Cooking may be a lot of things, but sexy isn't one of them

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Bellbottoms are behind us and lawn darts are long gone, but for some reason, cooking keeps coming back.
It seems that every 20 years or so, cooking goes from weekday necessity to the whipped peak of fashion. Daily kitchen drudgery has been resurrected, reconstituted, by Birdseye and the microwave meal, by Julia Child and her French revolution, and by a bunch of hippies and that stuff your mother fed you in the '70s.
Before my college career, cooking had returned to the humdrum realm of everyday obligation. But less than four years later, with the remarkable, yeastlike rise of the Food Network, the cult of the kitchen ascended to its current heights.
Cooking became sexy. Nigella Lawson is sexy, Rachael Ray is sexy, Giada De Laurentiis image searches will get you fired from your job -- even Molto Mario is sexy, if you're into large pony-tailed men in orange clogs who travel with fatback pork.
Naturally, any young man with half a brain and an 8-year-old can of bay leaves would want to get in on this. And so I did.
I read wonderful books like "Heat" by Bill Buford and Anthony Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential." I reveled in the science and detail of "On Food and Cooking." I read "Omnivore's Dilemma" with shock and "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" with awe.
I bought remarkably expensive and surprisingly sharp knives. I went to the market with extensive lists for elaborate undertakings. And I cooked.
I've cooked hundreds of hurried weekday dinners, stretching "30-minute" meals into two-hour trials. I've spent dozens of long weekend afternoons chopping, mincing and dicing. I have dedicated several Sundays to the timing, temperature and touch necessary for the perfect banana pancake.
In all this time at my kitchen counter, I've learned countless lessons that can't be taught in an institute or printed in a glossy cooking magazine. But one lesson rises to the top.
Cooking may be a lot of things, but sexy isn't one of them.
Cooking is messy, difficult, inglorious work. It is trial and error with Thursday's supper at stake. When done right, it still leaves an incredible pile of dishes. Cooking is, in fact, 60 percent dishwashing, 30 percent labor and 10 percent actual eating.
But, oh, the eating.
Baptized in butter, I am a disciple of the unrepentant fraternity of fat. My icebox bursts with heavy cream, marbled beef and glorious, glorious bacon. I save the grease. I double the salt. I eat lots and lots of pasta.
It's been years since I quit smoking, I never drink to excess and I set my cruise control to a modest "8" over the limit. But with food, I'm like the reckless son of James and Paula Dean, too cool for coronary artery disease.
In 20 years, when I'm chasing my Syrah with statins, I'll look back on this behavior as the foolishness of youth. But for now, well, I guess it is kind of sexy.
It helps, of course, if you're into skinny balding men in loafers who travel with bacon drippings. But that's the sort of thing that never goes out of style.

(Ben Grabow writes for the young, the urban and the easily amused. Contact him at thinlyread(at)gmail.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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