyday home cooking was understood to be women's work.

Cavemen in the kitchen

It is not surprising, therefore, that the titles of home cookbooks written by men were either boastful -- "The Stag Cookbook: A Man's Cookbook for Men" by C. Mac Sheridan (1922) or self-conscious -- "Men in Aprons" by Lawrence A. Keating (1944) -- and that the writers used women as foils, positioning themselves as more creative and inspired than "the fairer sex" who drearily thought about getting three meals a day on the table, while men's concerns with food were creative and adventurous. In other words, he passed himself off as an artist, while she was presented as a scientist, presumably a domestic scientist. So, for example, in "The Best Men Are Cooks" (1941),  Frank Shay promises not to discuss vitamins or calories, or food for invalids, dyspeptics, children or  reducing diets, for he is writing only for people who love good food, presumably men. That disclaimer appears to be a less than subtle reference to those comprehensive and ponderous books on household management that were written almost exclusively by women for the benefit of other women from the 19th century far into the 20th.

As it turns out, when you shove aside Shay's posturing, what becomes clear in his book is that he is knowledgeable not only about standard American foods, but for his time shows an uncommon respect for international dishes, suggesting, for instance, that his readers go into Mexican neighborhoods to buy tortillas "better than any living American can make." He gives us recipes for polenta and risotto, and points out that "a blintze is to the Jewish gastronome what a clam cake is to a New Englander or ravioli to an Italian." Yet what is not in his book also shapes his culinary chauvinism. He gives wonderful recipes for all kinds of dessert pies, which must have had status as guy food, but not a single recipe for cakes or cookies, products that require exacting measurements, presumably more suitable for literal-minded women.

Frederic Birmingham, author of "The Complete Cookbook for Men" (1961), is another writer who ridiculed women to establish authority and the right to produce a cookbook. He finds cookbooks written by women unusable, as hopeless as trying to find something in his wife's closet. When a man cooks, Birmingham insists, "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." As expected, he makes the claim that outdoor cooking, with its live flames, flying cinders and complicated equipment, is a male prerogative. He even constructs a prehistoric scenario in which the caveman bashed animals over the head and cooked them while his wife no doubt stood on the sidelines making necklaces from bear claws. With the passage of time, he insists, men's roles did not change although their approach became more artful. He describes, for instance, what he dubs the method-acting school of outdoor cooking in which Birmingham is able to put himself in the place of a steak or double lamb chop and intuitively know when it is time to turn over.

Making cupcakes manly

Happily, disparaging women even in fun is no longer a requirement for men wishing to communicate their interest and knowledge of cooking. Even cupcakes, that former symbol of effeminacy in the kitchen, have been born-again as worthy, tasty delights. Who can help but notice the proliferation of cupcake bakeries sweeping the nation? I even know of a man who left his job with a hedge fund to open his own cupcake shop, preferring to think about frosting instead of funding. While the cultural effects of women's liberation are usually discussed in terms of how women's lives have changed, such as having three women now serving on the Supreme Court, its benefits to men should not be overlooked. They too have been freed from restrictive sex roles imposed by the culture.

This is not to say that the image of overly masculine men in the food world has disappeared, far from it. But this time around that image seems to be cultivated by professional chefs with television shows who "throw-down" and "bam" to their hearts' content. Guy Fieri, apparently a dedicated family man when not on camera, has developed a persona described by the New York Times as "chef-dude" and seems all about fast cars, tattoos and NASCAR talk. And what about that overly macho and generally overbearing, foul-mouthed Gordon Ramsay? Is it possible that when alone he plays the harpsichord and reads poetry? What strikes me about this recent onslaught of macho men who cook is that they are professional chefs and not the home cooks as in days of yore. Could this be a response to the growing numbers of women entering the professional kitchen?

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