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Culinary
historian and ICE® Chef-Instructor Cathy Kaufman gives us the
following look at the chef's role through the ages. In addition
to being the creator of ICE®'s Historical Fine Dining series,
Kaufman is a noted lecturer and an Associate Editor of the
Oxford Historical Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink.
This February, she will co-host ICE®'s first Seminar in Gastronomy.
Beginning approximately one million years ago, when hunter-gatherers
learned that roasting quadrupeds over an open flame sure made
'em taste good, human history has revolved around how we play
with our food. The most important event in all pre-history
was man's ability to produce more food than was needed for
immediate consumption. By domesticating animals and learning
to farm, this "Neolithic Revolution" sparked the
development of civilization, and with it, cuisine.
How so? Surpluses freed some members of the clan from the
tedium of producing food, allowing them to pursue more "civilized"
activities, such as throwing pots (things to store the harvest
in), building temples (places to warehouse those pots and
to sacrifice lambs in thanks for the bounty), and the like.
With divisions of labor, some people could spend time embellishing
the food: by about 1,700 BC, cuneiform-incised clay tablets
from Mesopotamia record our earliest written recipes, including
a coq au vin precursor for game birds cooked in vinegar and
flavored with mint or leeks and garlic.
During the Antique Millennium, approximately 500 BC to 476
AD, a "Gourmet's Revolution" took place: educated
Greco-Roman gourmands liked to read about food. Archestratus,
Athenaeus and Apicius, to name a few, wrote extensively about
cooks, foodstuffs, recipes, dietary theories and gluttons.
Significantly, it was patrician gentlemen who wrote about
food; although some cooks were praised for working magic in
the kitchen, they were often illiterate and, rightly or wrongly,
were seen as greasy laborers.
How did food preparers go from being mere "cooks"
to professional "chefs?" Cooks had several career
paths before elegant restaurants emerged in the late 18th
century. In addition to private cheffing in well-to-do households,
some cooks were off-premise caterers. Other cooks, frequently
members of various guilds, ran the thousands of take-out shops
and fast-food bars that populated ancient, medieval and early
modern European towns. (Most urban dwellers did not have private
kitchens---think of the fire hazards in towns built largely
of wood---and needed some way of getting a hot meal.) Still,
the widely held image of these cooks was as unprofessional
hash-slingers, and extensive regulation prohibited makers
of savory meat pies from doing things like reheating pies
once they had cooled or selling day-old pies as fresh.
There were exceptions at the very top of the profession. Master
cooks to royalty and aristocrats from the 13th century forward
(and even earlier in the Arab world) were sometimes viewed
as artists, or at least as skilled artisans. Most private
cooks, however, were second-tier employees, answering to the
maître-d'hôtel, the chief operating officer in
charge of dining. The maître-d' would consult with the
master on the menu, communicate the decisions to the kitchen,
and be responsible for ordering food and supervising the preparation
and service of the meal. In short, the maître-d' schmoozed
the patron and tasted the wine in the dining hall while the
cook sweated in the stifling kitchen.
By the end of the 17th century, meals at the fanciest French
houses were served in a highly regimented style known as service
à la française. To understand this mode of service,
think of our groaning holiday tables where multiple side dishes
support a roasted turkey and perhaps a ham or joint of beef.
The host carves and serves the meat at the table, and whoever
is sitting by the cranberries or mashed potatoes places a
dollop on the plate before passing it on to the eager diner.
The same was true in service à la française,
except that it was much more over-the-top. Designed to dazzle
the eye as much as feed the body, specific rules governed
the contents, size and placement of dishes in a two-course
meal served French-style. Flowers and epergnes (tiered centerpieces)
brimming with sweetmeats and fruits formed the table's permanent
geography, around which were placed the varied dishes of the
first course, only to be removed and replaced by an equally
gargantuan second course. Symmetry was the key to taming the
jungle of platters and tureens, and a whole genre of household
manuals published in the 17th through 19th centuries explained
precisely how to do it, often with illustrations. The audience
for these books were the maîtres-d'hôtel, who
masterminded every detail of the meal; they were not written
for cooks.
Service à la française was unquestionably dramatic.
No guest entered the dining room until the first course of
dishes had been laid, and the sumptuousness could not fail
to seduce. Yet from a culinary perspective service à
la française was flawed because the food often was
cold by the time the diners assembled in the pre-set dining
room. As French chef Felix Dubois (1818 - 1901) noted, "Isn't
it regrettable… that on a table splendidly served, where
no expense is spared to flatter the taste and the desires
of the guests, one eats dishes that have cooled down or lost
something of their essential qualities?"
Dubois's solution was service à la russe. This is essentially
our modern restaurant style of service, in which complete,
individual plates are prepared for each diner by the kitchen
or service staff. No hot food appeared in the dining room
until after the guests were seated and service proceeded briskly
apace.
Service à la russe had one drawback: everyone wanted
the same variety of tastes found in the opulent service à
la française. This required that the meal move from
two main course settings comprised of multiple dishes to eight,
ten or even upwards of twenty sequential courses. Charles
Ranhofer, the chef at Delmonico's in New York, gives instructions
on how to accomplish this in The Epicurean (1893), noting
that to serve fourteen courses at ten-minute intervals takes
two hours twenty minutes; eight courses could be served in
sixty-four minutes only if, "[a]s soon as one course
is being passed around, the following one should be brought
from the kitchen so that the dinner can be served uninterruptedly
and eaten while hot and palatable." Talk about indigestion!
Thank heavens that Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935) recognized
the absurdity of such rapid-fire meals. Writing in Le Livre
des menus, Escoffier concludes "It is one hundred times
better to serve a very short menu, but well balanced and perfectly
executed, so that the guests will be able to savor without
haste, rather than to parade food in front of them and to
repeat the torture of Tantalus, a long stream of dishes which
they never have the time to touch." Escoffier's advice
was quite radical, and underscores the revolutionary shift
from serving à la française to à la russe.
It placed a new responsibility on chefs, as Escoffier notes,
by requiring them to choose limited, well-composed menus with
a harmonious flow, and paved the way for recognition of the
chef as a professional.
Escoffier himself was a precursor to our modern day celebrity
chef, his rise made possible in large part by a maturing restaurant
industry, a development that had begun in seriousness during
the Industrial Revolution. By the beginning of the 20th century,
the habit of dining out for entertainment, and the basic structure
of the restaurant, were recognizable in their current form.
This gave the chef a tremendous boost in prestige: the modern
restaurant became the stage on which a chef could operate,
his food available for the first time to anyone with the money
to pay.
The current passion among chefs and gourmets alike for the
tasting menu, in which the patron surrenders all choice to
the chef and dines on a varying number of petite plates in
an order dictated by the kitchen, could be seen as the ultimate
mark of regard for the chef. According to the 2003 Zagat Survey,
no fewer than 70 restaurants in New York City offer tasting
menus, and certain very elite spots, such as Berkeley's Chez
Panisse or Chicago's Charlie Trotter's, offer nothing else.
That diners are willing to surrender all choice suggests a
further development in the relationship between the chef and
eater, a perception of that the chef is a professional taste-maker---not
simply a proficient cook--- with specialized insight into
structuring a meal.
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