"If you want to, you can do it!": home cooking and masculinity makeover in "Le chef contre-attaque"

In the innovative show The Naked Chef (1999–2001), Jamie Oliver demonstrates how home cooking—a traditional feminine practice—can be a way for a “modern” man to obtain success in various social contexts. In this chapter, I analyze the gendering of home cooking in a cooking show from a French context, namely Le Chef Contre-Attaque (The Chef Strikes Back) (2009) with Cyril Lignac. In this show, the charming media darling goes from lifestyle expert to become a moral entrepreneur as he takes on a new food-related “social problem” every week. In the episode chosen, Lignac is trying to convince a group of working-class French men who have never cooked at home before that they must learn this craft in order to live up to contemporary gender ideals. During the culinary (and masculine) makeover, a series of tropes of the gendering of home kitchen cultures are being negotiated in the meeting between the “old-fashioned/sexist trainees” (working-class) and the “modern and dynamic” (middle-class) coach; these negotiations both echo and differ from the debates raised in the British literature on masculinity and home in cooking shows. The analysis accentuate the classed character of domestic cooking, and argues that the show exemplifies that debates about home cooking are not only about the gendered ordering of men and women in everyday life practices. Men’s participation in home cooking can also work to create hierarchies between middle-class and working-class masculinity.