I heard that she had a large group of friends coming and I was wondering if two cakes would be enough when all of a sudden I saw one more chocolate cake already sitting in the kitchen. A friend of mine and I put some finishing touches on it along with my two cakes, dusting them with icing sugar and decorating them with flowers. We then laid the three cakes out on the table on the veranda and put in the candles – Happy Birthday!
It turned out that the person who’d made the other chocolate cake (with nuts in it) was my daughter’s husband’s close friend. He’d just had a baby three weeks before and is a brand new father.
I asked him “Did you separate the eggs?”
I giggled a little to myself at the fact that such questions are usually kept just between us girls. But he didn’t seem to react at all and replied, straight-faced, “No, for this one you don’t separate the eggs, you just throw them in.”
A male friend of his overhead this and jumped in with “Really? You don’t separate them? In my recipe you separate them”.
“How do you get it to rise without beating in the egg whites?”
“You cream the butter and sugar together in a mixer. That’s how you get air into it right?”
“Really? In my one you heat the butter and the chocolate together in a water bath.”
“Mine too. How many grams of flour do you put in yours?”
We went on chatting like this for a while enjoying our symposium on the finer points of cake preparation with no hint that any of this was at all out of the ordinary.
“You two boys really know what you’re talking about huh” I said.
“Now if only I had someone else who could hand-peel my hazelnuts for me” he laughed.
The two of them are both in their mid-thirties and the guy who'd joined our conversation already has three children. They're totally the kind of dads who are always in the kitchen making tasty treats for their kids.
In this country, it's not rare for men to cook and barbecuing is most definitely a man's job. Still, it's not often that you find men that bake cakes. Consequently, if a man says “Should we make a lemon cake together tomorrow?” his stock quickly goes up two or threefold. A man who can really cook - that’s the dream!
In the English movie Bridget Jones’ Diary, there’s a scene where she’s trying to cook. She’s screwing it up entirely and this guy she has over comes into the kitchen, takes off his suit jacket, rolls up the sleeves of his white button down shirt and whips up some omelettes – that is just so hot.
On the topic of England, I have to talk about Jamie Oliver. People say he’s the chef that’s been changing people’s ideas about “horrible English food”. Now, if you watch him cook, you somehow just want to cook more than anything else in the whole world. He doesn’t use measuring cups or spoons – he uses a splash of this, a pinch of that, a dash of this and a handful of that. The way he mixes and squeezes things with his bare hands and runs them all through and all over his food is intensely sensual and his effortless way of cooking always looks simple, liberating and fun.
Mixing things together, kneading, making things into balls... Cooking is just like playing in the mud when you’re a kid. That would mean everyone would have loved helping out in the kitchen as a kid, right? But, we get robbed of our precious creativity amid being hurried about and being put down: “You're crap at cooking!” “This tastes pretty bad…” “You can't do it that way!” or even something as harsh as “What's a boy doing in the kitchen?”
Then on TV you see these top chefs yelling their heads off at novices and you have these people competing under tremendous pressure. But no matter how high quality the food made by these aggro chefs is supposed to be, I don’t want even one bite – the most delicious food is, of course, slow food made with pleasure.
Just like how mass produced, processed food can never match up to something that’s been made entirely from scratch, there’s nothing that tastes anywhere near as beautiful as something someone else has made for you and really put their heart into, no matter how simple it might be.
Even when I try going to fancy restaurants because people have told me “The food there is divine!” I usually end up thinking it’s nowhere near as good as the stuff made by my family or my close friends. It’s probably because I know they enjoy cooking food, they make it with love and they put their heart and soul into it.
At my daughter’s party, our homemade cakes flew off the table leaving just empty plates and crumbs. The guy’s chocolate cake had sunk a little in the middle and mine was similarly amateurish – it had zigzag bumps all around it from the baking sheet I’d used. Nevertheless, the proof is in the pudding!
A cake which someone’s put their heart and soul into – what greater gift can there be than that?
[You can find the original post in Japanese ｢ケーキを焼く男たち」 here.]
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