The kitchen revolution

Stereotypes about the cooking area are changing fast — and it is becoming a space to spend some of your life’s best moments

There is something about the concept of the kitchen that frightens almost every adolescent girl. Gender roles. Stereotypes. Drudgery. At least, those were the connotations that the kitchen had for me 
and quite a few of my female friends.

The boys would be allowed to do all the cool stuff with Dad or nothing at all, lying on their backs with their feet up, watching cartoons while the girls would be washing and peeling vegetables and learning how to cook with Mom who seemed to live her life in the kitchen.

The kitchen was a place where mothers spent all their time in, sweating and cooking and standing. Fathers seemed to have the better end of the bargain, watching sports on weekends and just relaxing while we saw mothers catering to their every need. In the eyes of questioning teenagers, it looked wrong. Girls vowed to be so educated and to marry so rich that they would never have to spend a minute in the kitchen. And boys thought girls and moms were really around to cater to their every need.

And then, we grew up.

Of course, I have only written of an extreme situation and there are indeed many homes that have a more egalitarian approach to child-rearing, but this is also typical of many homes across the world. There are many societies in which the home kitchen is the woman’s world and cooking is defined as a “woman’s work”. In many homes, men never enter the kitchen and would not know how to make a cup of tea even if their lives depended on it. They never needed to, and will never need to, because someone — often a woman, be it wife, daughter or maid — is there to do it for them.

On the contrary, the professional kitchen has traditionally been the domain of men. Male chefs were celebrated from time immemorial and women chefs had to work twice as hard and be twice as tough to compete with their male counterparts.

Today, all this negativity associated with the kitchen is changing.

Increasingly, we are seeing female chefs in the professional arena and more men cooking at home.

Yesterday, my Emirati classmate in an Arabic cooking course told me that her son showed more interest in the kitchen than her daughter and she was actually renovating her kitchen with him in mind. This was music to my ears!

My husband also had a mother like her who recognised his interest in the kitchen and encouraged it. She would allow him to experiment with family dinners as a teenager and even secured him an apprenticeship to test whether he was really interested in becoming a chef. He was hooked. A year later she sent him to the best culinary school in the US for his degree and the rest, as they say, is history.

I believe that there is a revolution happening in 
the kitchen.

I am testimony to this. I buried myself in my broadcasting and PR career and felt that kitchen work was part of the realm of domesticity I wanted no part of. I was a talented career woman in power suits and thought aprons were far from chic, though secretly I envied those who were brilliant in the kitchen and desired to be a cooking and baking goddess.

And then I had to cook. And then I started looking forward to cooking. And then I started sharing my food. After all that initial resistance, I am now working in the food industry and am amazed at how much I get from working with food.

For me, being a food writer allows me to explore my craft through food. My kitchen is not only where I make my living but also where I get therapy on a rough day — kitchen therapy!

My cousin Jodi would always chuckle, back in the old days, at how excited I got when I used to shop for food though I seldom cooked. Now, I am shameless with that passion. The kitchen has changed my life in so many wonderful ways. It has given my husband and I common ground and when we cook together, we solidify our bond. Your kitchen can change your life too… or your child’s. Just allow its magic to work!

wknd@khaleejtimes.com

· Kari is a Dubai-based journalist and photographer of the food blog chefandsteward.com. Follow her on Facebook at facebook.com/ChefandSteward and contact her at: · kari@chefandsteward.com

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