Beech Tree News Network

When Men Cook: Growing up in a rural area, I noticed something about men in the community.  Several of them could cook, but their cooking was very food-specific.  My dad is a good example.  He often cooked Sunday morning breakfast for the family, and when he did, he really laid out a spread.  He would fix home-made biscuits and either bacon, sausage or country ham.  He would fry eggs and make gravy—two kinds, milk-based and red-eye, if we had country ham, because red-eye is an acquired taste that not everybody in the family had acquired.  

If Dad was in the kitchen alone, he would sing while he cooked.  We girls slept upstairs in the old farm house, and one of my favorite memories is waking to the sound of my dad singing and the smell of burnt pizza wafting up the staircase. (The pizza was from the night before, and Dad inevitably forgot to check the oven before he pre-heated it for the biscuits.)  

The breakfast-cooking thing was a big part of my dad’s generation.  I heard an interview with Waylon Jennings several years ago in which he described the days that he and Johnny Cash roomed together in Nashville before either of them were country music stars.  He described how Johnny would get up on Sunday mornings and cook a huge breakfast of bacon, pork chops, eggs, and biscuits and gravy.  He said he would forever carry the image of Johnny in his black clothes, covered in flour dust.   

Breakfast was Dad’s generation’s tour de force.  The men of my generation gravitate more toward grilling.  Thanks to the technology-driven innovations of the past few years, new grills, like the Holland, can turn out meat and veggies that are cooked to the perfect temperature and are visually pleasing and scrumptious as well.  Our friend, Greg, has one such grill.  He has cooked enough on it to reach the status of grill-master (if you don’t count the unfortunate incident when he blew the lid off the grill and welded his eye lids shut).  

When our friend, Randy—who lives just down the street from Greg, and had just obtained his first Holland—stopped by the shop, to tell us about his grilling struggles, I chided Greg for not helping him.  “I told him everything he needs to know,” Greg defended, “If you’re lookin, you’re not cookin!”  

“That’s right,” Randy conceded, “It tells you at least a hundred times in the directions not to open the lid, because it makes the temperature drop and slows the cooking process.  I just can’t seem to help myself, though.  I have to raise the lid and see how it’s coming along.  Last weekend, after I put the chicken on, I made myself go into the house, and I sat down and read the paper, so I wouldn’t keep raising the lid.  When I went back outside to see how things were going, the grill had run out of gas, and the chicken was raw.”

Each grilling guy has his own techniques and recipes, which he has developed through a pain-staking process akin to the scientific method.  In short, if the technique doesn’t set any of the surrounding area on fire and the food doesn’t result in a midnight run to the ER, the cooking session is deemed a success, and the recipe can then be added to the cook’s repertoire.  

If a woman asks a grilling guy for one of his recipes, he will nearly always hesitate.  Do not read this as a reluctance on the part of the cook to share his secrets.  Nothing is farther from the truth.  While he hesitates, the man-cook is pondering how to break down man-measurements into woman-measurements.  When a woman gives you a recipe, it goes something like: two cups, a teaspoon, one-third cup, two tablespoons, etc.  Her recipe will traditionally feed a family of four a nice meal.  When a grilling man gives you a recipe, it’s more like: one large bottle Zesty Italian, half a bottle of Worchester sauce, half a bottle of hot sauce, ten pounds of potatoes, five onions and a can of beer.  (The beer is to drink while you’re grilling.)  You, your family, your dogs and your goats will have food for at least three days.

I, personally, like to be around when men are grilling, because they seem to be at their happiest when they have a spatula in one hand and a beer in the other.  There is an air of hospitality and self-assuredness that mingles with the scent of barbeque sauce to create a sense that all is right with the world.  I think, this year for the holidays, I’m going to wrap up a beer-and-spatula gift for every guy I know.  It would be nice to have peace on earth this Christmas.