Genetic imperatives number two: spoon, pan; pan, spoon.

In this (slowly) continuing series, in which I attempt to explain to women how we men can't help it, we are just made that way, I reach the tricky area of the kitchen and the man/spoon/pan interface.

It is well known that all the "great" chefs are male. There's a good reason for this. Only men would shout and swear in a crowded kitchen, thinking that this (a) is a good way to calm things down, and (b) is an efficient way to impart information, while (c) being aware that said s-and-s-ing gives the impression that what takes place in a kitchen is actually difficult, and not just a case of sticking the veg in a saucepan of boiling water the right number of minutes before you finish caramelising the outside of a lump of meat (ensuring, of course, that the frying pan occasionally catches fire like a Texas oil-well in a John Wayne movie, thus demonstrating that cooking is not only difficult, but downright dangerous too).

Women, on the other hand, make great cooks. That's not to say they necessarily are great cooks, but that they can make them. They write about it, or demonstrate how to do it, in calm tones, with simple instructions, and they write about things people want to eat. They de-mystify it ("You will never get out of a pan fundamentally better than what went into it, Cooking is not alchemy; there is no magic in the pot" - a woman said that) while at the same time making it fun (and yes, I do mean that kind of fun.)

And, believe it or not, we men understand that we do not necessarily know best in the kitchen. Even the most arrogant of us is willing to admit that women have a mastery of the kitchen that we can never hope to match. It's the multi-tasking thing, I suspect. Watch a man - he reads the recipe, measures all the herbs and spices into small pots ready for use, gets all the constituents chopped, prepared, and lined up, in the order in which they are to be used, and then proceeds down the line from left to right tipping in ingredients while timing intervals between additions with a stopwatch. A woman, however, reads a book while languidly opening cupboards, extracting packets and tipping them unsighted and unmeasured into the bubbling pot, while stimultaneously listening to Jenni Murray and ensure that the smallest child does not eat from the cat-food bowl.

There still remains, however, the one tricky area of the man/spoon/pan interface. It is the one place where we attempt to dominate the kitchen proceedings. Leave a pot bubbling, however gently, and a spoon nearby, and every man in the house will take it in turns to stick the spoon in whatever is cooking, and have a good old stir. every man. Husband, son, guest; they all know that the male is the sole effective wielder of the spoon (and seasoning adjuster - but that's another story). I'm sure it goes back to our hunter/gatherer days, when we used to break open termite hills and extract the contents on a length of bone with a conveniently hollowed out end, dashing back to the cave to show what we had collected before dumping them into the pot to contribute to the termite stew. Meanwhile caveman wife just calmly read a cave painting, milked a dinosaur, and ensured that the smallest cave child didn't clamber into the sabre-toothed tiger litter tray. And promised herself silently, that if he added just a single pinch of dried plant leaf, she'd give him one on the boko with the rolling club. And so it remains to this day.

And if you are planning on spending time in the kitchen today, may I just leave you with the sentiment once uttered by Johnny Craddock - "May all your doughnuts turn out like Fanny's".