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The below full-length version of Real Men Make Dinner by John Donohue appears in the current issue of Gourmet Live. Download the free Gourmet Live app to get this story and more.

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When I became a father for the first time, six years ago, I gave up old habits—such as sleeping, using full sentences, and spending evenings dining out—and developed new ones, like getting by on four hours of sleep a night, speaking in baby talk, and eating meals at home. Of course, this is nothing new. All new parents find their lives changed in profound, ineffable ways, but for me the upheaval had an unexpected benefit. I dealt with the physically and emotionally disorienting process of having a newborn in the house by cooking obsessively, and in doing so discovered a surprise route to family happiness.

My father’s knowledge of the kitchen began and ended with a Mr. Coffee machine, and my mother prepared all the food, so in many ways I wasn’t prepared to do much of the cooking in my household. But in another, I was fully ready. My coming of age had food near its core, and by the time I was married, I knew how to sauté, roast, and braise. In high school, I had been a part–time clerk in a seafood store, and in college I was a short–order cook. I courted my wife with skate in brown butter and summer salads full of heirloom tomatoes. Once I became a parent, I found it a relief to retreat into the kitchen and make food for the family. It sure beat changing diapers.

I’m not the only man who thinks this way. Fathers now spend more time cooking then they ever have in the history of the nation. Four decades ago, they handled a mere 5 percent of a family’s food preparation. Today, the figure is closer to 25 percent, and growing. There are many reasons for this: The largest is that maintaining a middle–class lifestyle now requires two incomes, and more women are working than ever. Recently, for the first time in history, the number of women in the workforce topped the number of men. Many women work and cook, but many opt to work and not to cook. The family is then left with a choice: Order out, or go hungry. But there is a third way, that of having the man help with the cooking.

Over the past few years, in writing my blog, Stay at Stove Dad, and in editing my book, Man with a Pan: Culinary Adventures of Fathers Who Cook for Their Families, I’ve talked with many men who run the kitchens in their households. If, as Leo Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” I would add that all hungry families are similar, and every well–fed family is well fed in its own way. After writing the blog and book, the only conclusion I can draw about how men cook for their families is that they each do it differently, for different reasons.

Still, they share some common experiences. The main one is that cooking gives men a chance to work with their hands. These days, most jobs are at desks, in front of a computer, or otherwise fairly hands–off. Sure, there are jobs where brawn and sweat are the measurement of a day’s labor, such as construction, but those jobs are on the wane at the moment. Men who pass their time sitting in a chair and staring at a screen find it refreshing to stand in a kitchen and chop vegetables. It also gives some men a creative outlet. I met a bond trader in Los Angeles who spends all day crunching numbers, and finds it an enormous relief to be able to come home and experiment with Nobu Matsuhisa’s miso–marinated cod. He believes it gives him a chance to use an entirely different part of his brain.

Cooking may appeal to men now more than ever because of other changes to the American workplace. Some 20 years ago, during the recession that brought Bill Clinton to the White House, the word on every middle manager’s lips was downsizing. Men who thought they had stable jobs found out that they didn’t. In the booms and busts that followed, workplace satisfaction suffered. The chief reason there are now more women in the workforce than there are men is not that women have made great strides; it is that men have been laid off in record numbers. These days people, but especially men, have very little control over their careers, it seems.

In the kitchen, though, all can be well with the world. There’s never a boss who doesn’t listen, nor a company on the verge of bankruptcy. No stress, other than any that might be self–created, such as figuring out how to roast a whole pig. But if the man has not succumbed to stunt cooking, the odds are that he’s going to find the time spent at the counter, before the sink, over the stove, very rewarding. And unlike at work, the rewards are immediate, and, with a little practice, very large. Very little compares to seeing the smiles on children’s faces while they eat your food. Maybe the only thing to top it is when they get up and dance around the table after finishing their pasta bolognese. The workplace can feel very far away at that point.

I’ve met many men—working men with full–time jobs—who are cooking for their families. A friend of mine is a leading cancer researcher at MIT who puts steaming Chinese dishes on the table for his wife and three children. I’ve talked to a firefighter in Brooklyn who feeds his wife and three boys. And one Italian–born economist for the Federal Reserve has become a minor celebrity in his Manhattan neighborhood for the pastas he makes his wife and boys. There is a Broadway trombonist who lives in suburban New Jersey and manages a houseful, including a college–bound teenager and two younger children. I know a Chilean carpenter who prepares most of the meals for his wife and teenagers.

These men have discovered that home cooking is tastier and more enjoyable than anything else they can get on a regular basis, that it’s cheaper than ordering takeout or going to a restaurant, and that it can be healthier, as well. And according to certain surveys, children in families who eat together are more likely to consume more fruits and vegetables and have less of a taste for junk food than do the children in families who eat apart. Also, some studies have shown they are less likely to smoke, drink, or take drugs than are the offspring of families who do not eat together.

So there are a number of reasons men like to cook for their families, but my favorite has nothing to do with the dinner plate. Various studies have documented that men who do more work around the house—and that includes cooking—are more likely to have a payoff in the bedroom. As it turns out, men who step into the kitchen can end up increasing domestic harmony in very gratifying ways.

John Donohue is an editor at The New Yorker, the creator of the Stay at Stove Dad blog, and a cartoonist; his drawings have appeared in The New Yorker, Barron’s, and other publications. He is also the editor of the just–published Man with a Pan: Culinary Adventures of Fathers Who Cook for Their Families.