Dads in the kitchen

More than ever, dads are taking charge of cooking at home. We look at why, and what it means for the family.

Love or loathe the plucky scamp, foghorn food campaigner Jamie Oliver has transformed our food culture. As well as changing school dinners and setting up community cooking colleges, he’s also been a strong vocal advocate of traditional family values. He’s the vanguard of the ‘cool dads’ generation and helped make it hip for men to strap a triple papoose to their torso, write columns on nappy rash, and stay at home fiddling with a food processor. 

The Jamie Oliver effect

As well as stronger laws supporting paternity leave, a cultural shift in attitudes directly correlates with more male TV chefs. Food editor and father of two Barney Desmazery calls this the ‘Jamie Oliver effect’, but the Essex cavalier is not a solo sailor. Gordon Ramsey’s programmes regularly feature his children, obliviously dunking their podgy hands into bowls of shortbread dough. Marco Pierre White even roped his little boy into helping advertise coagulated stockpots – at least I hope that’s his son. 

While these prolific chefs parade their children as an adjunct, some personalities have based an entire career on being a dad who cooks with children. My Daddy Cooks was an amateur blog started in 2009 by Nick Coffer. It’s now a book, and the author a budding broadcaster. Also, Alex Mackay centres his recipes on family cooking and educating children through the kitchen. 

Smashing stigmas

Barney says the shift happened during the last 10 to 15 years. “I now know a lot of stay-at-home dads who do all the cooking. Even in families where the dad works, more men are interested in food and any stigma is disappearing. I’d say women still do more daily cooking since men are more likely to be trophy cooks, but things have really changed.” 

So what does this mean for the family?  Alex sees cooking with the nippers as “practical playtime” – a window of opportunity for “quality time” and also for education. “You can teach children to celebrate and understand food, so it becomes normal for both mums and dads to be in the kitchen. Plus kids naturally like picking herbs, smashing garlic, breaking eggs.”

Too twee?

Barney agrees, and says “if you teach a 7-year-old how to make one proper dish a month until they’re 15, they’ll end up with a repertoire of 96 dishes.” Aside from developing a broad palette – Alex says his 4-year-old son demanded bouillabaisse on his last birthday – dads cooking with kids influences attitudes. It facilitates balance in the family, a greater likelihood of sitting down at a table together, and removes the burden from mum. 

Oliver’s Army has sped up natural progression to a more equal world and that can’t be a bad thing. But is ‘daddy’ cooking a twee step too far? Talk to us in the Comments box below. 

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