lumbingmi
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By SAM HOLDEN
When was the last time a woman cooked you a really excellent meal? Not just a nice meal, or a plain good meal, or a hearty meal, but a piece of cuisine that had you smacking your lips for weeks afterwards?
I'll wager that you can't remember, for the simple reason that you've never had such a meal cooked by a woman.
The truth is women can't really cook. All they can do is to cater, and there's a big difference. The only people who can actually cook on this planet are men, even the ones who only cook once a year when their wife or girlfriend is ill.
Women's cooking is often so poor because it is largely performed as a matter of necessity.
For the traditional housewife, cooking is not a luxury pastime, but simply another item in the long list of household chores that needs to be ticked off with efficiency and speed. There is clearly little time or energy left after a day full of children to prepare a serious piece of gastronomy, and most women usually rustle up a supper that is quick, dull but, to their credit, relatively nutritious.
However, it will undoubtedly be boring and flavourless, devoid of any inventiveness or joy in its execution. A typical example would be an overcooked pork chop with some over-boiled spuds and limp broccoli.
Even more common is the staple female dish, pasta a la things, in which some unidentifiable foodstuffs are chucked into a pot of soggy tagliatelle and then mixed up with slightly sour creme fraiche.
Men who endure such cooking soon find they have two options. Either eat a good lunch, or do the cooking yourself. I was one of the men who opted for the latter, having endured months of shoddy fare knocked up by my wife. (At least I hope she's still my wife after this.)
Although I was a stranger to the kitchen, I soon found that preparing exciting, top-quality dishes was neither particularly time-consuming nor difficult, and within a few months my abilities easily surpassed every woman I know, even the ones who think they are good cooks. And I soon discovered there were plenty more men like me.
In fact, when my wife and I go to see friends for dinner, nine times out of ten it is the man who cooks - and he does a brilliant job.
But female ineptitude in the kitchen is not just a product of the fullness of a woman's timetable. We all have busy lives these days, so there must be something else, something far deeper and intrinsic that makes women so hopeless at cooking. I have a few theories, all of which will no doubt see me pinned down and forced to eat my own sweetmeats.
The first is that women are less inclined to experiment. Good cooks are those who take risks, who wonder whether X goes well with Y, or perhaps even with Q. If it fails, it doesn't matter, you can always start again.
Women are more afraid of failure, perhaps because they are wary of all that nasty male criticism, so it does them well to stick to well-trodden recipes.
However, it gets worse. As well as being incapable of experimenting, women are useless at following written instructions, which in this instance are called recipes.
Blinded by a series of numbers and symbols, they get confused, and usually add the wrong amount of sugar or salt, or, more likely, substitute one for the other.
Every time my wife bakes, I always hear swearing coming from the kitchen when she realises that she has put in, say, six tablespoons of vanilla essence rather than six teaspoons.
This brings me to multi-tasking. Men are often being told that we can't perform actions simultaneously, and that it's women who have these wonderful brains that enable them to walk and chew gum all at the same time. What absolute rot.
The reason why men make better chefs than women is precisely because we are sensationally good at multi-tasking. For example, men can read maps and drive through any rush hour. Men can compute trigonometric equations while they are flying at Mach 2. Men can get roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, cabbage and carrots all ready at the same time, and will have made their own horseradish sauce and laid the table.
What else is cooking apart from multi-tasking? If women were so good at it, why can't they do as good a job as men? Why does my wife always burn the garlic? Why does my wife always forget some essential part of the meal only to remember it when we sit down to eat? 'Sorry honey, I forgot to put the potatoes in the oven. Are you all right with cous cous?' (Answer: 'No.') However, the most fundamental reason why women can't cook is that they don't have the same relationship with food as men do.
Click on the link for the full article
Why women can't cook - by a very brave husband | the Daily Mail