Becoming Butch at the BBQ and Femme By The Oven: Exploring Gendered Foodwork

By Carter Sawatzky

For the masculine-gendered task, I decided to venture out into my dad’s territory and try out barbecuing for myself. Being the lone vegetarian in a meat-eating house has been a difficult journey especially during BBQ events where dads and grandpas pull out all their red meats for backyard festivities. I don’t eat meat, however, so I opted to grill some extra-firm tofu. My sister mocked me for grilling non-meat saying, “you know that’s the most unmanly thing you can grill, right? If you’re going to do the task justice you have to cook real meat.” I wanted to enjoy the fruits of my labour, so I laughed it off and ignored her advice. I found a nice-looking smoked tofu from the store and marinated it for a few hours in a mixture of soy sauce, sesame oil, maple syrup, and balsamic vinegar. After it was done soaking, I made my way to the BBQ. I felt nervous as I was clearly out of my element. I was determined to set aside my fear of turning on the fire and carefully turned on the propane, heated it up, and collected my grilling tools. Once it was all heated up, I placed my tofu steaks on the grill and barbecued them for 4 minutes on each side. I have to admit, there’s some pleasure in hearing them sizzle and pop in the heat. Although it was a bit rainy outside, I felt very butch being outside the house and grilling slabs of protein on the open fire.

For my feminine-gendered task, I wanted to make something I would enjoy eating, so I found the “Chewy Coconut Cookies” recipe off AllRecipes and got started. I hardly do much work in the kitchen to begin with so I already knew I’d be a bit clumsy around the ingredients. I put the oven into preheating mode, collected my dry ingredients, and remembered that an apron would be needed. I had to look around for a few minutes to find where the aprons were stored––little did I know, this pattern of struggling to locate items would continue throughout the baking process. I mixed the flour, baking soda, and salt in a small bowl and started collecting the sugars and butter using various fractions of teaspoons and tablespoons. As I was mixing in the egg and vanilla to the mixture, the oven beeped at me that it was ready to bake but I was not even close to done! I refrained from using our electric mixer and opted for a plastic handheld whisk but it got too clumpy as I added in the flour mixture, so I switched for a medium sized metal whisk. As I added the coconut shavings, this whisk proved incorrect as the mixture quickly became trapped inside its handle. Trying not to get flustered, I used my hands to scoop out the dough onto the making twelve cookies. After baking for ten minutes and cooling down, they turned out amazingly chewy. I felt proud and very parental.

Backyard barbecuing has not always been known as a strictly masculine, paternal activity as I and many others consider it today. When my dad fires up the barbecue on the weekend, I know that my dad is earnestly making an effort to manfully assert his presence in our family life––I also know that the meal will be brimming with juicy, red meats. Since coming out as a vegetarian (as well as queer), I even further removed myself from this masculine performance expected of me. Being assigned male at birth, my dad would consistently show me the ropes of the barbecue every time we would grill burgers or steaks on a summer evening: I was his apprentice and it was expected that one day I would become a barbecuer dad like him.

Like many gendered norms, barbecue’s masculine connotation largely originated in postwar, suburban 1950s America. In “The Birth of the Patio Daddy-O: Outdoor Grilling in Postwar America,” Tim Miller examines multiple prewar cookbooks which draw remarkable insight to a pre-macho-BBQ period. Miller considers Horace Kephart's Camp Cookery, from 1910, which situates outdoor grilling in a specifically camping context (rather than backyard cooking) where groups of people––often men––would be outdoors for long stretches of time; Kephart did not promote this kind of outdoor grilling as the only or most preferable way to cook meat, but as one of many ways to prepare meat. Analyzing Cora-Brown’s Outdoor Cooking, published in 1940, Miller notes how the steak section outlines multiple ways to cook the steak including searing on the stove, frying, or broiling.

Following World War II, Americans were looking to fortify their national pride. Fathers were encouraged to invest in their family life by becoming visibly and actively paternal for their wife and kids. Due to various conditions following 1947––including a significant decline in ticket sales for sporting events, concerts, and theatre as well as an expanding consumer economy that elevated various pictures of fatherhood––leisure activities took the nation by storm which led to an increase in Americans who were “getting off their duffs, leaving the house, and hitting the lake, roads, or backyard.” Barbecues were instrumental in this shift towards masculine domesticity: as Rutherdale explains in “Fatherhood, Masculinity, And The Good Life During Canada’s Baby Boom, 1945-1965,” “fathers cast themselves in memory as they had been cast in the print media of their day: as central figures in the provision and enjoyment of the good life.” Advertisements of the day encouraged men to participate in family life through carefully defined activities which preserved laid-out gender roles like barbecuing, and men followed suit not because they were sheep, but because they saw it as an opportunity to “assert themselves as successful family men, not just conform to behaviors designed for particular target markets.” My dad works as a full-time accountant, but it was well-known that he had felt various insecurities about working alone and the potential unmanliness of his job so barbecuing meats for the family became one method to reassure his place as “head” of our family: a sign that he not only brought home the bacon, but he also provided and prepared the bacon.

After a chaotic wartime, togetherness was prioritized in the postwar period and the site of the backyard barbecue became essential in straddling the line in an activity involving the family while still remaining within the realm of maleness. It flips the feminine kitchen norms on its head enough as men cook with huge utensils and everyone eats with their hands. Kristin L. Matthews draws upon Roland Barthes’ “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption” (1961) in making the argument that barbecue’s images, practices, and philosophy reflect a collective imagination which can be seen as signs of American values, goals, and fears. As America faced a number of conflicts abroad including the continuing Cold War tensions, the war in Korea, and Europe’s postwar reconstruction, the barbecue served in part as a “propagandistic weapon” in America’s global war against communism. Men were able to showcase the bountiful fruits of capitalism in grilling the finest of red meats and simultaneously display national values by evoking myths of pioneering, manifest destiny, and American exceptionalism. In America, instability was threatening an idyllic postwar peace––there was the growing threat of communist infiltration, swelling racial divides, a burgeoning civil rights movement, and more women in the workforce. The 1950s barbecue succeeded in providing an escapist outlet: it clarified gender roles by having dad as chef and mom as sous chef who would clean up after. The barbecue established an American sanctuary in the backyard of the heteronormative, white, middleclass home when other sanctuaries could not be promised. The dad’s barbecue area was not a space for racial or economic diversity: it was reserved primarily for white, male, middleclass fathers seeking the good life and advertising reflected this exclusivity. While at the barbecue grilling my tofu, I felt alarmingly self-aware of this history and did not feel comfortable: I tried my best to imagine how others have reclaimed the site of the barbecue. Knowing that countless animals have been killed to be grilled in our backyard did not ease my feelings.

Meat consumption itself is important for the performance of one’s masculinity: the popular method of roasting leaves the meat appearing raw, bloody which draws upon “mythologies of masculine strength and virility deriving from animal blood” Frugality and mundanity is rejected in much barbecuing activity so as to distance itself from feminine domesticity and everyday womanly duties. Today, meat-eating is still a staple of masculine virility in North American culture––the burger having outdone the car as the symbol of quintessential America attests to this fact. The more men sit in their desk jobs and offices, the more they want to be soothed in their masculinity by way of the bleeding meat which acts as the last symbol of machismo: it is an act of domination of nonhumans and, arguably, over women.

Growing up, I have been largely spared kitchen duties. My mom pledged to not burden her kids the way she felt burdened by the amount of cooking help my grandma made her do. My grandma was well-known for donating delicious soups, breads, and desserts for others in the community but my mom––influenced by the feminist movements of the nineties––has always said that she hates being in the kitchen and often makes uncomplicated meals and limited baked items. Personally, I felt hesitant to don an apron and get to baking because of the internalized misogyny I have learned growing up, but I discovered quickly as I started that there’s something wonderful about making something tasty out of relatively nothing––I had friends coming over later and I realized I could offer my cookies to them as a treat.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the kitchen was a primary conduit for women’s self expression as they were encouraged to demonstrate their patriotism and care through their designated wifely roles in homemaking and cooking. The ideal separation of the private and public spheres continued until the end of World War I. This ideology aimed to safeguard women from the threats of the outside world and, at the same time, make them responsible for upholding traditional “family values.” Historically, baking has served as an opportunity for community between women in many cultures. Spending time together in the time-consuming, tedious processes of baking bread, pastries, baked goods, or cakes was a way to share knowledge, create kinship bonds, and support each other. Various innovations have taken place over time including the shifts from baking powder to convection ovens to boxed cake mixes to pre-sliced bread which have all altered the way this communal act took place. In “Reading the Cakes,” Ann Romines argues that cakes, and by extension all food, are a linguistic medium which function as a “female language that is clearly alive, not dead, and that can express passion as well as preservation.” My grandma’s kitchen skills clearly reflect this. Sophie Johnson suggests that “baking requires (and imbues) a kind of trust that is absent in everyday cooking… The premise that flour and water and sugar and yeast––practically useless on their own––could combine to make something like a loaf of bread requires trust.” In itself, baked goods, including cakes, cookies, and breads are “delicate emulsion[s] in constant process of change and decay; [they] subvert fixity, permanence and closure.” I found while preparing ingredients that I had to have extra patience with the process of measuring seemingly arbitrary fractions––the amount of mathematics involved surprised me. I thought about the often thankless hard work my mom and grandma did with their bulk baking of cookies and dessert-making. It is rigorous care work.

Baked items are not as straightforward as the more masculine meats: for example, when locating the focal point of a meal, one may ask “where’s the beef?” but baked goods are seldom the center of attention in meals. They are not necessary for nutrition and are instead made to express care, provide pleasure for the family, and express one’s femininity. Despite some of its function as decorative or adornments to meals, baking was no simple task. The lack of many baking technologies we are familiar with today certainly did not help to make it easier for women. While several appliances were invented in the late nineteenth century––such as the electric stove (1896) and the refrigerator (about 1876)––they were not available widespread until the early twentieth century. Even then, items like the electric refrigerator remained unaffordable to most working class families until the mid-1900s. Appliances like the icebox, while helpful, also meant new chores and regular upkeep for the housewife as efficiency and hygiene became more important values. The cleanup from barbecuing paled in comparison to the amount of baking cleanup; I couldn’t help but think of the amount of upkeep and cleanup my grandma still goes through.

During the Depression, homemaking lost some of its allure as Stephanie Coontz explains that “employed women found themselves working a longer double shift” as they tried to save money by baking from scratch and baking more than needed as bulk ingredients were cheaper. In the 1950s, popular cookbooks emphasized that a “happy, well-adjusted woman focused her energies on homemaking and raising children.” Regarding cookbooks from the postwar era in “The Way to a Man’s Heart: Gender Roles, Domestic Ideology, and Cookbooks in the 1950s,” Jessamyn Neuhaus explains:

The women who baked, basted, glazed, and decorated throughout postwar cookbooks were figments of the postwar American imagination. They were expressions of desires and fears in a nation strained by the war and baffled by the unstoppable social changes that shaped the 1950s. These women were as fictional as Betty Crocker and constructed for a very similar purpose: to soothe and reassure.

The evolution of the Easy-Bake Oven is an interesting case study for changing gender norms. When the toy product first launched in 1963, American women were still expected to take on the kitchen for their portion of family labour, yet, Kenner Products viewed boys as a marketing opportunity for their bottom line. Despite the product largely thought of as a girls’ toy by the general public, Easy-Bake Oven advertisements from its inception featured both girls and boys. In 2002, Kenner Products released the boy-specific Queasy Bake Cookerator which offered gross-sounding recipes with titles like Mud ’n’ Crud, Worms ’n’ Bugs, Dip ’n’ Drool Dog Bones, or Delicious Dirt, but in reality, they were just aliases for cake, cookie, and gelatin mixes––it unfortunately flopped with their desired demographic. The next year, in 2003, they released the Real Meal Oven which attempted to change course from gross-out humour towards a toy oven that would allow girls and boys to make more masculine, savoury meals such as pizza, mac ‘n’ cheese, and nachos. The evolution of Easy-Bake Ovens proves that baking is still treated as inferior to the superior restaurant territory of men.

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