Male Chefs and the Appropriation of Grandmothers’ Recipes
By Mary Fawzy
The first episode of the acclaimed Netflix series “Chef’s Table” features the story of Italian chef, Massimo Bottura. He recalls being chased by his older brothers and finding safety under the kitchen table. His grandmother was busy rolling pasta and shooed them away with her wooden rolling pin. When asked, “what is the plate of your life?,” he offers up tortellino. In his childhood memories, that’s exactly what he was stealing from under the table, “just made one second before, from the hand of my grandmother.”
Many famous chefs have a story about how a maternal figure’s food and recipes inspired their own love for cooking and the dishes they prepare in their restaurants. Chefs like Eric Ripert and Alain Ducasse share fond memories of their mother or grandmother's delicious cooking and cite it as the inspiration behind their decision to become a chef. Julien Royen was so influenced by his grandmother’s cooking he named his two-Michelin-star restaurant, Odette, after her. Some chefs learned to cook from those maternal figures. Tom Colicchio learned to cook while cooking with his mother and grandmother. Many of these chefs also feature those recipes in their restaurants and cookbooks. Wolfgang Puck has his mother’s recipe for veal wiener schnitzel at his restaurant, Spago and Mario Carbone has a dish inspired by his mother’s meatballs at his restaurant, Carbone.
Back in the episode of “Chef’s Table,” Bottura shares the story of Lidia, an elderly woman who came to him for a job. After being hired to work for him, Lidia teaches Bottura a variety of the traditional dishes and the art of pasta making. Many of his dishes are based on those teachings. Imagine a world where instead of teaching Bottura her secrets, Lidia had been able to pursue a culinary career of her own.
In an industry completely dominated by men, it must be acknowledged that much of the success of male chefs around the world is built on the fact that their mothers and grandmothers were expected to do the unpaid labour of cooking at home, while professional cooking was for men. It’s only in the last 30 years that we’ve seen a significant increase in women working as chefs. Women were rarely hired as chefs in the early days of public restaurant dining, and if they were, they were mostly kept in lower positions. In their book, Taking the Heat: Women Chefs and Gender Inequality in the Professional Kitchen, Deborah A. Harris and Patti Giuffre argue that the early exclusion of women in professional kitchens was fundamental to developing gastronomy as a profession. Certain methods and trends of cooking were established to create a distance and distinction between male chefs and feminized home cooking. They argue that many of those historical attitudes prevail today.
The culinary industry today still holds many barriers for women. In the US, according to the U.S. Labor Department, in 2018, only 20% of chefs are women, when it comes to leadership positions the numbers are even less with only 7% of head chefs and restaurant owners being women. In the UK, only 17% of chefs are women. It’s important to note however, that the majority of low paying, low status operations in food preparation, like cafeteria work, are held by women, mostly women of colour.
Cooking class, ca 1900 - Digital Public Library of America/NYPL Digital Collections
When asked to comment on gender inequality in the kitchen in a 2019 interview with The Economic Times, Chef Heston Blumenthal blamed women’s “biological clocks” and women not being strong enough to carry heavy pots. If a world-renowned chef in the mass media can feel comfortable displaying such sexist beliefs, imagine the sexism happening in professional kitchens every day. This everyday sexism does happen, causing women to leave the industry. Contrary to Blumenthal’s beliefs, the reasons women haven’t ascended to the top levels of the profession in the same way men have, has more to do with sexist sentiments like his, than with women’s ability to carry heavy pots. Kitchens still have a reputation of being hyper-masculine environments and have been reported to be riddled with sexism and sexual harassment; keeping many women from progressing professionally. A study found that 80% of women in the restaurant industry experienced harassment from a coworker.
The military origins of the kitchen brigade, a system employed to keep restaurants running smoothly, say a lot about why professional kitchens are spaces of hyper-masculinity; Auguste Escoffier’s military kitchen brigade was designed to be an all-male system of hierarchy and obedience. In today’s world, those power structures, rigidity and discipline make the kitchen efficient, but also make it difficult to challenge abusive behaviours, raging tempers and harassment, which is rife in kitchens today. A 2017 report by the Washington Post, highlighted that abuse, harassment and sometimes assault happens across restaurants, from the kitchens to the bar to the front of the house. “Men are not immune from abuse, but the vast majority of victims we spoke to are women,” wrote Maura Judkis and Emily Heil in the piece. “Their stories show that how women experience sexual harassment depends on their place in the restaurant ecosystem. Cooks are harassed by other cooks, servers are harassed by everyone. And immigrants and young people — who make up a large percentage of the workforce — are particularly vulnerable.”
Many male chefs have made careers out of a macho persona, with the likes of Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsey and even the late Anthony Bourdain. It became normalized and even celebrated, to be a male chef that people were scared of. When Jamie Oliver emerged, he seemed to challenge the hyper-masculinity that was associated with male chefs. Although it was a major shift, he still based his brand on a “lad” persona, a new type of machismo that was less aggressive and more laid back, but played into a modern dynamic of gendered food production; promoting men's cooking as leisure as opposed to home-making, which was still implied to be a woman’s job [1]. The message is that men’s cooking is edgy, innovative and modern, not like grandmothers’ cooking, continuing the same vein of distancing itself from feminized cooking as Harris and Giuffre stated. In the same Chef’s Table episode, Bottura explains that people found some of his dishes too controversial. He was, "poisoning the grandmothers’ recipes." The sentiment that chefs are the ones who ‘modernise’ traditional recipes, inherently assuming that traditional recipes are stagnant and fixed.
But our grandmothers didn't attend culinary school and train with world-class chefs. They didn’t have Google and YouTube, where they could teach themselves anything they wanted at any whim. They didn't have access to endless cookbooks and food media. They also didn't have the fancy equipment, tools and conveniences of food preparation that we have today. In terms of physicality, our grandmothers had to hand-grind foods, knead everything by hand and clean everything up afterwards. My own grandmother used to spend hours picking stones out of a bag of rice before cooking it, had to carry heavy bags of produce up three flights of stairs, and had to churn her own butter, cheese and cream. They worked with what they had, gaining their culinary wisdom over time, and put food on the table every day; our grandmothers and the women who came before them were the original culinary innovators.
Doña Angela, De mi Rancho a Tu Cocina
While women today are crafting out their own paths as chefs and creators, grandmothers are claiming space in the culinary world in their own right. One woman, Doña Angela, a Mexican grandmother from Michoacán, took the world by storm with her YouTube channel, De mi Rancho a Tu Cocina, She cooks using traditional Mexican cookware and has become a YouTube sensation, garnering over 3 million subscribers since she joined in August 2019. Pasta Grannies is another YouTube Channel and cookbook where creator, Vicky Bennison, features a number of Italian grandmothers that still make pasta by hand, honoring this tradition and the women who continue it. And recently, Hawa Hassan published In Bibi’s Kitchen: Eight African Countries that Touch the Indian Ocean, a cookbook featuring recipes and stories of grandmothers. Showcasing not only the knowledge these women have, but also highlighting different African cuisines, which are often underrepresented in food media.
Grandmothers have also been the center of Entoca Maria, a restaurant in Staten Island where grandmothers are the chefs. Started by Jody Scaravella, it began as an Italian restaurant, but has since expanded to feature a range of cuisines from different countries, including Palestine, Sri-Lanka and Ukraine.
Culture isn’t static—it’s ever-evolving—and the recipes that we have come to think of as “traditional” were once inventions and innovations. In many countries, there are clear regional differences with how certain meals are cooked. Meals are adapted according to the available produce, the climate and accessibility. Entire cuisines and foodways exist because of their cooking. The women that came before us are responsible for all of the most impressive foods and recipes throughout history. Grandmothers and all our foremothers were responsible for feeding their communities and did so with invention, skill and technique.
If they had the opportunity to work in professional kitchens the way men did, without being harassed, abused, and held down because of their gender, the culinary landscape would potentially be a completely different world than it is today. It is ironic that the male chefs of today, along with the food media that celebrates them, think that they are the leaders of innovation. Strangely, while they seem to have deep sentimental attachments to their grandmothers’ cooking, they speak of “grandmothers’ recipes” with an often patronizing endearment, that fails to recognize that so many of the recipes on the menus of top restaurants today are inspired by, adapted and appropriated from them.
Paying homage to their maternal figures shouldn’t be only by the words of endearment they speak, but should also take the form of challenging patronizing sentiments and in fighting sexism and patriarchal kitchen environments.
While these male chefs may not call it “appropriation,” their knowledge and recipes are often born out of the labor and genius of the women who came before them, and their opportunities and rise to success fueled by the systemic patriarchy that imposed the gender roles of women cooking.
The women that came before us are responsible for all of the most impressive foods and recipes throughout history. We owe it to them to offer up the credit that they deserve.
[1] Hollows, Joanne. "Oliver's twist: Leisure, labour and domestic masculinity in The Naked Chef." International journal of cultural studies 6, no. 2 (2003): 229-248.
This essay is a part of Comestible Issue 9, a special online edition devoted to the wisdom, knowledge, and inspiration from the women who came before us.
Papercut illustration by Anna Brones
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