When my wife worked longer hours, I cooked 5+ nights a week. Now that I work the longer hours, she’s cooking 5+ nights a week. When my schedule frees up (summer mostly) we do it about 50/50. On a holiday like Thanksgiving, we’ll split up the duties and work together.
She is the expert at baking - anything dessert-related is all her (she once made a living doing wedding cakes, so she’s at that level). (But, I can certainly handle the basics.) I’m the expert with BBQ. We both have slightly different styles, but I don’t think anyone could really point to one of us as better than the other.
Male, I do 95% of the cooking. I can cook intuitively and have a pretty good idea of what’s in the pantry at all times. I also have a pretty good idea of current meat prices and can come up with recipes on the fly, based on what is cheap.
My wife will sometimes make a recipe out of a book and its always good, but it requires a trip to the store for specific ingredients and absolutely no substitutions or changes.
I’m by far the better cook. My husband likes to cook, but slavishly follows recipes.
As for who cooks more, we go in spurts as to who is the main cook. It varies a lot depending on what’s going on in our lives. Right now my husband is doing slightly more than I am because I get home from work later and by then, we’re both starving.
I (female) am an indifferent cook at best (though I love good food and going out to restaurants and trying new things). Unfortunately I have ended up as the sole cook in the house. My husband will make himself a sandwich or heat up some soup for himself, and he certainly doesn’t expect dinner on the table, but if I want something other than delivery pizza or a can of soup I need to make it.
I would cheerfully wash every dish and pot in the house AND scrub the oven if someone would cook for me… sigh…
My wife cooks more, and cooks better, than I do. I will grill a steak or salmon, and can make my own sandwiches, etc. But for real “meals,” she’s in charge.
Dude here. My grandmother on my mother’s side was an amazing cook and baker. She used to enter baking contests and win, all the time. She did everything! Soups, jellies, pickles, everything! She was also the only woman I’ve known who could cook worth a damn. My mom is an awful cook. My dad is solid. None of my love interests or female friends have known how to cook, and have admitted as much.
There’s a relatively even distribution of cooking duties in my home, but I’m demonstrably better at it. My wife is a much better cook than she was when we started dating, but is still average at best.
My theory is that there are two types of cooks. You’re either a cook who wants to make the best food they can, or a cook who wants to get food on the table. I believe most all of the women in my life have fallen into the latter category. I know my way around a kitchen and I pride myself on it, but it took a lot of work and practice.
Female and I do basically 100% of the cooking in our house. Once in a while one of the kids will make a meal, but my husband does not cook. It is not a male thing, he just does not like to do it and was never taught how. He will help in the kitchen if I ask him to, but my kitchen is really too small for two cooks. He will grill occasionally, but I prepare all of the side dishes with the grilled items. He also works 12 hours a day, so if I waited for him to cook, we would eat at 9:00 at night.
I bake, the wife cooks. Works out for the best because she isn’t that good a baker and, while I am an excellent cook, her talents in this area put mine to shame.
When we met my spouse’s idea of “cooking” was opening a can of peas and eating them at room temperature out of the can. Culinary skills have improved over the past quarter century, but with a start like that, yeah, I wound up doing most of the cooking.
The men who are better cooks are more likely to respond in comparison to the women?
I admit that I’m currently in the lucky minority among the couples here where the man cooks. He also shares many of the chores (I actually asked him to leave laundry to me). And doesn’t nag me about things “his way”. Winning so far!
Tangentially—Asking a lesbian couple “Which one is the man and which is the woman?” is the same as asking about a pair of chopsticks: “Which one is the fork and which is the knife?”
Could be a generational thing. The Ukulele Lady and I are in our mid-fifties; I often mock her as a “70s-style teenaged feminist.” She considers most housework and other pre-“Women’s Lib” girl things to be shit any moron could do, including cooking. I myself read John Hess’s The Taste of America and Alan Watts’s Does it Matter as a teen and take food and cooking very seriously.
She’s a good cook, but doesn’t pay much attention to what’s going on while she’s doing it. I can hear cursing coming out of the kitchen when she’s in there because something has burned tight to the bottom of a pan, or a pot has boiled over.
I do 95% of the cooking, and when I put dinner on the table the Angels join together in joyous chorus.
I like to try cooking ambitious and complicated things, but my wife is the master of making something out of nothing in 20 minutes. So by definition she puts more food on the table than I do. It’s a skill I respect and should try to cultivate.
My wife is an awesome cook (Chinese, Thai, Japanese, French, lamb chops, steak, etc) and a SAHM. I swear she spends half the day thinking about dinner. Yes, I am pleasantly overweight. Sometimes I wish she would dial it down to a couple of times a week, and simpler stuff some days.
I’m a competent chef and griller. My wife hates me to cook because it has to be just like what she does or it doesn’t pass muster. Me, I think there is more than one way to cook a steak, and several ways are good. And, the other thing, is if I try something completely new and experimental, it must be awesome or she will mercilessly hound me for the next few years.
Did I mention she is a great cook with many different cuisines? My kids are picking up the skilz too, which is great
I grew up in the 70s, probably the last generation of kids to whom the stereotype of mom staying home with the kids could seem to be “the way things are.” My dad barely cooked at all. I don’t even remember him grilling that much. Maybe he handled the grill at times, but not as a chef: more like executing the directions of my mom (but my memories of even that are faint).
I’m surprised at how much men outweigh women in the poll. Could it be that there are more men on SDMB, and since people here tend to be rather intelligent and autonomous, more men end up saying they cook more/better? Not sure. My guess is that if one were to poll the general population, women would still have the edge when it comes to cooking duties in the household.
As one of the men who posted that he cooks, I suspect that there is the confirmation bias suggested upthread. I am proud of my role in cooking and so took the time to post. I see the roles all along the spectrum, but it does seem like “traditional” roles are now part of a richer data set. In my case, it was practical and I was better at it than my wife. I have come to feel great about it - as my kids and I discuss, I own the smells of sauteeing onions and other cooking in their brains
