Manning the Stove

By Elizabeth Weil

"I'm a father of nine, all of them grown up on grits," says Kofi Moyo from his home on the South Side of Chicago, where he presides over his blended family's kitchen with diligence, passion and Southern-inflected love. "All of my kids are grits champions. Maybe that's because I approach grits as something different. Grits with cheese, tomato and pepper. Fish and grits. Lately I've begun working diligently on shrimp and grits. I've knocked a few people over with that one." Moyo, a gemologist by training and a brand builder by trade, belongs to the growing ranks of husbands and fathers who are the primary cooks for their families. He keeps his pantry well stocked with onions, garlic, ginger, fennel, curry and cayenne. And when his kids, now grown, head home for a visit, they phone in orders. "Dr. Moyo, my daughter who's an intern in child psychology, she loves fish-head stew and overripe okra. That's her thing," Moyo explains. "Then I have another daughter who wants Thanksgiving every day. In the summertime they expect all kinds of smoked fish. Catfish, trout, I'll smoke anything."

When not manning the smoker or stove Moyo spends much of his time organizing Real Men Cook, a nationwide cooking- for- charity event that takes place on Father's Day. Real Men volunteers whip up huge batches of their favorite dishes, people buy tickets, and everyone chows down. This year, the event's 16th, Moyo expects 1,000 male cooks to feed 30,000 mouths in 10 cities. Moyo also has a new cookbook, Real Men Cook: Rites, Rituals, and Recipes for Living (Fireside Press; 192 pages). He aims to help local charities, such as Chicago's Community Mental Health Council. In the past 15 years he has raised $800,000. But he also wants to make a point: cooking is not just women's work; it's a vital part of being a responsible man, taking care of business at home.

Moyo and his 1,000 real men represent a larger trend. Over the past 40 years, as women poured into the labor force, the average amount of time that American married men spend cooking has tripled, from seven minutes per day to 22, according to John Robinson, co-author of Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time. Meanwhile the number of hours married women spend cooking has fallen from 88 minutes per day to 48. A recent survey by Mediamark Research found that the number of men ages 25 to 54 who cook for fun at least twice a week has jumped 36% in the past 10 years. No wonder Mark O'Connor at the Food Network reports "a definite increase in male viewership."

In many cases, men are home on the range because their wives are stuck at the office. In other households, dads prefer to retreat to the kitchen while their spouses wrangle the kids. Then there are the families in which the guy is just clearly the better or more passionate cook.

Take Sam Stoloff, a literary agent, who is the primary cook in his two-income, two-commute, three-child household, a job that grew weightier a few years ago when his family moved from Manhattan--where takeout was an easy option--to South Orange, N.J. Stoloff has been cooking his way through Jean-Georges: Cooking at Home with a Four-Star Chef. On his lunch break he scours New York City for ingredients like the smoked paprika needed for a chickpea dish he recently made. Stoloff's strategy is to stock a great pantry--with items like homemade salsas and tomato sauce put up from his own garden, plus 100 lbs. of organic free-range beef, which anchors the basement freezer. He then "cooks ahead" on Sunday afternoons and has meals partly ready for those hectic weeknights when he comes home at 5:30, followed by his wife Ilena Silverman, a magazine editor, at 6. The kids--Anya, 7, Katya, 4, and Silas, 1--need to eat immediately, or meltdowns ensue.

Stoloff became the guy in the kitchen because cooking had always been part of his relationships. "Either I became the cook, or it was part of my courtship practice." He also finds cooking "deeply comfortable and satisfying." "There's nothing better," he says, "than being in the kitchen and listening to baseball on the radio. That's my idea of heaven."

The arrangement pleases his wife as well. She says it underpins "my sense that I can pull off this life--job, three kids." The kids like it too, and Anya pitches in with enthusiasm. "I'll now let her chop with the sharp knife, and I won't even watch her," Stoloff says proudly. "Ilena's kind of flabbergasted."

For true foodie dads like Stoloff, restraint, not extra enthusiasm, is what's required to keep the home running smoothly. One recent weeknight, for example, Stoloff decided to use some ricotta he had on hand to make cheesecake instead of just focusing on the meal. "That decision to make one thing extra," he freely admits, "messes everything up. But mostly, I keep myself in check--unless we're having a dinner party. Then I go nuts."

Going overboard is not uncommon for male home chefs. Food writer and blogger Derrick Schneider (obsessionwithfood com believes that's because men often bring their competitive zeal into the kitchen, aiming to master skills and impress eaters.

John Brumbach, a part-time video editor and stay-at-home dad in Omaha, Neb., found himself going overboard soon after he took over the home kitchen for his family of five. He and his wife, a cable-company marketing director, promptly gained 10 lbs. each. The culprit: butter. Brumbach now sees his job as keeping the family healthy and happy. He flips through cooking magazines and watches the Food Network, then adapts recipes or "change[s] them drastically" to suit the family's palates. "I work with my kids to find out what their taste will tolerate," he says. "So now I do a soy broccoli and a pan-seared asparagus with lemon, and they love it. I also really try to make sure they think that cooking is fun. Kids who grow up feeling shunned in the kitchen end up not liking the kitchen. They start feeling like, 'I'm outta here; guess I'll go play video games.'"

Of course, men taking over the kitchen from officebound wives is not entirely new. Martin Ginsburg, husband of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has been the main cook in his household for nearly 50 years--ever since he took a bite of Ruth Bader's tuna casserole ("as close to inedible as food could be"). Their daughter Jane agreed with this assessment at an early age, he recalls, and mounted "a campaign to exclude Mommy from the kitchen, which Mommy fully supported." Upon Mommy's nomination to the bench, Jane remarked that she grew up "in a home with an equal division of responsibility: Father did the cooking, and Mother did the thinking." Nowadays Ginsburg bakes birthday cakes for his wife's fellow Justices--at least, he says, "when my wife tells me to."

But not every dad finds himself in the kitchen under such glamorous circumstances or because he loves it. Sometimes duty calls, plain and simple, as it did for Ronald Inniss, a high school guidance counselor in Boston and father of three grown kids who often come home to roost.

Inniss started cooking because his job enabled him to get home earlier than his wife. Though he's no gourmet chef, Inniss can, as he puts it, "feed the troops," who often include relatives and other children he has opened his home to. Among his standbys are spaghetti, meat loaf, roast chicken and stir-fry. "I like to hide the veggies," he confesses. He doesn't encourage the kids to help. "I basically like to keep them out of my way. I just want to get through it."

In Moyo's experience, however, Inniss's honesty and modesty are both rare. While rounding up volunteers for Real Men Cook, Moyo has often found himself mired in bragging sessions as though cooking were a competitive sport. "A lot of these guys will say flat out that they cook better than their wives," he reports. Moyo likes to tell them, "After you finish your years trying to slam-dunk on the basketball court, you can do the same thing with meatballs."