Cassowary Crossing

HOW BLOKES MAKE A MEAL
Surviving the heat of an all-male cooking course

(c) David Astle

Tonight we start where all life starts: the egg. How to crack it, pour it, whip it. How to glide it into water for poaching. How to beat it into froth for zabaglione. How to devil it. Strain it. In short, how to befriend the egg. How to match it with asparagus, or fold it in a pan and be comfortable in your own skin. Tonight is The Egg Manifesto, a casual meet-and-beat for half-a-dozen egg-scared men.

Fear is no exaggeration, not when it comes to blokes and cooking. Fear and flat-out ignorance. As a gender we have a habit of sidestepping stovetops and one big reason boils down to embarrassment. Neither eggs nor free-range chickens fill us with calm. The exceptions in the kitchen shine – your naked chefs and iron chefs – but the average bloke is too often cowed by things culinary.

At 44 I can cook. Let me rephrase that: I can cope in the kitchen, but wouldn’t presume to label the space a natural habitat. Mum was the first honorary caterer in my life. (As domestic dishwasher, Dad came off the bench on Sundays for bubble-and-squeak.) I grew strong on a boyhood supply of comfort food, seldom venturing into the nerve centre, unless to forage for seconds.

Cooking as a skill just wasn’t on the menu. By osmosis I learnt how grill a chop, or boil a pea, but the repertoire was finite. Jumping the nest I filled the belly at noodle shops, 21st buffets and the mother-pub. Later, like a Red-Cross package, my first real girlfriend, or FRG, landed in my lap. She could cook like a sorceress, and my bacon was saved.

Warren Collins has been likewise coddled. At 60, the bookkeeper has seldom lifted a spatula in anger, relying on his wife Margaret’s kitchen panache. “I can do saltimbocca and chops I suppose. But learning anything new can be a bit intimidating. Cooking for Margaret feels a bit like chauffeuring Michael Schumacher around.”

Paul Scott, 25, has a handle on roast lamb. He also does a capable salmon casserole. He’s made the latter since primary school, but the draftsman is happier to answer to domestic kitchen-hand. “I haven’t cooked by myself too often. I did four years of Home Economics at school which gave me the basics. In one Year 10 class I tried making fudge with a friend – it turned out so badly we converted it into a milk-shake.”

Stir in four other men, plus a teacher called Frank, and you have the key ingredients of our egg tutorial. Tonight is Week 2 of He Cooks – a six-week course reserved for the male of the species, hosted by the William Angliss Institute of TAFE in central Melbourne. Every Monday night men of all ages can blend socially and sauce-wise. No women allowed, and no question too stupid. Frank holds a knife. He has the kitchen’s attention.

“Gentlemen,” he says in his Torino lilt, “diz eez what I call a knife. You remember da knife skills we do in Week One, OK?” As a flock we nod. Frank Sidari, 52, is built like a gnocchi ball, dressed in linen smock and square black toque. “And diz, what is diz?”

“A zucchini,” we sing in unison. Blokes know their vegetables. The mystery lies in what to do with them. “OK,” says Frank. “No problem. Perfect.”

Ben Dalton is the brains behind He Cooks. Combining the simple with the social, his courses aim “to give men enough knowledge so they can walk into the kitchen, open up the fridge, open up the cupboard and cook whatever’s there.”
The Sydney marketing graduate has a hospitality history – and your typical male handicap. Twelve years ago, aged in his late 20s, Dalton shared a flat with two (male) chefs, and felt tragically inadequate. “I woke up one morning and realized I could cook about three or four things.” He counts them on his fingers. “Spag bol, a roast and this chicken-filo-thing with tomato and basil.”

Time for some positive action. In 1994 he created a male-only course called Mamma’s Boy’s Home Cooking School. Blokes were promised a sheaf of readable recipes and the gumption to follow them.

Enrolments soared, despite any stigma the course name carried. “Mamma’s Boy is memorable, but the name had a negative connotation. People started thinking – are you insulting me? Are you saying I’m a girl’s blouse, or a nancy?”

Just as dishes evolve to taste, so Dalton tweaked – and renamed – his idea. In 2003 he launched He Cooks, building a three-course menu into each session. In a single night, say, a fellow may conquer black mussel risotto, beef stroganoff and lemon-lime tart. Scary but true. “And the amazing thing?” says Dalton. “Feedback says that guys are getting far more than cooking from the course.” Graduates in fact are approaching their home kitchen with a sense of fun and self-belief.

Based in a Glebe high school kitchen, the He Cooks phenomenon has since expanded into Sydney’s North Shore and tonight, for the first time, into Melbourne. Inside three years, across three venues, almost a thousand males have sought culinary enlightenment, aged from 17 to 71.

By coincidence, those two extremes attended the same session. “The 17-year-old,” says Dalton, “had just won a cricketing scholarship to Oxford University. His mum had sent him to He Cooks to make sure he could look after himself. While the 71-year-old was a retired diplomat whose wife had fallen sick. He had to look after her first time.” Two generations apart, the two had a ball together.

In many ways, the camaraderie is as much the spice as the tutorial element. Ross Conwell, an early student, enrolled in the wake of his divorce. “When my kids came to stay with me,” he said, “I wanted to cook proper meals.” To Dalton, the guy’s transformation was exhilarating. “Ross looked so low when he first turned up, relying on Maccas and takeaway. When he left he was a different person. You couldn’t hold him back.”

Knives poised, we cut our zucchini. Frank has shown us the secrets of slicing. First you shave one edge to create a stable base. Next, keeping fingers tucked away, you style a guillotine with the blade, and cha-cha-cha-cha across the length.

(The “cha-cha-cha” is pure Frank. Coming to Australia ten years ago, the career cook relies on rapport and onomatopoeia for vocab. Simmering water is “blub-blub-blub”. Pecorino cheese comes from the “baa-baa”. And the whisk? That’s the “ta-ta-ta”. If all that sounds a little too daycare for your liking then it’s only what some men deserve. Instinctively we grasp every sound-effect.)

Three steps into making frittata, the class starts to bawl like babies. Onions are to blame, though there’s much in the lesson to tease the senses – if not the funny bone. Frank issues a yellow card to Georg, a Lebanese-born beginner, for washing his blade in hot water. “Always cold, OK,” says Frank. “Why?” asks Georg.

Frank beams. Over the years he’s seen men throw garlic into sorbet and bake pies under grillers. Georg’s knife question is the least of heresies. Frank himself doesn’t know the hydro-physics involved, but has the experience to say: “It keeps..how you say…da edge better.”

Fine. As a race, men can handle the practical. Just as I learn that breaking an egg is best done against an intact egg. Or that running the goop through your fingers is the simplest way to isolate the yolk. Or eggshell is the ideal scoop for rescuing any unwanted shell from the liquid. Three surefire methods that I’ll never forget.

“There’s scientific reason behind everything we do,” says Dalton, spelling out the He Cooks tenet. “There’s no la-di-da stuff. It’s all down-to-earth and practical.”

Pauline Dine, overseer of short-courses at William Angliss, sees the practical as vital for men. “There are some men who are good at gadgetry,” she says. “They love working out things, cutting things – what I call shed skills. Hence once they get their mind around transferring those shed skills into the kitchen, they feel very comfortable.”

Who knows, give a man a piece of sound advice and he may even learn to master the other trick to cookery: multi-tasking. But one step at a time…

Ta-ta-ta. We whisk our yolks. We sprinkle in pepper, add a pinch of salt. “How much salt?” asks Warren, scribbling down measurements as we go. Serafino Di Giampaolo, a second teacher joining the scrimmage, reckons, “You add according to your taste. Numbers just make you confusion.”

Serafino is Don Quixote to Frank’s Sancho Panza. Together the two Italians comprise the He-Cooks team of Victoria, with some 60 years of cooking between them. Now a boyish 57, Serafino has cooked for Monaco royalty and Pope Jean Paul II. He’s ruled the decorated kitchen of Lounge in Frankfurt, and has created the world’s longest sponge cake at 551 metres. In other words the man is entitled to speak on the egg.

“Teaching men you need to be serious but not too serious.” He floats around the pans, eying the extra virgin sizzle. “I don’t believe in recipes because I don’t believe in chefs.” (The oil is ready for the veggies, and he gestures to Paul – “put, put, put.”) “I believe in technique. And I believe in knowledge. And the courage to do simple things.”

Frank adds to the pep talk. “To be a good cook you have to respect and appreciate the food. And after, put a little bit of passion into it. That’s a really simple mix.” He dabs my zucchini with a spoon. “Of course you need a bit of knowledge otherwise you create a big mess.”

Brendan Holwill, 59, is my cooking partner. As he shovels veggies into a bowl he says, “I’ve done my share of cooking. Like most men I’ve learnt by the seat of my pants. I suppose I was looking for a course to cover the basics, to see if I’ve been doing things the right way.” He tips the egg into the mix. “Or seeing if there are different ways.”

Psychiatrist Brendan specialises in post-traumatic stress, an area most apprentice cooks will know too well. But tonight is a bid to heal those acute memories of gluggy rice and limp beans. A chance for men, as a species, to undo the notoriety. While kitchens may hold that unique ability to mortify, the same space is open to offering redemption.

Keeping the course all-male is core to that principle. “We found guys in general are quite intimidated doing anything new,” explains Dalton. “We get quite self-conscious. Making the class men-only takes away that last excuse. There’s no way they will feel embarrassed, or feel like an idiot or lose face because they’re all guys, doing it together.”

Like garlic and sorbet, male and female students don’t blend so well. “When my wife or any woman walks into the classroom to observe,” adds Dalton, “guys will change their behaviour. They try to be funny. They get competitive, defensive, self-conscious. When there are no women, they concentrate.”

Such a defence was mounted this year in a Victorian tribunal, all in the name of a stag kitchen. Brian Laker, a Melbourne resident, sought to open a male-only cooking class at the Rowville Community Centre. The spectre of sexism arose. A suburban spat led to the judicial hearing and an eventual exemption from the equal opportunity laws of the state.

Mind you, for a bloke like Kevin Priest, 52, the female dimension is less an obstacle. Waiting for his frittata to brown, Kevin explains that much of his cooking background has been confined to the role of lay-cook in a monastery kitchen. “I’ve worked in two religious kitchens. The brothers at the Franciscan monastery in Kew [Melbourne] worshipped my seafood creole.”

Though excluded, women are convinced of the short course’s long-term benefits. Since the re-launch in 2003 the story behind the He-Cooks numbers has been telling. “Eighty per-cent of placements are purchased as a gift,” says Dalton. That’s almost 800 men coming courtesy of wives and girlfriends and mothers: women concerned for their frittata-challenged loves. “In many ways the course is marketed to women. I usually say: He Cooks, You Relax.”

Pans are flipped onto plates and five frittata born. Basil leaves are added to the plate’s rim, plus an arabesque of vinaigrette – all those little touches that separate the cooks from the brutes. Our teachers suggest a vino – or a “glug-glug-glug” – to accompany the feast. And who are we to argue with the experts?

[Sunday Life, September 2006]