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Hot tips from Karen

Karen Anand has learnt a great deal about what men want in the course of putting together a cookbook for smart men

MONEY MATTERS Karen Anand: `Men cook really well when they are paid for it' Photo: K. Gopinathan

"You can get through life perfectly comfortably without so much as lifting a wooden spoon. Fine. Do that. If you decide to go through life without cooking, then you are missing something very, very special. You are losing out on one of the greatest pleasures you can have with your clothes on. Cooking can be as passionate, creative, life-enhancing, uplifting, satisfying and downright exhilarating as anything else you can do with your life... And to add to that buzz, the satisfying tingle that goes down your spine when you watch someone eating something you have made for them, and you have one of the greatest joys known to man," says Nigel Slater, Britain's highly regarded food writer.

Women rarely need to be seduced into cooking with such poetry. The rules laid down by tradition in straightforward prose does the job quite efficiently. But it's a different ball game with men. You need not only loads of charming poetry but also some manly prose to convince them that ladles and rolling pins and kadais too can be wonderful boys' toys.

Chefs and cooks

Karen Anand knows this well. "Men make the best chefs... Yes, they cook really well when they are paid for it. Catch any chef coming to the rescue in a domestic kitchen," writes the celebrity food writer in her introduction to Simple Cooking for Smart Men (Popular Prakashan, Rs. 195), a how-to manual for "young men interested in finding their way into the kitchen". The stylishly produced book, which has a young Karen having a hearty laugh on its cover, uses a combination of aforementioned prosaic and poetic techniques to lure men into the kitchen.

Karen did intensive asking around to make her own list of "what men want" before she sat down to put together the "male-friendly" book. Men, she says, prefer big, readable fonts and don't much care for colourful photographs that go into the cookbooks meant for women. You quite understand the big font logic. Must be the same one as children's books. But why don't men like colour pictures? Karen confesses: "Now, I am not a psychologist to analyse why men don't wants pictures. But I do know that men and women like things differently."

The foreword of the book has more of Karen's reading of men's ways, and by default, women's too. "Men love kitchen gadgets which do half the work, like a good food processor. Fair enough. So do I. Most women don't. For some strange reason, women of a certain age love to toil and slave with blunt knives and old vessels to prove how hard they have been working. In some cases I agree. By the time you get the tomato slicer out, wash and clean it, you might as well have cut the thing with a knife. But today's cool men need their basic tools in working order. Cool men also love a nice-looking kitchen, not one that looks straight out of a Victorian novel (what the English used to call a scullery) or a Siberian labour camp. They love quick recipes, easy shopping and like to see a smart table with smart accessories... "

It also looks like smart men don't like boring chapter divisions such as "Soups", "Starter", "Main Course" and so on. That's why this book comes with sections headers such as "Guys' Night In", "Post a Big Night", "Date on a Plate", "Wining and Dining the Boss", "Boy Meets Grill"... and so on.

Now, can any true-blue metrosexual male resist such temptation? Karen adds a pinch of cheerleading to add to the flavour. Dedicating the book to her father Patrick, she says of him and the rest of mankind: "He who didn't know his way to the kitchen for the better part of his life... miraculously started cooking in his sixties. If he could do it, any man can."

Now, for all those women oddballs who aren't "natural" hearth angels and demand their share of seduction, Karen has started writing Simple Cooking for Smart Women. We can only wait and see if "smart women" like big fonts or colour pictures.

BAGESHREE S

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