I remember chefs musing about the future of the business when I was just entering the field. The message was a Oh, Woe is me. How will cooking ever survive with this riffraff? I suspect no craft or skill was ever immune to the worries of the masters for their replacements.
As a chef I held similar thoughts about the future of cooking with the up and comers I hired. Oh, Woe is me. How will the craft ever survive? Well, for better or worse it has. But, that is part of my question. When I was learning, the cooks and chefs who were my teachers were as hard as nails. First days, weeks and even months could feel like an emotional gulag. Rarely was a guard left down among the plebes long enough to reveal humanity. Kitchens were no place for sentimentality. The food and the customers didn’t care about your feelings. Dinner service must, MUST, get done and no disaster was going to interfere with that plan. The youth of today seem weak. Physically and emotionally feeble.
Commercial kitchens heat source is gas. Electricity goes out? The ovens will not work (funny yet tragic bit of engineering, the pilot is regulated by an electric sensor. No electricity, no oven) but the stoves do. Gas goes out, get the catering propane burners. Cooks learn to work around problems in easy stride. Several traits are needed to accomplish this. A cool head, a stubborn refusal to see the problem and a willingness to find success.
The chefs who successfully achieve the arduously earned Certified Master Chef spend years honing their skills well enough to compete for the 8 days of testing covering everything–dining room, baking, garde manger, hot food, cold food, butchering, you get the idea, everything–a chef needs to know in the kitchen. Milos Cihelka was the first to pass. If I recall the history properly, he escaped his native Czechoslovakia to Canada and then to the US. In addition to learning English, he was, when I knew him, fluent in at least 4 languages, he mastered the craft in a way few could ever imagine. He was a DaVinci of cooking, so great were his gifts. Cool and stubborn and successful. Chef Milos was the kind of man who shaped you even if you didn’t know it. He carried himself with pride but was humble enough to learn.
What I miss in my life are cooks. Cooks had a mission: to serve the customer. After that there was the quest for skill and learning about the ingredients and how to get the most flavor from them. But all that education served to make the guest’s experience better. Where have the cooks gone in the rest of our lives? Speaking particularly of politicians, I see no cooks. I see masses of bodies milling about waiting for something to happen then complaining to the news that something happened. Joseph Heller is laughing at us.
R and D mean little any longer. There are no principles I can see save bash the other guy. Libertarians have a position. No aggression. From that position there is a plan of how that works. The basis of that plan is liberty. Liberty from regulations and violence in the name of the state and, in some cases, from the state.
A kitchen is a miniature autocracy. Given that no one cooking in such a kitchen is there unwillingly, it is accepted as the price one pays for obtaining cooking skill excellence. Excellence in cooking is the liberty to create and make the food what it wants to be. Cooks at that level are not under the thumb of the chef. Autocracy has turned to mentor and students, and often enough that is symbiotic, except the chef pays the bills.
In DC the cooks are gone. There are now professional speakers who occasionally pass a bill to name a tree or post office. Nearly no one is cool under pressure and solves the issue regardless the obstacles. More than a few refuse to see the problem, and that is a problem.
I’ve gone long. Sorry for that.
