Dad's Cooking Tonight

There is a particular type of domestic man who cooks between once and four times a year, somehow managing to make each occasion feel like the debut night of a new restaurant.

You know he is cooking because he announces it. This is not information casually passed on; it is a household bulletin. He might be making a romantic dinner for his partner on Valentine’s Day, or feeding the family on a Saturday when he decides it’s about time. By three, ingredients have colonised the kitchen counter. Every pan they own is out. His favourite music is on. He is already drinking the wine intended for the sauce.

By five, the sink requires a Chinese restaurant’s kitchen porter. His wife, who was promised the night off, is fielding questions from the next room. Where’s the cumin? Do we have another frying pan? How does the extractor fan work? Eventually she will appear, wordlessly rescue something from burning, and disappear again before her intervention can officially be counted as helping.

Dinner is served a little late. The meat is slightly overcooked, the sauce watery and there isn’t an ounce of seasoning. Still, everyone is encouraging because Dad has cooked. Dad himself is rather pleased with the result and wants to know what everyone thinks.

I know several versions of this man. They are perfectly capable adults, often very successful ones, who approach cooking with the confidence of somebody whose mistakes have historically been cleared away by someone else. They don’t make dinner so much as stage it. The whole thing has a beginning, a middle and, crucially, an audience.

For a certain generation of households, Mum cooked and Dad occasionally Cooked. One was part of the repetitive labour of running a family; the other was an event.

The distinction matters because making an impressive meal and feeding a household are not the same skill. The occasional cook gets to wait until inspiration strikes. He can go to the butcher, spend half the afternoon preparing something and decide that tonight is the night to make his own stock. The person actually responsible for dinner has to open the fridge at six on a Wednesday and work out what can be made from two chicken thighs, half a pepper and a bag of wilting spinach.

Men have, of course, always cooked, but there is something comedic about the forms of cooking that have traditionally been easiest to make masculine. Put a man in front of a barbecue and suddenly dinner becomes an ancient communion between man, meat and fire. Let him carve the roast beef his wife has spent hours preparing. For God’s sake, it’s tradition. You poor, sweet, fragile thing.

For most of my childhood, my mum did the cooking. My dad could cook, in the broad sense that he wasn’t going to starve if left unattended, but I don’t remember him being particularly interested in it. Dinner belonged to the patriarchal machinery of family life and, like plenty of men of his generation, he had managed to reach middle age without having to think very hard about the machinery at all.

Then, at 45, my parents divorced.

There are more consequential parts of a divorce than dinner. I mean, I have a few screws loose. But one immediate reality of finding yourself alone in your forties is that nobody else is going to decide what you eat. My dad suddenly had to cook for himself regularly, not because it was Saturday and he fancied having a go at something, but because it was Tuesday, and Tuesday requires dinner.

And he got good at it. Really good.

More surprisingly, he liked it. Cooking became one of those things that seemed to arrive with the second version of his life. He started paying attention to ingredients, learning dishes properly, evolving his palate and developing the instincts that only come through repetition. He became adventurous. He began to enjoy the process rather than merely the result and, eventually, became the better cook.

My mum, meanwhile, went in almost the opposite direction. She can still cook very well, but once we had left home she seemed to retreat from the kitchen. Which, when I think about it, makes perfect sense. Sometimes you have to dismantle a gender norm to discover what was underneath it. What looks like aptitude may actually be obligation; what looks like disinterest may simply be inexperience. Cooking can be a pleasure for one person and a duty for another.

My dad’s enthusiasm eventually contributed to what I think everyone involved would accept was a fairly comprehensive midlife crisis. Some men buy a Porsche. My dad went off to do a ski season.

There is something both funny and admirable about discovering a new version of yourself at an age when people are supposed to have settled comfortably into the old one. Cooking had spent years as something that happened around my dad. Then circumstances forced him to take responsibility for it, and he discovered genuine pleasure there. What began as necessity became an interest and eventually part of who he was.

The important thing is that he learnt to cook when nobody was there to congratulate him.

That feels increasingly different from many of the relationships I see around me now. In plenty of couples I know, the man cooks as much as the woman. In some, he cooks considerably more. There are men who genuinely love cooking and women who couldn’t care less about it; couples who divide meals according to who gets home first; households in which there is no meaningful gender attached to the question at all.

I find that quietly encouraging, because the most important change isn’t necessarily that men have become better cooks. It is that a man cooking can now be entirely unremarkable. There is something liberating about separating domestic competence from gender altogether. The old arrangement wasn’t particularly good for anyone. Women inherited an endless domestic responsibility, while men could reach 45 without properly learning one of the most basic forms of self-sufficiency. Neither seems an especially desirable inheritance.

None of this means the ceremonial male cook has disappeared. I still encounter him. Afterwards, he will sit down with the exhausted satisfaction of a man who has provided for his family, while somewhere behind him the kitchen resembles the aftermath of a minor military campaign.

But the men I identify with more, and who I think should represent the baseline rather than the exception - are the ones for whom none of this is noteworthy. They cook because they enjoy it, because they’re good at it, or simply because they are adults and dinner needs making. Plenty of them will be feeding their families tonight, producing something good, clearing up afterwards and doing it again later in the week.

The phrase “Dad’s cooking tonight” used to contain an announcement. You could hear the capital letters. It meant something unusual was happening and the kitchen might not recover until morning. In more and more households, it means nothing beyond who happens to be making dinner.

That’s a much less interesting story to tell at the table, but a considerably better way to live.