Feminine Women Can Cook

And in a fancy dress too.

"Is this the kind of wife you want, Ben? Not someone to help you, not a wife to cook and sew and cry and need, but this kind. Selfish, vain, useless. Is this what you really want?"

— Eve, Star Trek: The Original Series, "Mudd's Women"

If a female character is feminine, she will be able to cook. If she isn't, then any and all attempts to cook will end in failure or poison the consumer. Thus the Girly Girl will be a better cook than the Tomboy.

By feminine, we mean traditional domestically-focused wife-like roles. Being sexy isn't enough to qualify. You can also lose femininity by becoming overly childish and cute. We are talking about a traditionalist grown woman femininity here; The Wife of The Three Faces of Eve.

Keep in mind that this trope refers to home cooking, not professional cookery. (Although working in a restaurant may still be counted as one of the Acceptable Feminine Goals and Traits depending on how it's presented.) Younger tropers might be surprised to learn that before the 1980s, women were generally not allowed to work as professional chefs.^note Famous female chefs do seem to have worked professionally pre-1980, whether in their own eateries or publicly. The excuse usually given was that the work was "too physically hard" for women, but in reality, the common belief was that although a woman could make an adequate home cook, she could never be a real chef, because being a chef took a certain genius that no woman could possibly ever, ever have. The resistance to women working as professional chefs was so strong that some women who tried ended up having to leave the profession to protect themselves from sexual harassment and violence. Thus Colette in Ratatouille can cook and be a fiery feminist heroine at the same time —as she points out, she has to be a fiery cook in order to become a chef at all.

This trope is fairly recent, as before the arrival of electric and gas ranges (and of packaged meat) cookery was dirty, hard work that if anything sharply detracted from a woman’s perceived femininity, especially in a time when ‘true’ femininity was considered to be possessed only by the genteel. A proper lady living in the 18th or 19th century might make preserves or distill perfumes or medicines - and would have a stillroom in which to do so - but (as Mrs. Bennet rightly points out in Pride & Prejudice) would not be caught dead even so much as walking into her own kitchen, let alone cooking in it.

Compare the male equivalent Manly Men Can Hunt for traditionally male activities in which modern successful men lose the ability to perform manly abilities as a function of their "sacrifices" for success. Fishing, car repair, hunting, plumbing, carpentry, etc.

Compare also Harp of Femininity, an alternative and somewhat more refined way to emphasize a woman's femininity. Also compare Textile Work Is Feminine, which is similar but has fallen more victim to the Industrial Revolution. Also see Through His Stomach for one use a feminine woman can put it to — whether in a romantic or maternal situation.

Not to be confused with Stay in the Kitchen, which, despite its name, isn't exactly related to this trope, although they can overlap. Inverted with Dads Can't Cook or Real Men Cook, depending on your perspective.

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Examples:

Advertising

• American food companies in the 1950s tried to wrap up their mixes and other convenience foods as an easier way to cook because otherwise women resisted them, fearing they would fall afoul of this trope if they used them. (They still resisted even with it, just not so much.)

Anime & Manga

• In Ai Kora, one of the signs that Ninja girl Kirino is actually a Tomboy with a Girly Streak is that she's an excellent cook.
• In Angelic Layer, the anime in particular, cute lead character Misaki is an excellent cook and is told that she'll make a good bride someday. Her tomboyish and violent best friend, Kizaki Tamayo, begins to get jealous of her ability when it looks like Misaki will win the boy they both like, Koutarou: he loves Misaki's food, but Tamayo can't even crack an egg right. In an odd twist, this is expanded upon much more in the version in which Tamayo *does* win, and barely glossed over in the one where she loses.
• The protagonist Ryousuke in Blue Wars plays with this trope in an interesting way because he is a heavily muscled marital artist with the heart of a maiden in love and the feminine interests to match. His cooking skills (good enough to get a compliment from his crush) are evidence of how he fits this trope to a T—except for the fact that he isn't actually a feminine woman, he just really badly wants to be one.
• Referenced in A Certain Magical Index. After Touma nearly kills himself helping Mikoto and the Sisters clones, she buys him some cookies as thanks. He protests that the reward would usually be homemade cookies, and Mikoto (a textbook tomboy) demands to know exactly what kind of girl he thinks she is. A Certain Scientific Railgun, however, shows that she afterward did bake him some cookies herself (with Saten's help), but was too embarrassed to give them to him.
• In Chrono Crusade, the Hot-Blooded Rosette can't cook. In a flashback, Chrono is shown foaming at the mouth when he first tries one of Rosette's cookies. Later, she's shown to have improved enough that her food is edible, but it still looks disgusting. In comparison, Fiore's cooking is to die for, and in the anime, Azmaria and Chrono (of all people!) are both shown to be good cooks, as well.

• Aoba in Cross Game is the Tomboy category, while her feminine sister Wakaba can cook quite well.
• Toyed with in Dear Brother. On one hand, the Yamato Nadeshiko-in-training Nanako is a Supreme Chef and The Lad-ette Kaoru is a Lethal Chef. (Which gets a lampshade in the fourth episode of the anime, with Kaoru epically failing to separate egg whites and yolks and Nanako teaching her to do so). On the other, the other local tomboy Tomoko is just as good of a cook as Nanako is.
• The main female lead of Daltanious is a traditional Yamato Nadeshiko who likes cooking for her male counterparts and enjoys cleaning as a hobby. She's also a medic and tends to the wounded, since the anime is set during a post-apoctalyptic Alien Invasion.
• Inverted in D.N.Angel: the tomboyish Riku Harada can cook while her girly-girl sister Risa is a bonafide Lethal Chef. This is justified by their personalities: Riku is more hardworking and responsible while Risa is more spoiled and childish (she gets better in the manga).
• In Fate/Prototype, the very girlish-looking Manaka Sajyou◊ took care of the housework after her and Ayaka's mother either died or disappeared. That certainly included handling the family kitchen.
• Thoroughly played with in Food Wars! whenever the topic comes up.
  • First, it's subverted in an omake when girls try to appeal to guys by making them food, only for Nikumi's tsundere 'I just made too much' excuse to fall flat when she sees that everyone in the Polar Star Dorm really did make too much food because they cook constantly and are having trouble getting through it all. Then we see two fangirls of the Aldinis try to share lunches with them, only for Takumi and Isami's food to be much better, leaving all three girls depressed. Then it's inverted when the extremely masculine and popular Jouichirou had female classmates begging for his failure dishes, showing lovestruck eyes after a BDSM-themed foodgasm. His food still makes pretty girls swoon even in the present.
  • More seriously, it's acknowledged at multiple points that the field of professional cooking is dominated by men and that women only rarely manage to reach great success and acknowledgement. For example, at least one student feels she needs the prestige of the First Seat to be acknowledged at her family's restaurant by the sexist male staff and we have yet to see a single female student who either has or has had the position of First Seat of the Elite Ten at Tootsuki.
  • Particularly played with when it comes to Megumi. She's extremely feminine and supportive in a 'girl next door' sort of way, which has great influence on her cooking. Rather than emphasize technical perfection or ingenuity like her male or more aggressive female counterparts, she prefers to use simple ingredients with painstaking care put into thinking about who is going to eat it. However, while this does make her the most girly girl in the cast, it's also nearly gotten her expelled on at least three different points throughout the story and also causes her to be overlooked in favor of students like Alice or Miyoko, even if she actually scores higher than the latter and makes much more enjoyable and comfortable food than the former.
• In Gourmet Girl Graffiti, Ryou's grandmother taught Ryou to cook exactly for this reason. This is why Ryou wondered if she'll become a bad housewife at the beginning of the series as she found she hasn't been tasting as food lately (which is more because of loneliness than her cooking skills).

• Gender Bender mangas Maomarimo and Sekainohate de Aimashou both use this trope as partial justification for the Third Law of Gender-Bending, which carries the rather… unfortunate implication that a boy with a feminine interest is not manly enough and is better off as a girl.
• Miia in Monster Musume believes this trope and keeps trying to prove her suitability to be the girl Kimihito marries. Unfortunately, between being a lamia meaning that she has only 1/25th to 1/50th the taste buds of a human and her tendency to simply add ingredients to a dish because they look or sound like what's being made (for example, when trying to make white rice gruel she added white onions and white fish because they're all white), she's an exceptionally skilled Lethal Chef.
• Naruto:
  • Hinata Hyuga in a filler episode of Part I Naruto and in an omake of Naruto Shippuden is shown to be an exceptional cook. And in Boruto she is shown as a Supreme Chef with her son, Boruto, commenting once how she went overboard, and her husband Naruto mentioning how her food is delicious.
  • Sakura Haruno on the other hand, is shown in the aforementioned omake as Lethal Chef, being a medical ninja and her insistence on preparing "healthy" meals having something to do with it. By the time of Boruto, she has improved her cooking skills considerably, after having been a housewife raising her daughter Sarada.
• In Otomen, one's cooking skill is apparently correlated to femininity. Tomboy Ryo is a Lethal Chef, but when she briefly turned feminine due to a Heroic BSoD, she suddenly becomes a good cook. She loses her skills once she pulled herself together.
• In Paradise Kiss, Isabella is constantly feeding everyone her exquisite traditional Japanese dishes. Coupled with her extremely feminine, motherly, and caring demeanor, she's the closest the series gets to a Yamato Nadeshiko... apart from some embarrassing biological details.
• In Pokémon: The Series, Dawn was good at baking Poffins and Serena is an excellent patisserie. May subverts it despite her coordinator status by being a Lethal Chef.
• Pretty Cure:
  • In Fresh Pretty Cure!, the very feminine Love was taught to cook at a young age by her mother.
  • In Suite Pretty Cure ♪, Kanade, the Girly Girl to Hibiki's tomboy, is an excellent pastry chef.
  • In HappinessCharge Pretty Cure!, the adorable Ribbon cooks for Hime, because Hime doesn't know how.
  • KiraKira★Pretty Cure à la Mode: Zigzagged. The very feminine Ichika, Yukari, and Ciel are all fantastic cooks, but so is the shy Himari, and tomboyish Aoi and Akira.
  • Subverted in HuGtto! Pretty Cure: Despite being cast in a cooking show, Saaya's famous actress mother can't cook very well.
  • Inverted in Tropical-Rouge! Pretty Cure, where it's the tomboyish Asuka who likes to cook.
  • Delicious Party♡Pretty Cure: Like Kira Kira above, the Cures are all very girly, and excellent cooks. The same goes for Yui and Ran's mothers, and Yui's grandmother. Some male characters (ex. Rosemary) are shown to be good at cooking, but for the most part, the women are in charge of the kitchen.
  • Hirogaru Sky! Pretty Cure: The feminine Mashiro makes delicious bread that looks like clouds, which the tomboyish Sora loves.
• Ranma ½:
  • Akane Tendo's utter inability to cook symbolizes her tomboy inner nature, despite her preference for feminine garb. The fact that she desperately wants to learn to cook is a way of showing that she wants to be more feminine like her idolized older sister Kasumi. Ironically, Wholesome Crossdresser Ukyo's superlative cooking ability (she's a professional chef) is one indication that her inner nature is actually more feminine than dress-loving Akane. The only thing they have in common is martial arts.
  • It's hinted that Nabiki Tendo can't cook, and can't be bothered to try, and prefers extremely expensive takeout instead. Since she is described as lacking a maiden's heart, the lack of cooking ability follows.
  • Ranma is also able to cook basic meals, despite being a boy who hates being cursed to turn into a girl. His mother (unaware that the redheaded girl is the same person as her son) once compliments "her" cooking and immediately follows up with "You'll make a wonderful wife!" simply because of this skill. Needless to say, Ranma was not amused.

• A Rare Male Example occurs in Saint Beast where an already very effeminate character has his effeminacy further established by being the natural cook in his circle of friends.
• Princess Ann from Samurai 8: The Tale of Hachimaru, as part of an attempt to connect with her Samurai Lord, Hachimaru, she decides to make lunch for everyone. The meal is delicious... just not very appealing to the eye.
• Miya from Sekirei is an interesting example. Her cooking is noted to be incredible, and she seems to be the very ideal of a housewife. However, it turns out that Seo was the one who taught her everything she knows about cooking and keeping house. When she first married, she was horrible at anything related to keeping house — ruining clothes, breaking the panels out of the shoji screens, and cooking food so horrific that her husband couldn't even swallow it while trying to insist it wasn't that bad.

• Played for Drama in Spy X Family. Yor is an assassin who got married to seem less suspicious, but due to her Bunny-Ears Lawyer nature (only being good at killing-related things), she is constantly worried about not seeming normal enough. She's good at cleaning (because of her experience in taking care of crime scenes), but she is a Lethal Chef (and good with poisons; it's unknown which came first). She tries to get her coworkers at her cover job to teach her to cook, and she eventually learns one recipe.

• Tenchi Muyo! series:
  • Sasami's the usual cook for the household, mostly out of a desire to pay back for staying at Tenchi's house. However, there are times where both Ryoko (very much The Lad-ette) and Ayeka (The Ojou, meaning she's very girlish) attempt to cook, mostly to win Tenchi over. One issue of the manga series had Tenchi fall ill after one of Ryoko and Ayeka's fights knocked him into the lake, leading to both girls trying to cook for him. Both girls are horrible cooks, but where Ryoko plows through trying to cook (with disastrous results, Ayeka ends up swallowing her pride and Sasami aids her. It's all for naught, though - by the time Ayeka's done cooking, Tenchi's feeling much better and it's Mihoshi who's sick (she got that way trying her own idea to cure Tenchi).
  • Ayeka takes after her mother Misaki, who, being an Action Girl par excellence, couldn't be bothered to learn, while Sasami chose to follow their grandmother Seto who is the best chef in the whole damn Galaxy. Which is ironic, because Seto is probably even a greater Action Girl than Misaki and still finds the time to teach her cooking to everyone who asks, despite being busy with running the empire and upholding her "Demon Princess Of Jurai" nickname and screwing with everyone around.
• In Tori Koro, Yae is the only one of the three main girls who can cook (and the only thing she can do well; she's bad at both physically (except baseball) and academically), provoking ire from others that she's more feminine than them.
• As seen above, Sumire from Venus Versus Virus. The slightly older Gothic Loli Lucia however could not cook well until Sumire taught her. Another variation that appears is that Sumire has a liking for flower arrangement.
• The Wallflower: Sunako is an excellent cook, at least with Japanese food, and it's one of the big signs that she really is Beautiful All Along and Feminine All Along.
• Wandering Son's protagonist Nitori is quite good at baking, though she's not shown to do any other sort of cooking besides that; she identifies as a girl despite her boy body, and is pretty girlish as well. Her female peers aren't nearly as good at baking.

Asian Animation

• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Tibbie, the makeup-loving chick of the goats, is also stated to enjoy cooking.

Comic Books

• Superman: Depending on the Writer, Lois Lane, as a career woman, can't cook. Clark can.

Film — Animation

• While just a minor character, Mirabel's mother in Encanto is the most feminine (and stable) woman of the family. Her Gift is making food with magical healing powers.
• Pictured above: In The Princess and the Frog, the heroine, Tiana, loves to cook, and from the age of six shows off her prodigious gumbo skills. Her dream is to own a beautiful, community-nurturing restaurant where she herself is the head chief. Her skills were honed in her home kitchen but, like Collette, she is a professional chef who's worked her whole life to get where she is.
• Colette from Ratatouille twists this trope around by being strong, feminine, and an outstanding chef at one of Paris' top restaurants all at once. She makes a speech partway through the film which is a Take That! to the notion that women can only cook within the home, which is clearly a Berserk Button.
  • It's also Averted in the food industry as a whole- there's a lot of ingrained sexism and it's very hard for a woman to get into haute cuisine. Colette managed it because she was willing to go through hell for it.
• In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Snow White's ability to cook is one of her defining traits and what ultimately convinces the dwarfs to let her stay with them. Within the film we see her cook a pot of soup and later gooseberry pies for the dwarfs; she also mentions that she can make apple dumplings and plum pudding.

Film — Live Action

• Film Always. Air-traffic controller Dorinda Durston wants to have a man over for dinner. She has to buy a pre-cooked meal and pretends that she prepared it herself.
• Lara Croft in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider even screws up reheating a ready meal in a microwave. She's of noble blood, and her butler does all the cooking. She's also most definitely not feminine. The one time she puts on an elegant dress, her butler nearly has a heart attack (he's been trying to get her to act like a proper lady for years) and quickly corrects the situation by serving her guns on a tray.
• Éowyn in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is shown to be a horrible cook by Aragorn's wordless expression when she attempts to make stew for him (matching at least two trope variants, since Éowyn is not at all happy in a medieval woman's role and she has an unrequited crush on Aragorn). It probably helps that she's highborn, so she probably has servants for cooking, and she's traveling with minimal equipment.

• Woman of the Year spends much of the movie showing how Katharine Hepburn's female reporter is the intellectual equal (or even superior) of Spencer Tracy's male reporter. The last scene in the movie is of Hepburn trying to make waffles but failing spectacularly, indicating that by being so successful in the "man's world" (the movie was released in 1942), she's rendered helpless in the "woman's world."

Literature

• Iria Gai from Alice, Girl from the Future. She was raised as an ultimate tomboy and was known to live for years on sandwiches. Then she fell in love and married...

• In The Bible, this is one of the traits of the ideal wife in Proverbs 31. "She is like a merchant fleet, bringing her food from afar. She rises while it is still night, and supplies provisions for her household, the daily fare of her maids." She's also pretty handy with a spindle. (It's part of a very big list; being able to do any of it is seen as a good thing. That said, if she CAN cook, it means another skill that doesn't need to be outsourced.)
• In The Black Company, this appears in the form of "Non-Feminine Women Can't Cook". The Lady, Sleepy, and the Radisha, all powerful and formidable women, can't cook at all. The male narrator says at one point that he doesn't think any of them could boil water without burning it.
• In Poul Anderson's "Break", Cleonie — previously noted by the captain as a feminine woman — is the sole passenger among the survivors of The Mutiny. When the (male) crew desperately work to save themselves in a damaged crew, she feels helpless, but the captain counters that she keeps the meals coming.

• Louisa May Alcott was very fond of this trope. The scenes in Little Women putting Jo March through the 'feminine redemption for the tomboy' version were repeated in several other of Alcott's novels and short stories, as her heroines contemplate taking up a profession and are firmly told that the most honourable profession for any woman is to make a happy, comfortable home for her family. Which doesn't mean they always follow it, anyway.
• In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, Mara Jade tries to give Luke a taste of home by cooking a Tatooine dish. She screws it up. Luke, perhaps for the sake of her feelings (or just to escape her rage), tells her that it smells just like he remembers; and that he really wanted to leave Tatooine because of the food.
• Invoked in Summers at Castle Auburn when Roderick says this. Corie points out to him that's stupid because most noblewomen can't cook.

Live-Action TV

• Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, where Michaela, a highly educated and competent doctor, cannot cook at all. This plays into a few different aspects of her personality, including the fact that she decided to become a Frontier Doctor rather than marry, after a childhood spent with a father who made her his protégé despite not being the son he wanted. While not masculine, Michaela is definitely more practical than the other women she interacts with, which translates into being less overtly feminine. Although even if she had married, it's implied it's unlikely she'd be expected to know how to cook anyway, as she was raised in privilege and this is another demonstration of her Fish out of Water experience on the frontier.
• Played with in Firefly. In "Our Mrs. Reynolds", Mal's almost painfully submissive new wife Saffron turns out to be a fabulous cook. Zoe is not amused when Saffron suggests she cook for her husband, and is even less amused when Wash drools over Saffron's cooking. However, in "War Stories", a rather touching scene has Zoe cooking for Wash after he leads the charge to rescue Mal.
  "Mmmmmm. Wife soup."
• Gilmore Girls:

• Lorelai's best friend Sookie works as a chef, but she's also shown as a feminine woman who loves cooking and happily feeds her husband and children. And occasionally Lorelai and Rory.

• How I Met Your Mother:
  • Lily is the girly girl and feminine woman of the group. Some episodes mention that Lily is a great cook and bakes excellent cakes or cookies. For instance, she prepared the very delicious Thanksgiving dinner.
  • Sweet Baker Victoria, Ted's girlfriend, is a very pretty and sweet woman, and a professional baker who met Ted at one wedding. She often bakes cupcakes for Ted.

• Lois in Lois & Clark can't cook... as shown in one episode, at the end of which she inherits cookery talent from the ghost of a disgruntled housewife who possessed her. Cookery is never mentioned again.

• Sheila from Two Up, Two Down is a typical feminine woman of The '70s, happy with being in the kitchen and content to spend a morning going through her spice rack, whereas Flo, a more unconventional New-Age Retro Hippie, does nothing of the sort.

Tabletop Games

• Traveller: In the Sword Worlds the "Hearthfire" is a sacred Archetype and a symbol of security and domesticity. A proud male warrior or worker "guards" the Hearthfire, but his wife Tends it. In a way, they hold this to mean she is a quasi-priestess merely by being a woman.

Theatre

• In The Golden Apple, Miss Minerva bakes a seven-layer cake for the fair "just to prove I'm feminine." But Lovey Mars takes along her mincemeat pie and Mrs. Juniper brings her prize-winning angel food cake. And then old Mother Hare appears and offers her Apple of Discord to the most feminine of them all, for confectionery values of femininity.
• Implied/Downplayed in the female version of The Odd Couple. Florence (genderbent Felix) is a prissy former housewife who loves cooking, prides herself on her cooking, and is noted for her cooking skills. Olive (genderbent Oscar), meanwhile, is a sport-loving career lady (this version of the play's set in the mid-1980s) who late in the second act doesn't remember or even look to remove Florence's roast capon from the oven before it burns up past being saveable.

Video Games

• Fire Emblem: Awakening:
  • Sumia is very girlish and tries to use her cooking to win over Chrom's affections. She also attempts to help Gaius gather good ingredients, with disastrous results. Some of Sumia's Event Tiles conversations have her saying she has made lunch for any of her love interests... and that she tripped over the lunchbox. Twice.
  • Noire, the Shrinking Violet archer with a Split Personality, is very girly as well and she's great at baking.
  • Lissa is a Tomboy Princess who tries to bake for Kellam. She fails. She also attempts to cook for the aforementioned Gaius, and that goes a little better... since this time he's watching over her and giving her cooking lessons.
  • Sully and her daughter Kjelle are the tomboys of the army... and neither can cook. Ironically, two of Sully's potential husbands/Kjelle's prospect dads are Gaius and Stahl, who are supreme chefs.
  • Olivia is rather feminine in looks and personality, and according to her supports with Kellam she's pretty good at making sweets. And she can be paired up with almost all the aforementioned guys.
• Harvest Moon:
  • Played with. Ann, a tomboy, cannot cook well in her first appearance. Come its successor port, and she's one of the best cooks in the game.
  • Eli is rather feminine and is a baker.
• Depending on the player, in Mass Effect 3's Citadel DLC a female Shepard romancing Kaidan can either avert this trope or play it straight depending on a dialogue choice made when Kaidan cooks for her (Shepard being a textbook Action Girl).
• Metal Gear:
  • Played straight in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Sunny is taught how to cook by Naomi, and it eventually becomes a plot point. Sunny uses Raiden to deliver a coded culinary message indicating she'd attacked the Patriots.
• Discussed in Persona 3; Fuuka Yamagishi, despite her gentle and supportive personality, perceives herself to lack femininity due to her talent at tinkering with computers and electronics, and wants to learn how to cook to make up for it. Unfortunately, her cooking is quite awful. However, the trope is played straight by Yukari Takeba, who's a decent but not great cook, and Persona 3 Portable's female protagonist who, while more of a Tomboy with a Girly Streak, is such a Supreme Chef that she can actually teach Fuuka how to cook properly.
  • In the sequel everyone assumes Yukiko Amagi will be an excellent cook before they try her cooking, as she's considered to be the most feminine girl in town and the inn her family runs is known to have good food. Unfortunately, she's also a Lethal Chef-having no sense for what is actually good in food and being easily able to be talked into baffling culinary decisions by the even worse Chie.
• Rune Factory Oceans:
  • You start the game as the male protagonist Aden but have the choice of switching to the female protagonist Sonja once you've restored her body. Sonja will inherit all of Adel's skills with the exception of cooking, which will automatically be bumped up to 40 if Aden had any less than that.
• Tales Series:
  • Tales of Symphonia:

• Averted with Sheena who is one of the best cooks the party has, especially regarding familial recipes (she gets this as a title: "the culinary master who raised home-style cooking to the highest level"), yet she's a Tsundere tomboyish Action Girl. However, the deviation from the trope is lampshaded in one scene where Handsome Lech Zelos calls her on it:

Sheena: Oh, well. It's fun to cook every now and then. I wouldn't want to get out of practice.

Zelos: Oh, Sheena, what does that mean? You practicing your cooking for when you get married? I didn't expect to hear that from you of all people!

Sheena: N...no, it's not that! Sheesh!

• In Tales of Graces Cheria is the one usually cooking for the group and is the most feminine party member, often lampshaded as the Team Mom.
• In Tales of Legendia has Mimi the source of the recipes in the game.

• In Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the very feminine Pyra's unique field skill is cooking, a skill that her less feminine "sister" Mythra lacks. The similarly feminine Vess also cooks dumplings that are famously delicious even though they're the only thing she can cook. The tomboyish Mòrag, in contrast, is a self-admitted poor cook, though this seems to be more directly related to her experiences with combat; when she's tasked with gutting a fish, she gets the impression that it's trying to shame her with its gaze for stabbing it in the heart, so she leaves the task to Brighid instead.

Visual Novels

• Amnesia: Memories' fandisc Amnesia LATER: The feminine heroine does a lot of cooking in the various stories. Partly justified, as she lives alone and knowing how to cook is a worthy skill in such a case. In Ikki's story, he expresses amazement at how well she cooks and she admits that she kind of had to learn to cook for herself because her father was often going out on dates with various women.

• Daughter for Dessert:

• Deconstructed with Lily. As she becomes more vulnerable, or more “feminine,” as it were, her cooking skills improve.

• Fate/stay night:
  • Sakura learned to cook to appeal to Shirou. One of her primary goals seems to be to outdo him at cooking and she gets a little antsy if she fails. Her unpleasant backstory drove away most of her feminine traits, and also most of her human ones... But she's (a bit) better by the time the story starts. Except in Heaven's Feel where those quick flashes of insecurity or jealousy she had in the previous two routes, coupled with the shards of the corrupted Grail that Zouken's implanted into her, cause her to go insane (eventually). She recovered, fortunately. Interestingly enough, this actually originated as an Invoked Trope for her: she believed that being as close to a perfect House Wife would make her "worthy" of Shirou despite her internalized self-loathing over being Defiled Forever.
  • Saber takes the cake in terms of being successful in a "man's world" in addition to being one of the powerful characters in the series. It makes sense that she's doesn't know how to cook, in fact it would be more strange if she did know how to. As such she depends on Shirou to cook for her, made more noticeable by the fact that she's a Big Eater.

Webcomics

• Marina of Castoff greets the heroes with a nice dinner, makes them breakfast the next day and while joining the group, starts the list of her useful skills with cooking. She's easily the most conventionally feminine of the women in the group that includes Kung-Fu Wizard Arianna and tomboy thief Rori.
• Tedd in El Goonish Shive can cook — but only when he's a woman. His explanation is initially "because I'm hot" (and the comment on this background is "She's so hot, it helps her cook!"). Later he reasons that he only has to cook for himself when his dad isn't around, which is also when he turns himself into a girl, so he has accidentally conditioned himself to feel more confident cooking in female form.
• Ménage à 3 features DiDi, who lacks some of the attributes of extreme femininity, but who is certainly very, very female — and who is a keen hobbyist cook, implied to be far and away the best in the kitchen of the lead cast.

• In Sinfest, one choice Monique is presented with is Wife Material, with a conspicuous oven containing a dish.

Western Animation

• In Atomic Betty, Betty's grandmother is a Retired Badass and can't cook to save her life.
• Doug's best gal pal the tomboyish Patti was shown in one episode to not be a good cook, despite being The Ace in many other areas.

• An episode of Kim Possible shows her as a disaster in the kitchen, getting by the end of the episode under the tutelage of her culinary genius sidekick Ron Stoppable.
• In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Pinkie Pie and Sugar Belle are two of the girlier ponies, and Pinkie Pie is a sweet lover who works in Ponyville's cake shop, while Sugar Belle runs her very own bakery. Rarity, the girliest of ponies, has also been shown to be a decent cook.
  • On the flip side, tomboyish farm girl Applejack has proven to be good at cooking with her family's apples, which makes sense since that's one way her farm makes money.
• A running gag in The Simpsons is that Marge buys into this a lot, but is in fact a pretty bland cook. She claims her secret ingredient is salt and is flummoxed at the idea that a spice rack could hold as "many" as 8 spices, claiming some must be doubles and having never heard of oregano before.
• Teen Titans (2003):
  • Raven can't even cook pancakes.
  • Starfire's a straight example if you accept that Tamaranian cuisine is difficult for Earthlings to swallow at its best (unless you're Terra).
• In the episode "Johnny Daddy Day" from Johnny Test, it is shown that Johnny's super-busy working mom Lila and genius inventor sisters Mary and Susan have no experience in cooking whatsoever. They aren't even sure what a spatula is or does. Under the guidance of Johnny (who took a cooking class to get an easy A grade), they manage to make a meatloaf for Hugh for Father's Day, only for it to come alive and attack him.
  Mary and Susan: We... might have used too much DNA.

• Played very straight in Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa. The tomboyish Cowlamity Kate is such a horrible cook that the others dread her recipe for rhubarb pie, while the more traditionally feminine Lilli Bovine's culinary skills are universally praised.

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