Jeff Houck

The Tampa Tribune’s food writer since 2005, Jeff Houck covers the way people live through their food. He also hosts the Table Conversations food podcast and believes that everything crunchy is good.

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Eat Like A Man, Whatever That Means [It’s Dude Mood Food]

Posted Sep 6, 2011 by Jeff Houck

Updated Sep 6, 2011 at 05:23 PM

I made a batch of Greek Lemon Soup the other night for dinner.

Packed with crisp citrus flavor, it was warm and satisfying, with bits of long-grain white rice, chicken broth and a hearty egg flavor in every spoonful. My family loved it.

After I finished my bowl, I temporarily considered forfeiting my membership in The Man Club.

Men aren’t supposed to cook like this.

At least that’s what the unwritten “Bible of Stuff American Men Should Cook” says.

That’s the one with such commandments as, “Thou shall not make any food that could be confused with the scent of Febreze.”

Lest we forget, men are constantly reminded that they should be on an all-brontosaurus diet. Hunt, forage, kill, cook, chew. Rinse. Repeat. Those are our marching orders.

For a reminder, you only need look to TV, where dude food has become its own cottage industry.

By now, you’ve no doubt seen the stunt-eating throat-a-ganza Adam Richman hosts on Travel Channel’s “Man v. Food Nation.” (It’s the show formally known as “Man v. Food.”) The plot is simple: See Adam. See Adam go to a new town. See Adam watch as ordinary Joes do their best to fork down a Hummer-size burrito with a jalapeno hand-grenade nestled inside. The End.

Adam’s network brother in gastric harm, Andrew Zimmern, picks through nature’s gross-out picnic on “Bizarre Foods.” No Zimmern moment is complete unless he’s choking his way through such delicacies as frog ovary soup, baby eels, fermented whale blubber or chicken uterus. What’s so refined about this? He does it in foreign countries.

Over on Fox, chef Gordon Ramsay stars on—and this is only a rough estimate—143 shows simultaneously that feature elements of him screaming at decibels heard only at the airport. At this point, he’s so omnipresent, they should just name the network after him. The only thing remaining for Ramsay to do is announce Fox’s NFL games so he can describe plays where he throws touchdown passes to himself while flying a blimp over the stadium.

Ramsay’s most recent culinary broadcast venture had him on “MasterChef”, a show in which he, restaurateur Joe Bastianich and chef Graham Elliot culled a herd of 100 amateur cooks to find the best of the bunch. In a surprise to almost no one, the three gentlemen last month chose a beautiful blond former beauty queen as the winner. And then they sprayed her head-to-toe with celebratory champagne. You know, like they do to all chefs.

Stay classy, Fox.

If that’s too refined for you, drift over to the cable frat house called MAV TV, a channel which boasts programming made “By Men For Men.” (Surely there’s a discrimination lawsuit somewhere in there.) MAV features a show called “Body Shots,” during which the technical and refined art of mixology is displayed through a cunning use of bartenders in bikinis. Shaken, not stirred.

And now, for a completely unnecessary and gratuitously lascivious video clip:

This is what’s known in the communications industry as a visual aid.

Cooking has become so cool that HBO’s ultimate guy fantasy show “Entourage,” which tells the fictional story of a Hollywood hunk and his posse of yes-men friends, features a storyline in which Bobby Flay steals away the wife of one character’s power-hungry agent.

Here’s a clip which sums up the confrontation nicely. If a bit profanely. Don’t click on it if you have delicate auditory sensibilities.

Think about that: Bobby Flay. As the “other man.”

You may want to chew on that gristle for a moment. It took a while for me to digest.

With all of these images swirling in my brain, it was with no small amount of curiosity that the September issue of Esquire caught my eye. Tucked in a corner of the cover was a tiny headline in all-capital letters encouraging readers to “EAT LIKE A MAN.”

“Oh,” I thought. “Like, using your hands.”

Inside, I was heartened to find it was more about teaching the essentials every man should know about cooking. In an introduction, chef Mario Batali declares, “Cooking at home is now fully documented as cool, exceedingly good for you, fun to do, and, most significantly, an attractor of women.” Adjacent to this statement is a full-page photo of a skillet-roasted boneless pork chop with pickled cherry peppers, rosemary and garlic. If they had printed it horizontally, it could have been the pork Playmate of the Month.

Way to sell it, Mario.

The rest of the 10-page spread goes on to explain “how to do everything a little better.” Every man should know how to scramble eggs, sear a scallop, make a sandwich, sauté garlic and hold a knife properly. Every man should know the difference between a roasting pan and a Dutch oven. Every man should have an emergency country pot roast up his sleeve, ready for deployment at a moment’s notice.

These are the essentials, and they are not in dispute. Knowing them and harnessing their simple power makes life better. And they have nothing to do with chewing on chicken uterus or nuclear-hot Scotch bonnet peppers.

The next lesson for the truly advanced gentlemen cook: Greek Lemon Soup.

Gets them every time.