By Ann Cooper
Slow (The official journal of the Slow Food
movement)
October 2004
Since the beginning of time, women have been the tamers of fire, the inventors of most early cooking tools and the creators of most elementary cooking techniques. Throughout history, women have provided food for the world’s population; until recently, however, they have been virtually excluded from professional kitchens. But finally today in many of America’s professional kitchens you see women at all levels from prep-cook right up to Executive Chef and owner, but this was clearly not always the case. Was it chauvinism that kept women from becoming chefs?
History tells us that the first “professional chefs” were men who cooked for armies and then became cooks for kings. One of the most famous was Auguste Escoffier, arguably the “father” of the professional kitchen. Escoffier was the first chef to transform the almost intolerable heat and brutality of the kitchen into a structured organization. He based this organization on his knowledge of the army; and chef’s coats have their ancestry as Turkish Army uniforms. Escoffier put in place a brigade system, where the ranking went from Executive Chef to Sous Chef – Chef de Partie and on down through the ranks, in a mirror of military ranking, without women.
Fast forward to The United States where the most renowned chefs were European until the 1970s. Not until 1970 did the first female graduate with a culinary degree from the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), a school that had been established by two women, for men returning from WWII, twenty-five years earlier. As women began entering the culinary world in the late 1970s and early 1980s they encountered all kinds of bias, from being told they were too weak for kitchens, to sexual innuendo, to hazing beyond belief. In some respects, hazing is an inherent part of working in the kitchen for both women and men. For women, however, this can be taken to an extreme as their stamina and fortitude are put to the test time and again. The following are stories told to me during my research for my book, A Woman’s Place is in the Kitchen, published in 1998 by Routledge.
Mary Sue Milliken, co-chef co-owner of Border Grill and Ciudad in Los Angeles California, reflects on her dogged determination in the face of pain and torture; her insistence that there was no way she was ever going to give up and 'let them win' was a potent motivator. “I was a rounds person, for banquets, and [I] would [be told to make] make sixty quarts of hollandaise by hand, [without using] the mixer.' I thought my arm would come off, and I smiled through the whole thing, just whipping whipping whipping whipping [and] the whole time, never even winced! …I literally thought that my arm was just going to die. I was practicing that Zen thing, where you separate your body and your mind. And [I kept telling myself], ‘These guys are not going to get to me!’
Another story of harassment, which can only make us wonder what the motivation can be for such mistreatment, is famed New York City chef and restaurateur Anne Rosenzweig's recollection of the hazing she endured at her first job. “They made me stand on milk crates to work at the stove because I was short. They would tell me that women didn’t have enough stamina, concentration, or strength to work in a kitchen -- they were constantly telling me that. In retrospect, it was like a fraternity hazing. They used to make me carry the stockpots, and in that kitchen, stockpots were huge -- nobody carried them by themselves -- they always shared them. But they made me do it. Once I got through enough of [that] stuff, I was sort of begrudgingly accepted.”
Today the culinary world by and large is a very different place. On average, thirty-five percent of professional culinary school graduates are women. Over forty percent of chefs and cooks are women, and when we think of the best chefs and restaurateurs across America, we’re just as likely to think of women chefs as their male counterparts. However with less than twenty percent of all executive chef positions filled by women, the upper echelon of professional kitchens is still predominately male -- that being said, I truly believe that professional kitchens are much less chauvinistic than anytime in the past.
Women Chefs and Restaurateurs (WCR), the only national women chefs organization was founded ten years ago by Barbara Tropp and seven other top female chefs and restaurateurs in America. The organization was founded to promote the education and advancement of women in the restaurant industry and the betterment of the industry as a whole. These leading female culinarians felt strongly that women needed a helping hand to be successful in the then male dominated industry. I am happy to say that today, over ten years later, that in most kitchens, in most parts of America, woman can and do attain predominance, prestige and success. WCR has over 2,000 members and as past President of the organization I am proud to say that equality reigns in most kitchens, some of the best food in America is made by women, and men and women are working together to make American cuisine some of the finest in the world.
Ann Cooper is a Food and Society Policy Fellow, a national program supported by the Kellogg Foundation, and the author of “A Woman’s Place is in the Kitchen: The Evolution of Women Chefs.”