Back in the 1980s, the chef Mark Hix says, there used to be a joke about “lobster thermidor and oral sex being two things you couldn’t get at home — now it’s steak and chips”.
What Hix is hinting at here is the pornographisation of man food; the notion that the unreconstructed, anti-sushi dining experience of man food, with its emphasis on appetite, simplicity, bonhomonious inclusivity and full-blooded flavour, has become the 21st-century equivalent of a quick dive into a peep show. Something fleshy and naughty. Something that men do on their lunchtimes but don’t let on to their wives when they get back home.
I know that when I sneak off to Gourmet Burger Kitchen (always alone, always at a quiet, off-peak hour) for my fortnightly sandwich fix of an Aberdeen Angus beef patty served with bacon and avocado, I emerge feeling slightly dirty.
It’s my wife’s doing, bless her. She doesn’t want me to die or to get fat, so she keeps me on a diet of mashed yeast, muesli and soy. It is kind and loving of her to do so, but sometimes I look at our fridge shelves full of Greek yoghurt and falafel and skimmed milk and olive spread, and my heart sinks. I crave the golden puff pastry crust of a pie, meat and mashed potatoes with melted cheese, a bloodied steak, full-cream mayonnaise, something that has been recently killed and quickly grilled; cravings that are cruelly exacerbated by a kitchen shelf groaning with man-food smut, much of it by the man-food hero Nigel Slater.
Man-foodies love Slater because his thing is “real food”. By that he means “big-flavoured, unpretentious cooking. Good ingredients made into something worth eating”. It’s what all men of our vintage want.My formative food years were the 1970s. My mother prepared dinners that matched the brown and dark green colour scheme of the era. Her two hungry boys and hard-working husband ate shepherd’s pie and peas, pork chops, steak and kidney puddings, spaghetti Bolognese, beef stew. None of this stuff made my brother and I remotely tubby.
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We gorged on it. Mopped up the spag bol juice with hunks of “French bread” as Mum reloaded the glass spaghetti receptacle we’d bought from the York branch of Habitat. Ooh, we were dead sophisticated, we were.
All these dishes remain firm favourites on my adult man-food menu and bring back joyful, boyful memories of the days before I knew about cholesterol and prostate disease. Proust had his madeleines. I had my rissoles.
The 19th-century philosopher and food expert Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin knew about the need for men to enjoy the shared, unalloyed gluttony of dining, that the quality of the company, the luxury of time and generosity of spirit, was just as important as the standard of nosh. “Three pairs of friends will feast on a leg of boiled mutton and Pontoise kidneys washed down with Orl?ans wine and limpid M?doc,” wrote Brillat-Savarin in his book The Physiology of Taste. “And after rounding off the evening with delightful unfettered talk, they will completely forget that finer dishes and more skilful cooks exist.”
That last line is crucial to understanding the essence of man food. Man foodie likes to think that any meal that he is eating could have been rustled up in his own kitchen, with his own hand on the ladle. Comfy familiarity is part of the pleasure. Eating out is merely an excuse to sample epicurean versions of his own repertoire. He is wholly suspicious of pretty much everything else. You see, man-food lovers value nonchalant flair over poncy, Michelin-starred skill. We are not entertained by amuse-bouches. We don’t do foam or medallions. Hell for the man foodie — who lives for flavour, piquancy, bite, substance, good times, remember — is sushi. God, I hate sushi. It is such a snooty, mojo-free, party-pooping, social snub of a dinner; food designed for people who value ceremony over taste and a happy tummy. It’s the prissy, finicky, pinky girliness of sushi that we despise so much — all those carved, anaemic carrots served with such po-faced superiority and eaten by bores who will never know just how much fun it is to trough on a cherry tomato sandwich over the sink or wash down a minute steak baguette with a cold Coke.