Learning Day: Man Up Your Meals (Patreon)

In 2014, the year of gamergate, the cookbook industry recognized a problem: straight men need to eat, but food is sort of gay? There had to be a way to get sustenance into men's bodies without emasculating them through the womanly art of cooking, which is up there with giving birth and interpretive dance as one of the most womanly things you could possibly do. Luckily they found a resolution: a book that explains to men how to make food in the way someone might explain it to a baby or a small dog.

To find this book, I went to the recipe section of the used bookstore and followed the thick stench of cigarette smoke. It's shaped like a can, the manliest form of food, because it can also be a weapon if you chuck it at someone's head. It's peppered throughout with what I call man language, words like mighty, ultimate, blazin', and hunger-busting, to make a cheesecake recipe sound like it could kick your ass.

Recipe titles like Mega Meat Feast and The Mighty Five Egg Omelette will make you say, "is this a nourishing meal for my entire family or the name of a professional wrestler?" Before the book gets into recipes, it begins with a long note about why this cookbook is so necessary. Yes, all good things start with a manifesto. A very masculine, insecure manifesto.

That's right, Men, the feminists are coming for your food! Our master plan all along was to trick you into respecting women so we could force you to take care of your skin and maybe eat a vegetable, vastly improving your life. Drats, we've been discovered! Now you have the secret tome that will tell you how to eat like men again. What does that mean, though? How should men eat?

Ah, that's right, the Golden Age of Food, and also, probably a coincidence, the golden age of scurvy and heart attacks! I too fondly remember the good old days when breakfast was cigarettes and lunch was a jello mold full of bacon and olives. Why aren't men allowed to drop dead on the toilet from a constipation-induced heart attack anymore? What else has our modern food taken from you, Men!?

The intro also asserts that "not only is it OK to eat like a man, but you know what? It's better. It's preferable." If only someone had been willing to listen to men 3-4 thousand years ago when quinoa was first eaten by humans, we might never have run into this problem. Now, we need a book with a whole pep talk in the intro for men who are terrified to eat food they like.

My favorite thing about this intro is I'm 99% sure a woman wrote it. This whole project stinks of a tired wife trying to gaslight her husband into making dinner just once, even if it's terrible. In fact, one of the few male names associated with the book is Lincoln Jefferson. That's not a real name. That's what you quickly come up with when someone says, "quick; think of a man's name, and it can't be any former US presidents." They may as well have called him Guy Peniston or Toilet Seatup.

To trick men into cooking, the cookbook writer followed four simple rules: make it big, say it's spicy, use dick shaped ingredients, add booze. No matter what the recipe, if you add beer, it's a man recipe. That's how we get stuff like Beer Waffles With Ham & Cheese.

I learned some things about myself from this recipe because I didn't know I had opinions on the manliest cooking oil, but I definitely don't think it's sunflower oil. It feels like a deliberate troll to tell a man he will be making only the manliest food and then making him ask a grocery store clerk where the sunflower oil is. That extra large egg, though, that's a manly ingredient. No small eggs here; we only cook with the big boys.

You may have noticed the difficulty rating begins at monkey and ends at man eating alone on a fold out card table. I do think that’s a correct assessment of the men who would buy this book, but it’s not a kind one! This recipe also comes with a TOP TIP (since this book is for tops only). The tip is that you can buy frozen waffles at the supermarket. Who doesn’t know that Eggo waffles exist? Or where they could find them? It just feels mean to assume you would need to tell someone that. You could write a book called Bitches No Likey Science, and it would be less sexist to women than this cookbook is to men.

Not all of these manly meals are the same type of monstrosity as the frozen waffles and ham pile with beer. The Beeramisu is probably fine. That name makes me picture a frat boy replacing water with Natural Light in a box of cake mix, but it's actually taking some of the coffee in tiramisu and replacing it with stout beer, which might be fine? It feels almost like cheating. By sneaking beer into something as delicate as tiramisu, we make it an acceptable meal for even the beefiest of men!

Other recipes where alcohol provides the manliness include drunken chuck steak, boozy chocolate cheesecake, and, uh oh, this recipe is just a full bottle of tequila you're supposed to stare at in the dark while thinking of your ex-wife. But don't worry, this cookbook isn't just about making unhealthy recipes. It cares about men's health so much it stops in the middle to remind men that while constantly ingesting man meals is good for them, they also might want to hit the gym. Not for vanity or anything, just for big, pretty muscles.

The book then goes on to explain in detail what a push up is. The ideal reader for this book has never heard of frozen waffles, push ups, or gout. Fruits and vegetables are largely absent from the menu except for bananas which are considered manly for some reason? There's a recipe for a banana breakfast shake after the gym section, a token nod to the fact that fiber is technically necessary to survive. Then there's the big banana split, which calls for a large banana and says you can make it with cookie dough ice cream for a side splitting banana-buster. Yup, the goal is to bust that banana wide open. To explode a penis from the inside out? Like a real man?

Another phallic favorite of mine is the monster hot dog. It's a recipe that explains to men how to put condiments on a hotdog. Again, it has to be a large hotdog. Find the biggest hotdog in the store to achieve man (stores are large buildings where you trade money for food, see Beer Waffles With Ham & Cheese). This is a recipe in the same way LEGO instructions are a recipe. It tells you how to build a pile of food. Even if you were unaware of the concept of hotdogs, I think you could figure this out. Monkey is the appropriate rating for this one, but you shouldn't aspire to the cooking skills of a chimp.

If food is not dick-shaped or boozy enough, you can make it manly by simply making a ridiculous amount of it. There is a recipe in this book for 36 pancakes. It's called pancake peak, and it's for when 30 pancakes won't do the job. The job is making someone say, "this is way too many pancakes, are you ok?"

Since eating a dangerous amount of food is manly, the cookbook stops for a third time to explain that certain restaurants have food challenges where you can compete against other Men or against God and the restrictions He put on your stomach capacity. After all, the only thing more macho than eating something called a giant meat feast pizza is competing for the glory of defeating the giant meat feast pizza in battle.

I know a lot of men who can see a restaurant menu defying them to eat a two foot long burrito or the hottest chiles in the world and react by saying, "no, thank you, I would never stop shitting if I ate that, I would have to completely build a new bathroom from scratch, from the wooden 2x4s up, if I ate a two pound burrito because it probably has cheese and sour cream on it, and I'm very lactose intolerant." That's a perfectly fine way to respond to an eating challenge. Men, it's ok not to want your belly to expand like an anaconda that's just eaten an entire Florida pet owner.

You don't have to be the monkey or the man eating alone. You can be a man who doesn't need a recipe to make hot dogs. Guy Fieri doesn't need a recipe to make hotdogs. Sorry, also don't use the inventor of Donkey Sauce as a role model. God, being a Man is hard. I can't wait to finish this article and return to the ease and comfort of femininity. I'm going to go eat the most feminine tiramisu I can find.

...

If these images are borked, you can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM.