A Domestic Goddess, Maybe, But Never a Chef

Just 5% of the Michelin-starred kitchens in this country are run by women, even though an equal number of men and women sign up for catering courses. It is to highlight and partially redress the oddness of this state of affairs that a leading food magazine has just announced its list of the UK's finest up-and-coming female chefs. You probably won't have heard of these women unless you are at least of a pro-am standard of dining out, but they are, say Square Meal magazine, the first serious wave of female chefs since Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray launched the River Cafe in the late 80s.

At first glance, the reasons for this gender imbalance at the top table are obvious, pedestrian even. Women have less access to the capital needed to invest in all those prime location leases, the bristling kitchens, the just-so tables and the full complement of ultra-fine but machine-washable linen. They are less likely, too, to want to lead a team of people, many of whom are slogging along on minimum wage, into battle at searing temperatures twice daily. Finally, the hours involved in top-flight chefing do not sit well with the school run or bath time.

But the reasons for women being distanced from the production of high-status food go far deeper into our culture than the usual ones of cash and access. Something altogether more atavistic must be in play to explain why we have fewer top female chefs than we do CEOs, engineers, doctors and MPs. The reason is this: because women are instinctively and most obviously the providers of food (through breast milk or a relentless rota of three workmanlike meals a day), they have been emphatically excluded from its fancier manifestations. What comes naturally is made to seem invisible. What comes at a sweat - the strops and swagger without which Gordon Ramsay or Anthony Bourdain find it impossible to run full service - is what we book for, pay for and talk about for days afterwards.

There's nothing new about the differing professional status of men and women's cooking. In the late 18th century, if you were rich and a bit of a pace-setter, you had a man, possibly a French one on the run from the revolution, installed in your kitchen. It was his job to produce a nightly piece of theatre, a gorgeous show in which you and your friends were as much spectators as diners, required to ooh and aah as the maitre sent his sublime pieces to the table.

The prince regent had Antonin Careme, his equally piggy brothers had Louis Ude and, briefly, Alexis Soyer. There was, inevitably, a bit of foot stamping when the chefs felt they were being treated as jumped-up servants by their thick-necked John Bull masters. Mostly, though, an atmosphere of mutual appreciation prevailed. These men were artists, and were treated with hushed respect.

In the homes of the gentry, it was another matter. In the manor houses of England you found "cooks" - working-class women who had learned their craft (and it was a craft, everyone agreed) - as they rose through the ranks of scullery and kitchen maid before arriving, eventually, to the place where they turned out a full programme of breakfasts, dinners and suppers 365 days of the year. For the fancier bits and pieces - the making of jams and chutneys, the brewing of beer - these cooks were helped by the lady of the house.

And so women of all classes worked anonymously and in tandem to keep their households fed, watered and comfortable with as little fuss and drama as possible. No one threw saucepans or stamped their foot because the master of the house had gobbled down his supper without remembering to sigh with pleasure or send his compliments to the kitchen.

This oddly gendered dichotomy still prevails. The women who have broken through do so in highly specific ways. Nigella Lawson is emphatically not a chef, she is a "woman cook", operating out of her own domestic kitchen. Her commercial popularity is embedded in her personal biography as daughter, wife and mother. Rogers and Gray, meanwhile, held up as the last and best example of successful restaurant chefs, have built a business of a particular kind. Their restaurant, after all, is strangely designated as a "cafe", a small place where you get snacks. It started, too, as the in-house canteen of Richard Rogers' architectural practice, in other words as a utilitarian pitstop designed to get a cohort of hungry workers through the day.

For the first woman chef - one who is happy to own the term unambiguously, even if she has no desire to come on like a buccaneer or a bully in the process - we are actually still waiting.

Kathryn Hughes' latest book, The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton, will be published by 4th Estate in October