Can't cook, won't cook - Young British women "can't cook to save their lives"

telegraph - uk ^ | 23/10/2005) | Chris Hastings and Elizabeth Day

[dennisw]

 

Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay

15 May 2005: Ramsay's pizza joke outrages vegetarians

 

He is infamous for his raging four-letter-word tirades but now Gordon Ramsay has managed to insult 50 per cent of the population without uttering a single expletive.

The television chef has provoked uproar by claiming that young British women "can't cook to save their lives". In a move likely to alienate his army of female fans, the 38-year-old Michelin-starred chef, who is currently filming a new series for Channel 4, says that Britain has produced a generation of women who can "mix a cocktail" but are incapable of doing anything else in the kitchen.

Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay The former professional footballer said that while more and more men were making their mark in the kitchen, far too many women were surviving on a daily diet of expensive and unhealthy ready-made meals.

"I have been visiting ladies' houses up and down the country with our film crew and you'd be amazed how little cooking the girls are doing," he said. "When they eat, they cheat - it's ready meals and pre-prepared meals all the way.

"Seriously, there are huge numbers of young women out there who know how to mix cocktails but can't cook to save their lives, whereas men are finding their way into the kitchen in ever-growing numbers. Trust me: I am only telling you what I've discovered."

The comments might come as a shock to Ramsay's wife, Tana, who cooks for their four young children in a separate kitchen at home.

Ramsay, who has become an unlikely sex symbol through his regular television appearances, makes his scathing comments in an interview to promote his new series, The F Word, in which he cooks a three-course meal for each episode.

He tells the current edition of Radio Times that he has no time for "stick-thin models who never eat" and he says that he would refuse to serve anyone in his restaurants who asked to go off menu because they were "on a stupid diet like the Atkins or GI".

"They would be out of the door before they knew what was happening," he said.

His damning verdict on the culinary skills of young women is causing controversy. Female cooks and writers accuse him of ignoring the inroads made by a new generation of women chefs into what was previously a male-dominated world.

The number of female chefs at work in Britain has been rising steadily for years. They include Ramsay's former protégée, Angela Hartnett, the 36-year-old chef-patron at the Connaught in Mayfair, central London, in addition to Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray at the River Café in Hammersmith, west London, who trained Jamie Oliver.

Clarissa Dickson Wright, who shot to fame as one half of television's Two Fat Ladies, said that Ramsay's remarks were "rubbish and about 10 years out of date".

Ms Dickson Wright, who was until recently the rector of Aberdeen University, said: "I think when I first joined the university there were young women students who didn't know how to cook. But I think the situation has completely changed over the past five or six years.

"Young women have read books by food experts and chefs and are now much better informed on what they should eat and how they should prepare it.

"I have noticed the sea change because unlike a lot of so called celebrity chefs I spend my time with real people rather than the glitterati."

Tamasin Day-Lewis, a food writer who contributes to The Daily Telegraph and Vanity Fair, described the Ramsay thesis as "complete b*****ks".

"I have a 20-year-old daughter at Bristol University who has already written a student cookbook and prides herself on cooking from scratch, buying good food and making sure her store cupboard of essentials never runs out," she said.

"My three children are all like that and so are their friends."

Skye Gyngell, a chef and the food editor of Vogue, agreed that cooking was a dying art but said it was "bull***t" to suggest that women were worse than men.

"We live in a world of convenience and life is so quick that a lot of us can no longer be bothered to learn cooking as a craft or skill," she said.

Ruth Watson, the proprietor of the Crown and Castle Inn at Orford in Suffolk, who presents Channel Five's The Hotel Inspector, said: "I don't disagree that a lot of people aren't bothering to cook real food during the week but as Gordon Ramsay seems to rate everyone on the size and efficacy of their balls, it's hardly surprising he gives women the thumbs down."

Nigella Lawson, the television chef and chat show host, has herself previously attacked British women for "vaunting their undomesticity".

"Of my friends, it is mostly the men, not the women, who cook," she said.

[VOA]

IIRC, I heard there was a saying in Vietnam (during the French colonial days) that
all a man needed to be happy was three things:
1. American car
2. French-style house
and
3. Japanese wife

[Hermann the Cherusker]

We didn't have them in Chicago in 1985! There were white button mushrooms, or canned

That's because Mushrooms aren't grown in Illinois and South Mill hadn't started shipping fresh Chester and Berks County Pennsylvania Mushrooms all over the eastern part of the country yet. Places which grow Mushrooms (eastern Pennsylvania with roughly 45-50% of US production, and California with roughly 20%) had fresh Mushrooms. Pretty much everywhere else did not.

[Hermann the Cherusker]

I was looking for an article, and saw this.