Summer in the city. To the soundtrack of a thousand pimped-up car stereos, the smell of hot tarmac and burning meat drifts across illegal roof terraces, accompanied by guffaws of manly laughter. It’s the annual ritual of the segregation of the sexes – inescapable even in my showily liberal bit of north London, a place where the very graffiti is feminist. A bit of sun, and in a flash we’re all back in 1955.
Up and down the country, it’s the same story: women chopping tomatoes and slicing burger buns in the kitchen, men standing around the grill squirting lighter fuel about with gay abandon, competing over their facility with fire. Whether they’re drinking cans of bitter or glasses of rosé, the message is the same – women may be able to lead countries and international banks, but the mysterious art of grilling meat is still men’s work.
Not for any practical reason, need I say; go to Thailand, or Vietnam, or Mexico, and you’ll find women are the ones manning the streetside grills, expertly flicking water on to the coals, turning skewers and flipping baby goat with practised ease. Yet in the UK this is one bit of cooking that’s off-limits to us.
Naturally drawn to forbidden fruit, I made a pilgrimage to this year’s Chelsea Flower Show for the sole reason of checking out some very fancy barbecue technology. There may have been fancy plants there, too; I didn’t notice. Having read endless breathy hype about an American take on the ancient Japanese kamado cooker, I was there for only one thing, and that thing was a Big Green Egg.
Like much other barbecue-related paraphernalia, this Dr Seuss-like gadget seems to be marketed principally at men, judging by the laddish blurb on the company’s website. I’m particularly intrigued by the boast that the Egg will allow me to “do five birds at one time . . . non-stop for over 12 hours”.
Though I didn’t see any such shenanigans in SW3, the testosterone was running high at the Egg stand. Men crowded around the hot grills drooling over the enormous steaks – cuts that looked like they’d come off a mastodon. The Blur bassist-turned-professional cheese-botherer, Alex James, even allowed himself to be photographed ogling one lasciviously.
A chef lifted a big green lid to reveal a vast rib of roast beef and there was a deep, collective groan of primal pleasure. But as the boys posed beside it like Fred Flintstone, we women were already discussing the more interesting gastronomic possibilities offered by this avocado-coloured humpty-dumpty. Someone suggested that the high temperatures might be good for pizza. I wondered about smoking fish. The men, meanwhile, stared dreamily at the meat, as if hypnotised by the smell.
And suddenly, all the raw kebabs and burnt sausages I’d grimly endured over the years started to make sense. For males, the barbecue experience was all about the primitive joys of making fire and slinging big chunks of mammoth on there – playing at cavemen, in other words. The food itself was neither here nor there.
It’s not as if grilling is difficult: for all the macho posturing over the best way to arrange the coals, or the benefits of using your own hand as a temperature gauge, cooking doesn’t get much simpler than this. But sadly, all the Y chromosomes in the world aren’t going to turn you into a culinary genius if you’re not basically interested in the food.
The time has come to acknowledge that barbecuing is neither a man’s nor a woman’s work; it’s a job for those who enjoy it. So, yes, a woman’s place is at the grill if she wants it to be – but it’s also standing around nearby, drinking beer and chatting. Equality is important, but so is steak. Salad, by contrast, is definitely overrated.
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