It may feel like the march of progression is in full swing when it comes to addressing the gender imbalance present within the restaurant industry (and society as a whole), and in many ways it is. Yet despite women traditionally being encouraged to cook at home, in 2018 only seventeen percent of professional chefs were women – five percent less than in 2010, while less than a quarter of the world’s fifty best restaurants currently have women at their helm. It was stats like these along with conversations she had with her mother and grandmother during the first coronavirus lockdown that inspired food writer Clare Finney to put together The Female Chef – a collection of interviews and recipes from some of the women at the forefront of the UK’s food scene.
The use of gendered language in the kitchen, whether consciously or subconsciously, undeniably has played a large role in reinforcing stereotypes. And it was in fact a conversation with her grandmother about the distinction between the words ‘cook’ and ‘chef’ (which is discussed in depth at the start of the book) that fuelled Clare’s desire to look more deeply at the relationship between women and food. ‘I would call my grandmother a chef, but she would call herself a cook,’ explains Clare. ‘Therein lies the rub. However much you want to remove gender from the language, those words remain incredibly gendered and aren’t as clear cut as we’d like to believe. There have been professional cooks for centuries and also chefs operating in restaurant kitchens; but increasingly there are chefs doing supper clubs and pop-ups, operating outside of restaurant kitchens. The relationship seems to be in a state of flux and that was the dynamic I wanted to explore.’