Should women commandeer the coals or should men braise the burgers?

In the August issue of “Waitrose Kitchen,” Charles Campion and Viv Groskop throw in the barbecue gloves and defend their views on one of life’s burning questions: who’s better at the barbie? Men or women? As this blog’s stated raison d’être is “seeking answers to life’s burning questions,” (pardon the pun about burning…) I have thrown in the tea towel and joined the debate.

I must say that my feminist side does not want to believe that a “Waitrose Kitchen” survey concludes that 84 per cent of female respondents rated their husbands’ barbecuing skills as Good. That’s a bit like saying that we love doing housework. Let’s face it, whose eyes are we trying to pull the wool over? Our husbands’ or our own? And then the survey reveals that an astounding 91 per cent of respondents don’t want men to hand over the tools to those of us who spend part of our waking hours on a daily basis preparing meals in the nest. Have these women lost their senses? Have the last 50 years of feminist struggle been for nought? Germaine Greer must be throwing her hands up in the air.

In my house, there is a very simple division of labour: he works, I don’t. He works twelve-hour days in an office while I swan around walking the dogs, shopping online (someone has to spend the money he makes and he certainly doesn’t have the time), and keeping up to date on Facebook. He comes home from work and needs to de-stress by cooking, so who am I to argue? I will go so far as to get out the corkscrew and open a nice bottle of wine to whet his whistle while he cooks dinner, but that’s where I draw the line. Then I plead hot flushes and other menopausal ailments and drag myself off to bed while he cleans up the kitchen. Simple, really.

But back to the barbecue issue. Now that’s where I really shine. For Christmas a couple of years ago my husband gave me the ginormous gas barbecue I had been yearning for (read that as making his life miserable until he bought it for me) and I started off by roasting our Christmas dinner on it that year, wrapped up in fur and fleece to keep out the cold, rubbing my hands together over the grill to keep them warm. Since then I barbecue in all seasons and all weather. A Duchy from Waitrose Welsh lamb half leg gets boned, stuffed and given the barbecue treatment by me on a regular basis, as do essential Waitrose chickens, fish from the service counter, and various other delicacies.

I happily admit here that I am a proponent of the Crash and Burn School of Cooking, and I have perfected this talent thanks to said ginormous barbecue whose upper temperature seems to know no bounds. A mere 750°F yields perfectly blackened vegetables and overdone meat. Not to mentioned singed eyebrows on several occasions.

The only way I will allow my husband anywhere near My Barbecue is to let him gently remind me to turn the heat down to a measily 250°C so that his entire salary doesn’t go up in smoke. Otherwise, I wield the tools. And he washes them up.

So it’s women at the barbie in our household. Oddly enough, the autocorrect feature on my laptop keeps insisting on spelling it Barbie, but that’s another issue…

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