Awwwwwww Yeeeeeaaaaah. Via digiyesica @ Flickr
The Dude and I enjoyed a leisurely late breakfast out this weekend, and while lingering over our plates, we started swapping stories about all the pancake breakfasts we went to (willingly or not) while growing up as Midwestern Protestants.
There were church functions, Moose Lodges, all-you-can-eats down at the VFW Hall, follow-ups to 5Ks, fundraisers, and community gatherings…we have eaten our weight in pancakes many times over.
And in all that time, it never occurred to me to notice that every. single. one. of those pancake breakfasts was cooked by groups of men. Of course, we’d both also been to all other types of communal meals (chicken-n-dumplings, pizza parties, pot-luck out the wing-wang), and all of those were executed by women; typically stout, aproned matrons.
The more I thought about it, the weirder it seemed–and continues to seem–to me. And then I realized that in my own home, the Dude is The Breakfast Guy. Pancakes, waffles, omelets, crepes, steel-cut oats… I know how to make all those things, quite well, but they have, at some point, become his territory. I’m not really complaining, since I’m only too happy to loll in bed, reading, waiting for him to bring a plate in to me. But now I’m wondering what’s up with this affiliation.
My dad wasn’t a breakfast-cook, but he did have his specialities: pizza from scratch, chile con queso, chex mix. Fun food. Occasional food. And, of course, outdoor food: meat on the grill. But the pot roasts and chicken-and-rice dishes and the soups and vegetable sides that we subsisted on were all Mom. Or almost all her.
So, is it that breakfast foods are fun foods? Or occasional (weekend only) foods? Or that they’re not as difficult and involved as your average dinner-from-scratch? Is there a sausage component that I’m overlooking in an attempt not to make a cheap joke?
Few families I know divide up the cooking 50/50 (we try, but…no), but have you noticed any particular patterns in your households? And what do you make of this guys-do-breakfast thing?
Huh. I do most of the cooking in our house, and that includes an Elaborate Breakfast on a saturday (We’re British, so an elaborate breakfast is anything that is not cereal or a slice of toast).
I will admit to loving making the fun food, and that’s because my dad and I used to cook on Saturdays at home- weekends were for fancy meals and he worked away during the week, so Saturday was the “boys cook” night, and it’s how we bonded. He likes to cook too, soups especially, and is doing it more and more now that he’s retired. But he didn’t have the chance to do this often because of his work- even when he was at home during the week, he’d routinely get in past dinnertime, and that pushed the job onto my mum who was a teacher and thus got home earlier (until we were all old enough to start helping out properly, anyway).
I think this might be a hangover from a generation where male figures cooked when they had the time, and to relax, whereas the actual work of cooking was seen as women’s work due to a fun combination of sexism and time constraints.
But yeah, not in our house. I do cook all the breakfasts, but I cook all the rest of the food as well, so it’s not really a thing.
My family has always been a little different, since my dad makes most of our meals. My mom is a schoolteacher, and my dad has either worked from home or had a flexible work schedule since I was pretty young, so it made sense for him to be the main cook. Also, he’s the pickiest eater in the family (unless you count my vegetarianism as pickiness), so it’s easier for him to cook. My mom cooks the meals for holidays (because she’s a Jewish mother and loves nothing more than feeding large groups of people), but dad takes care of weekday food.
That aside, I feel like breakfast foods are “man territory” because they’re bachelorhood foods. Most breakfast foods are very nutritious, and easy to adapt to most meals. Also, it’s fairly easy to order in lunch and dinner, but breakfast is a meal that, most of the time, you need to make for yourself.
Sorry if this doesn’t make any sense. I just woke up.
Bigstepdaddy, who raised me, is a most outstanding breakfast cook. His French toast–made with Arnold’s white bread–is legendary. Every weekend when I was a kid, he’d make French toast or pancakes for me and my sister, and serve MamaSharper breakfast in bed.
Otherwise, his repetoire was limited to barbecue chicken and burgers on the grill (which he did very well). MamaSharper cooked all the other meals (although we kids made our own breakfasts and packed our own school lunches from about 5th grade on).
Funny you should mention this – my dad was the breakfast cook in our house as well. My mom was a stay-at-home parent for most of my childhood, and my dad worked full-time, yet every morning he did breakfast and packed our lunches. His reasoning was that it was one of the few times during the week he could really hang out with us, since he often arrived home late in the evening. He definitely made the better scrambled eggs, and would frequently serve nontraditional breakfast foods, like chicken noodle soup, or grilled cheese sandwiches in lieu of toast.
Now all that said, although breakfast was generally my dad’s area, on weekends when we would break out the pancake griddle, that was my mom’s thing. Go figure.
A few years ago, my brother asked for this “Pancake Magic” automatic pancake flipping skillet thing (As Seen on TV!) and I gave it to his for Christmas. He was very excited to be able to flip his pancakes more efficiently.
Boyfriend and I are roughly equal in the pancake making, mostly because I think mine are tastier.
My dad was the breakfast guy in my family too, but I think it’s because he’s gotten up at 5am-6am as long as I can remember. Thus, he started the coffee, and if it was a weekend, he started the (emphatically not from scratch) sweet rolls, or made the pancakes or the French toast. Eggs and bacon were all him.
The one exception was muffins/other breakfast quick breads, which my mom always made when she rolled out of bed.
My father expects my mother to cook AND dish out his food for him. They are in their 80′s and from an even more patriarchal society than ours, so I give him a pass.
My husband cooks stereotypical MAN food: breakfast on weekends, bbq, steaks, chops.
Cooking well is an art and a craft that is difficult to perfect and requires lots of practice. I wonder if men who cook occasionally like these “easier” dishes because they are all level 1 recipes to conquer. They don’t require any long term commitment to cooking as a craft.
My dad had a few specialties, including amazing waffles, delicious egg rolls, and anything grilled. My mom did most of the cooking, including breakfasts. My husband’s father is the exclusive breakfast cook, and fed us breakfast every morning we were there over the holidays, but otherwise seems to only cook lunch or dinner if a grill is involved.
In my house, I cook most of the dinners because cooking is my hobby. My husband and I usually cook weekend breakfasts as a team. His real specialty is Mexican Chicken Casserole.
I make the pancakes in the house; my wife specializes in omelettes and French toast. Other than that, breakfast is usually some sort of cereal and fruit.
We cook as we need to — if she’s busy, I handle dinner and if I’m busy she takes on the cooking chores. We’re not preparing complicated meals most of the time, so its easy to switch off. I used to cook a lot more from scratch when I was a bachelor, but now that I’m married, it’s mostly pre-prepared or mixable stuff. I miss actual cooking.
Oh, thanks a lot, Ph.Dork. I’m already hungry and it’s only 11 AM. Well, I have been up since 6, now I think about it.
But back to the topic at hand. My dad never cooked anything. Ever. I don’t recall seeing him with a cooking tool or a pot in his hand at any time in my life. His job was to sweep the kitchen floor after dinner. That was it.
My husband grills and makes great burgers, which we lovingly call Daddy-burgers. He used to make (sort of average) pancakes on Saturday mornings, but when I got religion and we started observing Shabbat, I began making challah French toast on Sunday mornings instead. He can cook for himself if need be, but I’m the better cook, so I do the great majority of that.
Our son started cooking when he moved out about 18 months ago, and he seems to enjoy it. He has yet to invite us over for a meal, though, so I don’t know if he’s any good or not.
My parents (who worked in the same department of the same company and always got home at the same time) shared the cooking about 50/50. What I didn’t realize until my father died and my mother lived alone was that while my father loved to cook, my mother never liked it. They were both excellent cooks, but my father did it willingly, made sure he passed on his love to us, and did the fun cooking. My mother made dinners (and weekday breakfasts), but rarely a dessert and never a fun breakfast. My father died four years ago, and I can count the number of times she’s cooked (for us or for herself) on one hand. We have a pizza-making date in the future because I need some dough-rolling tips, but I had to make a specific request for something she used to make three or four times a month. All desserts, fancy breakfasts, and snacks were made by my father.
I do the vast majority of the cooking in our house, mostly because I’m a passionate cook and don’t consider it a chore. Kitchen cleaning is much more a point of contention. My husband is a chemist who can follow any recipe to technical perfection, but he is not an inspired or creative cook. The few recipes that he brought to the marriage though do tend to be hangover breakfasts. For lunch and dinner he ate a lot of fast food in college, but leisurely weekend breakfasts when no one wanted to leave the house were his specialty, and I don’t think that’s unusual for young men. Any fancy breakfast baking is my job, but hashes, omelets, and anything greasy is very much his domain.
My husband does just about 100% of the cooking in our house because he likes it and I really don’t. I love to bake and so whenever it comes to desserts or bread, I’m the one in the kitchen. But otherwise, unless he needs a hand with something, it’s his territory.
My father, however, was a definite breakfast/stereotypical man food cook. As a teenager I was always woken up on Saturday morning by my father banging on my door telling me breakfast was ready. My mother hated cooking, a feeling she passed on to me, but out of necessity she prepared all of the weekday meals. My father worked long hours, often not getting home until after 8 o’clock at night. I think he probably would have cooked more if he could given how much he does now that he works a lot less.
I was raised in a single-mom household and lived with my grandparents most weekends while she worked. My Grandmama was a fabulous cook, but she never made breakfast. That was Granddaddy territory. They were great, elaborate, artery-hardening feasts* that we still refer to as “Granddaddy Breakfasts.” They were so *his* that there is a family story of my sister waking up, freaking out, and running to him in the front yard in her nightgown yelling “Granddaddy help! Grandmama is making breakfast!”
I’m not sure why it was that way. They certainly weren’t “easy” breakfasts. I can’t recall him ever cooking any other kind of food though.
*A typical breakfast consisted of fried eggs, regular bacon, hog jowl bacon, sausage, biscuits and sausage gravy AND biscuits with a mixture of Kayro Syrup and butter, toast for my sister (who hated biscuits), milk, and orange juice. My arteries hurt just thinking about it. Yum!
@FreshPeaches: Are you Southern? Because I am and Southerners are the only folks I know who use Karo syrup on their biscuits or pancakes. That and/or blackstrap molasses.
My boyfriend knew nothing of cooking before we started going out and says he’s been inspired by my cooking (I am flattered). He has mastered scrambled eggs, and his are quite good, if a little heavy on the paprika for my taste. But other than that, if something is going to be cooked, I am the one who will be cooking.
My grandfather taught me to pour the syrup in a saucer and then add the butter and mix until it’s a truly disgusting color. Smear it on the biscuit and chow down. He didn’t use Karo, and looking online, it must have been Lyle’s Golden Syrup.
And on topic, in our community Pancake Day is totally a Rotarian occasion which means that it’s all men. Also the Elks do breakfast once a month. Never even noticed the connection before.
a) at my grandparents’ church (the only one i know about) all the church meals are done by the mens club.
b) my boyfriend cooks most of the time but i tend to be the breakfast person as well as the elaborate recipe person. he cooks much more basic,easy to prepare meals. i also tend to make more desserts. although we recently got a panini maker so for the past 3 weeks all we eat is sandwiches so we each make our own. the fella is also great at cooking over an open fire (like camping style, not grilling) so when we go camping that on him.
c) grew up with a single mom so she cooked all the meals but with my grandparents the cooking duties were split really evenly. the only thing my grandpa won’t make is pie crust (and really its just as well. he tried once and it was a disaster) and he won’t clean fish. otherwise its really evenly split up. i think its because my grandmother was in middle management at a fortune 500 company while my grandfather was an art teacher. he had a more flexible schedule, was always home earlier, etc. also, he was raised by a single mother who was insistent that her sons learn how to take care of themselves.
Hmmm…
My Husband does *all* the subsistence cooking in our house. He likes to cook, I don’t. Except the guacamole – I do it better, and the breakfast food. I love breakfast food so much I put a moratorium on my aversion for cooking for that.
Growing up, my mom did the everyday cooking, my dad did the elaborate dinner-party dishes: the fettucini alfredo (from scratch – and I mean making the pasta), the chocolate mousse, the enchiladas from scratch. It started as a way to give my mom a break, but he started to love doing the big all-day cooking stuff. They split big event meals like Thanksgiving and Christmas about 50-50. But my mom does all breakfasts: eggs and buttermilk biscuits are my mom’s specialty! (except waffles, the waffle iron is one of my dad’s favorite toys.)
Hmm, since I live alone and don’t cook, I’ll have to cite my parents’ example. Dad and stepmom are both fabulous cooks, but neither of them ever really cooked breakfast. Dad is genius at cooking meat (BBQ or roast chicken, whatever works) and making Chinese recipes, stepmom makes wonderful Indian food, pasta, and desserts. It’s a pretty equal division, As for mom and stepdad, my mom…well, she’s culinarily challenged. She can make a few things, but her skills are best summed up with this example: her meatloaf is always slightly gray in color. The bulk of the cooking falls to stepdad, who makes insanely delicious pasta sauces from scratch along with really good chicken breasts and even duck.
I have not seen any of my four parents cook breakfast food in over a year; it’s almost always bagels at Dad’s house and kashi or toast or yogurt at mom’s.
I definitely haven’t seen that to be consistently the case with my parents or my partners. My mother, a stay-at-home mom until middle school, did most of the day-to-day cooking when we were growing up – at least until my sister and I were old enough to reach the stovetop, and eventually take over. My dad – who was actually a chef for a while in his bachelor days, and, frankly, a better cook than my mother – would do the “special” cooking: turkey and cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving, ham on Christmas, occasional fancy meals, and etc. We also had a tradition where Mom would sleep in Saturday mornings and he would make a pot of rice, as my mother hated rice and the rest of us loved it, so this was our only time to eat it.
Most of the guys I’ve dated long-term/lived with (n=7) have lived on their own for a while and know how to do day-to-day cooking. I did nearly all of the cooking with #1 because I was unemployed (but he’d do special-occasion cooking, including breakfast); and again did nearly all of the cooking with #2 because he claimed he ‘didn’t know how to cook’ (uh-huh); and with the rest we split the cooking depending on our respective work schedules. But each of them had special occasion/specialty dishes they liked to make – which included breakfasts (omelettes in particular; though one guy never cooked or ate anything other than cereal for breakfast), but as often as not were dinner dishes. So I haven’t seen the same consistent trend in my experience.
Btw, I think breakfast in bed is vastly overrated and I’m deeply grateful that I was never the recipient of such a thing. I only eat in bed when I’m good and sick, and it’s not an enjoyable experience.
Wow.. it’s interesting how things at once stay the same, and change, especially in the household.
In the current household, the BF does the most cooking, including special event cooking and breakfasts (his garlic mushrooms are yummy). He certainly can cook up a storm.
I do a very occassional breakfast – soft boiled eggs with toast soldiers (we both like it, and it reminds us of our childhoods). But he does most of the cooking. Recently he mentioned that he likes to cook especially when he’s cooking for someone he loves.
For the most recent end of year festive season, we tried something different, and split the cooking about 50-50. I roasted a lamb (to have cold with lashings of mustard), made potato salad, and baked desert (cherry clafoutis). He did garlic honey soy chicken, bbq’ed prawns (in coriander, chili, and lime and lemon juice) and tomato salad.
I haven’t really been interested in cooking, and after my parents divorced my *big* responsibility was looking after the car, which suited me. Though in saying that my mum makes great food, and she certainly did most of the cooking (big event or otherwise).
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen my mom make pancakes. My dad makes great ones. My mom likes to wake up when it’s close to lunch time and doesn’t like cooking when she doesn’t have to. Interesting.
Growing up, my dad did pancakes, and I think it was because he’d make the sweetmilk pancakes me and my sister liked (mom prefers buttermilk). Also, I kind of miss his mac and cheese.
Now, husbeast makes breakfast, but that’s because I don’t eat it (at least not in the morning). He also has this thing where he won’t eat eggs unless he has cooked them. We split other cooking around work/school schedules, with it weighing a little heavy on me making dinner. I’m working on that, especially getting husbeast to realize that shopping isn’t just something you go do, but a chore that requires forethought and planning. And that being my sous chef isn’t a job you can do while sitting on the couch half the time
Hmm. I didn’t realize this man-breakfast thing was so widespread! I cook dinner for him about twice a week (more when I’m on school break) and he cooks dinner for me when I’m in school and have late classes. Most of the time, dinner is an egalitarian affair in which someone is salad person and someone is entree person. On weekends, sometimes we cook together, but pancakes? His thing. I have tried to be the maker of pancakes, but mine just aren’t that great. I lack in patience.
Growing up, my dad was the pancakes guy. Maybe I’m just clinging to a remnant of my childhood.
But hey, I make great tortillas!
My parents split the cooking depending on who’s working more. It took me a while to figure out that this was the standard. So for several years when mum was taking us to school and bringing us home, dad (usually) made our lunches and breakfast, she made dinner. Now, he’s home first so he cooks and still does breakfast. Weekends are a free for all. They’re about 60.
My boyfriend does 99% of food buying, preparation and cleaning up. He’s not a huge fan of my cooking (thinks I rely on the microwave too much, for one thing), and I’m a huge fan of not cooking (left to myself I wouldn’t cook more than once a week and consider pasta or rice an acceptable meal on their own. He disagrees). We’re in our late twenties.
My nan (born about 1912) and grannie (born about 1930) did all the cooking for their families AFAIK. My grandad did have a Delia Smith cake recipe he made when us grandkids were coming to visit and my grandpa peels veg.
I always find it interesting whether people who are living together have even talked about who does what chore-wise. In most of the hetero couples I know where it’s not woman-does-everything-and-grumbles it seems to be a man cooks, woman does laundry trade-off.
@BeckySharper, I am indeed Southern! If the Karo syrup didn’t give me away the hog jowl would have!