The Manly Art of Cooking

One of my other interests is collecting and selling used and rare books, which exposes me to any number of sources of weird and wonderful cookbooks. I’m especially fond of cookbooks from the 1950s and 60s—a period that saw the rising post-war middle class in North America slide right into hedonistic excess. It is also a period that, in publishing, saw creative types push the boundaries of mainstream taste in terms of book design and illustration.

These two trends in the middle of the Twentieth Century resulted in a dramatic expansion of the design palette for books—often unrestrained by something as pedestrian as good taste. To get a rough idea of what I mean, check out these galleries of Ballantine and Penguin book covers. Some of the Penguins are more contemporary, but you get the gist, right?—the sublime and the ridiculous.

Two of my recent favourites are in the slightly disreputable sub-genre of cookbooks for men.

For example, I once sold a copy of Len Deighton’s ABC of French Food. Better known as a writer of spy thrillers, Deighton wrote several books based on his passion for French food, including a collection of “cook-strips,” originally published in The Observer, recently reprinted as French Cooking for Men.

The assumption that most of these kinds of cookbooks start with is that they have to convince their potential readers—i.e. red-blooded males—that it’s okay for them to cook at all. Despite the fact that professional cooking has been dominated by men since at least the time of Brillat-Savarin and Escoffier, home cooking had (let’s face it, has) long been thought of as the province of women. And when I say “province” I’m dancing around words like “duty.”

I could rant at length here about how the prominence of contemporary food culture still hasn’t completely eliminated the retrograde idea that a man cooking is somehow emasculated, but that would make me unhappy. I prefer to have more fun with my digressions, so let’s just press on.

The first of these manly cookbooks in my collection, I received from our friend Richard at the Bytown Bookshop: A Man’s Cookbook by Raymond Oliver, published in French in 1958 and for Americans in 1961.

His preface is worth the price of admission on its own. He launches immediately into a campaign to lure men to the art of cooking by emphasizing the creative and competitive:

“I should like to set down as a first proposition—and in so doing I claim no originality—that cooking is an art. But I also want to add immediately, and with equal conviction, that it can also be a game full of variety and surprises, a fascinating game. This is in fact an idea I have heard voiced in many a masculine get-together.”

He then takes a definitive stand that men are better cooks than women.* According to Oliver, women are  keepers of culinary tradition, but lack the creative impulse that drives the best male gourmets:

“Women, however, by reason of their very virtues, because they are the mothers and the perpetuators of the race, cannot afford to be as adventurous, as daring, as men.”

“Men who like to cook are a little like Sunday painters, or like those who on that day of the week relax by making model planes. The manual activity they indulge in before their stove is an outlet for them, a field of exploration into which a good deal of poetry enters.”

“…men all indulge in cooking through love of the art and in a spirit of joy. A few women engage in it through love and with pleasure, but many simply because they have to and with a feeling of despairing monotony.”

While his sexism and egotism might be off-putting, his defense of dilettantism is pretty charming, at least to me…a dilettante.

Oliver provides many short pieces on a wide variety of tools & techniques in addition to some recipes. His descriptions of methods can sometimes verge on the poetic, consider his piece on le feu d’enfer or Hell’s Fire for example:

“The hell’s fire is an oven that can be heated to a point where the lining becomes red-hot. A roast placed in such an oven is violently seared by the heat, then removed, and continues cooking—should we say self-cooking?—through the heat it has acquired.”

His insistence on cooking as an art lead him to include many maddeningly vague “recipes” such as this one for tête de mouton:

“A sheepshead should be split in two and grilled. Prepared in this way, it makes a particularly succulent dish.”

He defends this approach in the preface by saying that exact measurements are a “personal matter” between you, the cook, and your own potential culinary masterpiece. He namechecks Renoir and Van Gogh. Oliver wrote this cook book as simultaneously a snob and a slacker. He essentially chastises us for expecting clearer instructions and I kind of love him for it. Once you spend some time digging around the book, you realize that there is a wealth of idiosyncratically presented anecdotal information on French cooking provided.

My second choice seems wildly progressive compared to A Man’s Cookbook, the Esquire Party Book, For Entertaining Around the Clock by the Editors of Esquire Magazine, circa 1963.

Actually, the Esquire Party Book is the clear favourite here based on the excellent—and very 1960s—design and illustration work by the legendary Seymour Chwast:

His work is so completely charming and of the period that it’s worth flipping through the book on the strength of the pictures alone.

But beyond the lovely illustrations, there are some really good party tips in this book. It’s organized by time of day: breakfast gathering to nightcap, essentially; and provides cocktail, food, decorating, activity and music suggestions. There are some laughably bad recipes—such as the one called crab “Mongole” that starts with 2 cans each of tomato soup, pea soup and consommé—but there are also some classics, particularly in the dinner section. I also quite liked the smørrebrød section, which was quite fashionable for a time in the 1960s and has all kinds of potential for contemporary translations.

I was also really taken with a little piece in the introductory section that admonishes the good host to fully support teetotalers among his guests, including suggestions for cocktails that could be prepared virgin-style with no one noticing. In a book with this many drink recipes and serving suggestions—in a generally boozed soaked time—this part comes across as very progressive and humane.

A Man’s Cookbook rewards the archaeologist with some good information, based on the highly specific personal experience of a sexist and classist Frenchman from the 1950s; whereas the Esquire Party Book attempts to be egalitarian and open minded—at least as far as the reader’s of Esquire in the 1960s pictured themselves. Both reward patient readers with all kinds of unintended laughs at the very least.

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*The irony here is that A Mans’ Cookbook was published in America the same year as Julia Child’s unquestionably, vastly superior Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In the Iron Chef stadium of my imagination, Juila stomps Oliver using sweetbreads as the secret ingredient and a classic American method…like maybe chicken frying.