Episode #91 - Why Have Chefs Historically Been Men/History of Restaurants?
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Hi Janina! Hi Eamonn!

How you doing? I'm not bad, how are you? I'm alright, and I've got Livia on my lap who is purring very aggressively, so if anybody is like currently wondering what that noise is in the background of their podcast, it's Livia, just saying hi. Actually she's saying it's one hour until it is my dinner time and it's vitally important that I remind you just in case you forget and don't feed me. Yeah.

I'm going to sit here up until feeding time just to be safe. Yeah, just in case you one day forget about feeding me because Livia is, for people who don't know, Livia is diabetic to add on to her list of many problems. But because she's diabetic, she has to have an insulin injection so she can only eat twice a day and she gets hyped.

for her feeding times. I mean, me too. In the morning and in the evening. Yeah, it is the absolute highlight of her day by quite a long way. And the rest of the time she just spends sleeping or telling us that it's nearly her time to eat. And yeah, so she's currently telling me it's time to eat, nearly time to eat phase. Yeah, it's time to eat.

It's important to have a lot of preparation time. It is. And I think it's useful for her to have a structure to her day. So she's like, okay, so 3.30, it's time to get ready to remind everybody there's time to eat. Now it's 4, time to remind everybody there's time to eat. And that would be, it would be better if she didn't also apply that to the middle of the night when she's like, right, so 3.30 a.m., time to...

Job is reminding you that it's time to eat and she is paid in food. She is paid in the fish that she is allowed to eat. Yes. And prescription only cat food, which I have to get from the vet on a prescription because she's also allergic to everything. She is the neediest cat in the world. Anyway, that's not what we're here to talk about. This isn't Liviera is sexy, even though she's adorable. This is History is Sexy. Yeah.

But we are going to talk about food. We are going to talk about food. So actually, it's a very appropriate way to begin the situation because what we do is we answer everybody's questions that they would like someone to research for them. And this week, we are answering two people's questions, which are broadly similar from Carolina Gomez-Marino, who said, basically, I'm particularly curious about why women are historically linked to cooking, but most recognized chefs are exclusively men.

And Nathan Chirov asked pretty much at the same time, both where do restaurants come from and how come most professional chefs are men? And the answer is that the reason that all professional chefs are men or like recognized professional chefs are men, while like women are told repeatedly to get back to the kitchen and that the woman's place is in the kitchen, is that men very specifically and deliberately choose

designed the professional kitchen to be a space where women were not allowed and professional cooking to be something that was separate from home cooking. It seems like a very specific and concerted example of something that happens a lot, which is that there are jobs that are predominantly feminine. And then if they ever become, if that changes, if men start to get involved, then the pay goes up, goes up,

Women are pushed out. So this happened with coding, right? Coding, computer coding was originally a woman's job. And then it steadily shifted. And as it shifted, it became more lucrative and it also became more hostile to women. I worked for a long time and have a lot of friends who worked in social media and in digital marketing. And the same thing kind of happened there. Like it was always women. And then suddenly men got involved and took over. And it's very interesting. Yeah.

that this is something that still happens now, but cooking is like a particularly emotive example of that, I think. And I think it is because it is something that gets thrown at women as a way to... It's a way to control the way that we act in public, basically, because it is a way of distracting women, which is that as soon as you say...

go back to the kitchen when you're having an argument with a man or go make me a sandwich that immediately disrupts the conversation that you're having and highlights your gender as the thing that is important and it just it's

It's basically a way of saying I'm losing this argument, but it is also disrupting the conversation. And as a result, it is therefore feels more bizarre that professional chefs can be lauded for being amazing cooks, but go back to the kitchen can be an insult thrown at women. You know, like, how is it that it's whereas, you know, go back to

social media marketing yeah it's less of something that gets thrown at people i don't know that it's ever been said no i mean i guess i guess the idea of like women being obsessed with instagram maybe yeah but yeah no you're right it's not it's not the all-powerful dismissive argument that get back in the kitchen yeah

It's just also in the sheer weight, the amount of years it's been used and the amount of jokes there are about women in the kitchen, like brides wearing white because they match the other kitchen appliances, that sort of thing. Yeah. Yes. Or...

Yeah, I don't know. There feels like there was this real time, particularly on social media, actually, when like kind of Gamergate time, like 2014, when like make me a sandwich was a real thing that men would say to women on the Internet just out of nowhere. And you'd be like, well, OK, yeah, you're just doing patriarchy. I mean, all right. Yeah.

But it is at the same time profoundly like, it's hard to articulate, but it's kind of profoundly humiliating in a way to have it said to you. But never is it said to men. So we're going to talk a bit about, I say a bit, I'm going to talk a lot about the development of Western restaurant culture and Western kitchen culture over kind of a 200 year period. And there is a

four stage process of development which I got well into reading you won't be surprised to know that the person or the people to blame for this is the French pretty much entirely it is all their fault and how specifically it was designed like the

the entire industry is designed to specifically exclude women. Yeah. I do think it's like this question and attitudes to food and cooking are a bit Western-centric and we're not going to talk a huge amount about non-Western cooking. I did find an article talking about the origins of restaurants. The oldest, the earliest known restaurant was in 12th century China, which apparently it was part of, there was an enormous amount of trade between the North and the South. So there were...

places you could eat developed that brought in the cooking traditions from the other half of the of the country so that if you were working if you were you know a merchant who's traveling from the north to the south to sell your wares there's somewhere you can eat where you have the food that you're used to yeah which i thought was really interesting yeah just as a little tidbit but i couldn't i couldn't find much on like the gender roles of professional chefs at those points in time

No. Although I did read some things about kind of global traditions and that period in China was another period where it was brought up that there is a fairly hard line drawn between the chef who is, or the cook who is a professional and who is an artist and the cook who is a woman who just nurtures, basically, which is a really long,

large part of how this emerges and it is once again linked to the renaissance and renaissance and enlightenment ideas which is becoming one of my favorite things to talk about the

The first thing I'm going to say is that we say chef and then we say cook. And it's really important initially to say that a chef is not a cook. Chef in French means boss. And so a chef is something entirely different from just a cook. And anyone who has worked in professional kitchens will probably be aware that a chef is something that you like work up to because the chef is like...

a CEO of the kitchen basically is a person who is in charge of all of the people that work in the kitchen, but also of everything that comes in and out of the kitchen. And he has creative control, economic control, managerial control, and he does not actually do food preparation. So when we talk about celebrity chefs or star chefs or like

chefs in general, what we're talking about is a person who runs the kitchen but does not actually ever chop anything.

The chopping is kind of like the lowest part. And the status part is once you have, you get real status once you have emerged out of actual food preparation, you get, and you have to work up to that. So that is kind of the first thing that I think is worth pointing out is that in order to have status within cooking as a profession, you already have to not really be doing any cooking. Yeah.

like and that seems to be kind of like the the aim of the whole thing is that you work up to telling other people how to cook rather than kicking and that is a kind of through line that we're going to see about through all of this every every job leads to management

You know, whatever you do, eventually, if you progress in your career, you just become a manager. You do. I was a manager for a while and I hated it. And eventually I said, can I stop being a manager, please?

I don't want to be responsible for other people's bullshit. And they let me. So that was nice. But yeah, as soon as professional chefing existed as well, there is a real kind of focus in the development of the philosophy of the profession that it is not about caring or nurturing as well. It is about art.

And like pretty much as soon as the French invented restaurants, they invented this idea of gastronomy and gastronomy is not having a nice time or feeding people or being nice or nurturing or caring or any of the things that make things like girly. They're about basically forcing you to eat really intense things and possibly like just have an experience that is artistic rather than necessarily having a particularly nice time. Yeah.

Which has continued to today. I read an article really recently in the New York Times about like the top 100 best restaurants in the world, which is a whole thing that, I don't know, some fucking organization does every so often. And all of the best restaurants in the world right now, according to this organization and also according to like Michelin people, are

exist in this paradigm of like tasting menus. Right. Yeah. And abstract gastronomy where basically you effectively endure about 15 courses of tiny meals that look and taste weird and are completely divorced from the idea of actual food. And quite often they're doing something weird. Like they're like, it's in the dark or we are playing Fugazi at you at a deafening volume or,

or you have to eat it with like your eyes closed or something insane and it's kind of like an endurance test it is that one that one scene from Always Be My Maybe where they go to a restaurant and they eat venison while they listen to audio of the deer they're eating being put down exactly yeah and you could not be further away from the idea of like caring and like feeding someone something that you love it's like genuinely quite terrifying um

And that is on purpose. So we're going to talk a bit about the history of gastronomy as something that develops as being separate from feeding people.

And it all begins in France around about the time of the French Revolution. So we can also blame volcanoes for this one because we know the French Revolution occurred because of a volcano. And because the French Revolution happened, basically a lot of people who used to be employed in elite family homes as cooks for the nobility when they were serving food ended up

up kind of with nowhere to work because all their employers were dead.

And that does actually cause quite a lot of problems for these people because there was already existing in France this professionalization of cooking for the nobility, which had been happening since about the 16th century. That emerged through the guild situation, like medieval guild that used to exist, like unions, basically. OG unions.

Yeah. And there was a guild for cooks, which only allowed men in. And so already within the French nobility, within the French cooking profession, there was this idea that men could join the guild and men could be professional cooks for elite noble families and women could not be. And men could then...

achieve education so they could be given the role of chef and then master chef for having the skills that were required to pass exams within the guild in the same way that like people who are blacksmiths or farriers or whatever could but they were exclusively open to men and women could never be a cook or a chef or a master chef they could only ever be just a person who works in an inn

And so it was immediately and already by the time of the revolution preferred that aristocratic households employed a trained man to be their chef. Yeah. And I think this was also becoming like a fancy thing in England, right? If you were a real fashionable rich person, you had a French chef. You had a French chef. Exactly. Because they're the only people training them.

Yeah. And if you were a non-fancy person, then you had a female housekeeper of some kind, or like in all Agatha Christie novels, you have a female cook who is a cook, not a chef. So I read a dichotomy of the different household cooks and chefs in England. And it was like, there are master cooks, which were often French chefs. And then there were professed cooks who would be women who had served as an apprentice to a previous professed cook. And

And that would be in quite a fancy household, but not as fancy as the French chefs. And then you have plain cooks who are like, you know, doesn't really have any training, can do a roast. Yeah. A woman from the village. Yeah. Or and then the lowest rung is cook general, which is just a serving woman who does everything, including sometimes cooking. Yeah. Yeah. And this was like already knocking about this whole idea that only men can be educated in this thing. Yeah.

And therefore men are preferred because you can say, oh, well, my chef is a master chef from the Guild of Yada Yada. I feel like that's also part of the distinction is that the male path to these careers is different.

you go and you train under at a school or within a guild. Whereas for women, you are the scullery maid or a kitchen maid and you just help the cook enough that if eventually it develops into a proper apprenticeship and then you become a cook. But it happens sort of organically because that's the part of the household that you are put to work in.

Yeah. And you will never be able to then really parlay that anywhere else. No. And this men absolutely loved, obviously, because men like to make themselves feel important and powerful.

So when basically the revolution happened and everything started to shift, which happened at the same time that global trade started to really open up as well, which is something that we talked about last time. And trade really does change things a lot. And more new ingredients started to kind of move around more freely. Trade restrictions were reduced. And around about the

kind of end of the 18th century, there started to be much more new and interesting things emerging more cheaply into the European economy. So things like spices and stuff stopped being something that only the very richest could afford. And so all of these cooks who were basically out of work because of the attempted eradication

eradication of the aristocracy, all kind of wandered off and started cooking for the emerging middle class because that's the third thing that is happening, which is the idea of professionals is emerging out of the industrial revolution. So merchants and journalists and writers and artists and lawyers and all of these people who now have money and have a

professional life and are a middle class and who would like to have a lovely little treat sometimes. So it's kind of the advent of a social life outside of the home. Yeah, to a certain extent, because a lot of social life outside of the home would be daytime as well. Yeah. Yeah. And what there was before this was something called, certainly in France anyway, something called table d'hote. Mm-hmm.

Which is where the host, who is kind of a chef, would... They're kind of like supper clubs, really. They sound really like supper clubs, whereby everybody sits at communal tables, everybody eats at the same time, and the chef or the host picks the menu and then feeds everybody. And it is French style, so everything is kind of big pots of stuff. Yeah.

And they're brought out to you and everybody eats kind of communally. And that existed. And then there was also this kind of

the word restaurant comes from rest day because there was a fad in France for healing broths, which is where like the whole idea of this, the restaurant kind of comes from, which is this notion that people would go out and eat a healing broth. A nice bone broth, like everyone on TikTok wants you to do now. Exactly. And,

And it really reads as extremely like, oh my God, humans have never changed because so much of them were like, oh, we can't just eat our bread and cheese or whatever. We have to go and have our healing broth that has been specially created by a master chef. Yeah. The wellness industrial complex is eternal. It is. And concerns about health have always been. And somehow it's always possible to buy something to heal you. Yeah.

But yeah, so there is... So this is kind of... These things are all coming together in order to create these ideas that there is going to be a place where people can eat, where people can go out and buy food. But the way that restaurants exist does not...

it doesn't look like it does now it's almost entirely served what's called French style which is big pots of food being brought to the table and then served at the table and pretty much everybody eating the same thing and pretty much it is a fairly communal activity rather than the way that we do now where you can everybody can go and order their own separate thing also largely it's still kind of banquety so there's like seven fucking courses um

And which is the spread of this is why Americans call their main course an entree in restaurants, a thing that preposterous. But this French style is what spread around France.

Europe and then around into the Americas. So it used to be that you would have like five courses. So you would have like a soup and then you would have an entree and then you would have a roast and then you would have, I can't remember what the fifth course is called now, but like, and then you would have dessert. It's just, you've got to dedicate your whole day to this. Like, for that to be like,

physically. You've got to be there for like five hours. Yeah, a lot of them are intense. And I read that some, like when in the very beginnings of restaurant culture, like that was considered to be a small meal.

And some of them are like, oh, yes, the 19 courses that you would eat. And it just seemed truly and genuinely exhausting. Yeah. Because they would just keep coming and then they're bringing you some fish and then they're bringing you a roast. I do think there is something about this that we should consider. Like, I remember hearing from someone years and years ago who did spend some time teaching in France and

And they were really surprised that lunch lasted for at least two hours because the idea was that you would take a full hour at least to actually eat and then you would spend time resting and digesting it all before you had to go back to work. And I think that this is a great counter to the sort of English-speaking West's productivity drive. Yeah. Let yourself ease through your day. Give yourself time for things. It's nice. Yeah.

I mean, I strongly recommend that everybody allows me to have a two hour lunch break at all times and then a nap. But capitalism says that I'm not allowed. I would like to have a good three hours off in the middle of the day. But we, of course, live in a profoundly Calvinist Protestant culture that has come from the Americans that says if you're not working, you may as well be fucking dead.

Yeah. And you are morally wrong. But whereas the French are still working off of a different moral culture that says, look after yourself. Everything's going to be okay. Yeah. Sit down. Maybe we can have a nice dinner. Maybe we can have a lovely dinner that lasts for ages. Yeah. And that is the French's fault. Specifically, it was developed by a guy who had an amazing name. He was called Grimaud de la Reynière. Incredible. Incredible.

Yep, his full name, I have to tell you, was Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimaud de la Reynière. You should, like, if that's your name, you do have to say the whole thing every time. Like, you can't just be Alex, you know? You've got to go through the whole business. I would insist upon being Alexandre Balthazar Laurent, yeah.

But he was a lawyer who basically invented the concept of the gourmand, the guy who eats for pleasure and eats constantly. And...

sort of started a lot of writing so it is post revolution we're now into kind of the late 18th century and then moving into the early 19th century we have and then kind of napoleonic times basically we start to get this idea of french cuisine as something which is special emerging they they

Start writing magazines and cookbooks for the first time in France, like proper cookbooks that outline what cuisine is and what good food is. And develop this idea of Le Grande Cuisine as proper cooking and Le Petit Cuisine, which is lady cooking.

And that is developed in the 18th century and people slag off La Petite Cuisine a lot. There is this quote from a magazine called L'Art Culinaire where a guy called Chatillon Police says, it is a false economy to hire a woman because a woman cook can never give the table the attractive style that a male chef can bring to it. Only the male chef has the elements of ingenuity which a woman will never know how to carry off.

Well, that's us told, I guess. Yes. And so you see there another thing that is going to come up, which is this idea that women cook out of nature. So women are naturally nurturing, that the cooking that women do is unconscious and is done because of some kind of biological imperative. Whereas men cook by going against nature and they are...

using learning and reason to transcend their biological imperatives and therefore they are creating something which is artistic and cultural.

Fucking enlightenment, men. Yes. It is not like women produce kind of just feed, whereas men create art. Men use reason and women nurture. And I found a quote from the 2000s of a chef saying that...

Yeah, unconsciously and mechanically, because for all of history, they've been given no other option but marry and dedicate their lives to feeding their husband and children.

Pretty much. So stage one, really, of creating modern cooking as a thing, modern restaurant culture, modern culinary careers is a specific guy who's called Antoine Carême. Marry Antoine Carême.

who lives 1783 to 1833. He starts off life, interestingly, as one of something like 25 children who is abandoned by his parents because they have just too many. And he's like a little street urchin, kind of very Les Miserables situation, ends up kind of in a kitchen and becomes an apprentice chef and then gets incredibly into it because...

Becomes a very, very skilled and very famous patissier who makes these enormous monumental cakes and sugar concoctions. He is considered to be the inventor of the modern vol-au-vent, the profiterole and the mille-feuille. So pretty much all of Bake Off. Yeah.

He wrote a book called L'Art de la Cuisine Française in which he basically codified and standardized a lot of ideas that are still considered to be kind of foundational. And if, like me, you watch a lot of MasterChef, then I was like, oh, it's this guy that is responsible for why everybody makes the same bloody sauce. Yeah.

So he codified in that book what are called the mother sauces, which are the veloute, the bechamel, the allemande and the espagnol. He invented the stupid hat that chefs wear and the double-breasted coat. He rejected the notion of restaurants as places of health and medicine and developed the notion of food as aesthetic and beautiful on the plate and basically spiced

specifically went out of his way and told people repeatedly that being a cook was to be a scholar, a scientist and an artist. It was a professional job, not a service job and that it should be possible to basically standardize and professionalize and that

He largely invented the idea that in order to be a professional chef worthy of respect, you need to be able to do these specific things and also look cool. The thing I find exhausting, right? Because not just in cooking. I mean, you wait. It's getting worse after this. This is the beginning. Like this is, this guy is so chill in comparison to some of the people who are coming up.

just the idea that like some versions of a certain commodity

are artistic and respectable and some versions are not artistic and then not respectable. Like why have we decided that is okay to, to give someone who spends 12 hours plating a tiny little bit of steak more respect than like a line cook who serves up, you know, 30 dishes in 10 minutes. Like why is one more valuable than the other? They both serve a need that we've decided that we want and,

And that should be it? You've said it yourself because one is serving a need and the other is creating culture.

One is need. One is base and disgusting and connected to the body. And the other is intoxicating and thrilling and connected to the mind. And the mind is superior to the body according to enlightenment ideas of reason. And therefore, the guy who is creating culture is the guy that we're like gold stars in money for you. And the guy who is just cooking eggs real well is just feeding people. Fuck him.

Yeah, we talk a lot about how great it is that, well, we have talked about how great it is that the Arab libraries preserved ancient Roman and Greek texts for the West to rediscover. Maybe they shouldn't have. At what cost? Maybe it would have been better if they hadn't. I mean, I personally blame Patrick highly. Fuck the Enlightenment, man.

Yeah, so that's stage one. It is all Karem. Everybody in France loves him. Everybody thinks he's amazing. People kind of start to copy his ideas and like, oh my God, I want to be just like him. He has all the best ideas. He invented the vol-au-vent. Don't really see a vol-au-vent anymore. And I think that's disappointing. I think about this a lot, that I used to see vol-au-vents a lot when I was a child. And now I just really don't. They'll come back around. Everything comes back around.

I hope so. I feel like it's time for the Vol-Avant to come back. People who work in professional kitchens, bring back the Vol-Avant. Stage two is the mid-80s.

1800s so we are now well into modernity everything chills along until the guy called Auguste Escoffier moves from France to England in the 1880s and he turns up at the Savoy and Carlton hotels in London which at the time are being kind of built and being developed and he takes over the kitchens and he develops Karem's standards into rigid rules

rigid rules and he introduces two things which fundamentally change cooking completely

Completely. And the experience of going to restaurants. The first thing that he does is he introduces and popularizes what's called service à la rousse. And so instead of being things being served French style where everybody gets the meal and it's kind of prepared at the table or handed out the table, it's kind of profoundly stew or roast based. Mm-hmm.

he and now the courses are brought individually they are present they are prepared in a kitchen and then they are brought to the table and you can have separate things for separate people so instead of everybody eating the same thing that

the way that he makes that possible is by completely changing how the kitchen works. So instead of having just a couple of guys back there doing whatever. Manning a big pot of stew. Yes. He introduces what is called the brigade to kitchen, which is familiar to anybody who has really ever seen anything, I guess, involving a high level professional kitchen, which

which is a it's imported directly from the military it is the way that all kitchens pretty much work now if you watch the bear this is basically what he is instituting in the bear at the top you have the chef the chief of the kitchen he is the also called the chef de cuisine the boss of the kitchen and

And he's in charge of everything. He is the CEO. Under that is the sous chef, who is kind of the middle manager. And then under that are chefs and cooks who are on specific stations.

And everybody has specific roles within the kitchen. So you have one guy who is particularly responsible for sauces, one guy who does chopping, one guy who does like people do specific roles. There is a hierarchy within that.

And the people who do all of the like chopping up of tiny little vegetables and preparing like the mise en place are not the people who are cooking the steaks because everybody has their role. It is profoundly hierarchical and it means that everybody just does a small thing really, really well over and over again. And this means that you can produce everything.

lots of things to order in a kitchen rather than just making one thing and it makes it much more quicker much more streamlined so you can be pumping out food for hours and you can do it uniformly because you just need that one guy to cook a steak or to cook a bit of fish or to I don't know pan roast a pigeon and

Like really, really well. And that's all he needs to do. He doesn't also really need to be worrying about anything else. Escoffier also pretty much invents the modern menu where instead of the menu being this is what you're going to eat tonight. The menu is here's some things that you can choose. Yeah, sure. Pick one of the 12. Yeah. And he literally publishes a book about how to make menus called The Book of Menus. And

I do like going to a restaurant and being able to pick whatever I want from a menu of many things. It's nice. I'm not mad about it. No, and it is almost exclusively down to Escoffier who turns the kind of standards and the ideas that Careme developed of there being this idea of mother sauces and how to present food as being aesthetically pleasing and to be

going to a restaurant be a delightful experience and then makes an individual delightful experience rather than a communal one. He also develops the idea of kind of apprenticeship and education. So there is an Augustus Coffier culinary school, which is one of the oldest culinary schools in the world. And he is instrumental and a big part of developing things like how Michelin

are judging restaurants when they're driving around judging restaurants. On their tires. Yeah. And he has something like, he writes a lot. He appears in newspapers a lot. He travels a lot once he has his restaurant set up. And he has something like 20,000 disciples. And he's like, I can teach you how to do this. And he does. But he very specifically bans women from being involved. Yeah.

The professional associations that are set up as he starts to develop competitions and prizes and culinary schools and professional associations develop during his period. So he's like 1890 to 1930. And that is the time when things like Le Cordon Bleu, the Culinary Institute of America, Boston Culinary School, Michelin Guide, all of these things are developed and women are specifically banned from being

being involved. They're not allowed to enter schools. They're not allowed to enter professional associations. They are not allowed to enter culinary competitions. They are unable to learn the techniques that Escoffier is telling everybody you have to learn in order to be a chef. They are unable to learn how to work in a professional kitchen under the

brigade to kitchen situation and they are completely banned from professionalizing their role they can join as like cooks and be like line cooks or whatever but something else that also emerges at this time is because of the brigade to kitchen militarized situation kitchens become hell holes for women and

And become something that is masculine in a military sense, that begin to develop a culinary culture of endurance, of very, very, very long hours with no breaks and of suffering in order to advance. And that becomes...

kind of key to the idea of a kitchen, which is deliberately exclusive to women. Like women cannot join something that says you have to work 16 hours a day for 10 years if they want to have babies. It is also along the theme of are the men okay? Where like they pick a job that they want to do and then they make it so much harder than it needs to be so that they can demonstrate that they're tough and manly for doing it.

It's the same reason as like I think some actors go method, like not traditional method, but like Hollywood method where you stay in character 24-7 is to try and endow the fact that they are actors, which is kind of a silly job having been an actor.

Yes. And they can't deal with that. So they have to make it an important craft and make it everyone else's problem that they're making it an important craft. It has to involve like sending rats to your co-workers or whatever. And like you don't need to do this. No one's more impressed with... I mean, I guess some people are more impressed with them and that's the problem. Men are impressed by it. Yeah. And men love to like...

or men within the culture that we live in like to prize rigidity, competitiveness, discipline. They like endurance and suffering of endurance, like enduring suffering as an idea which is prized for men to do, but only suffering that you have chosen. Yeah, I guess this is also what the beer is doing, right? It's pulling apart these...

patriarchal notions of the kitchen and that's why the calm beautiful serene haute cuisine is run by a woman a sociopath yeah yeah yeah and the chaos demon one is is yeah it's it's it's about me trying to become more like olivia coleman yeah which is i think what we all want in life actually i think it is just in general i would like to be more like olivia coleman yeah anyway so

Escoffier changes everything. He modernizes, he turns a restaurant into what it is. He turns the kitchen, the professional kitchen, into what we now know of it in a high-level restaurant. And he is also profoundly dismissive of women who cook. He also says things about how...

women are basically incapable of the higher level creative thought that is required to cook professionally and to be a chef rather than just to cook for families. There is then a

third stage called Nouvelle Cuisine, which comes around in the 1960s, which basically the main issue there is that people rebel against like really heavy cuisine. So it used to be that it was, there were lots of sort of like heavy sources like velouté and bechamel are big heavy sources with like lots of flour and butter and cream and delicious things.

And there was a real big shift in the 1960s against that and against kind of the idea of consistency, I suppose, and reproducing each other's ideas. Because a lot of what Escoffier was into was the same thing that Carrier was into, Creme was into, which is that you have to be able to do these specific things in order to be a chef. And this is what good cooking is. And it is like these things.

25 recipes and you get people like Henri Gault and Christiane Millau who come along like no we're going to be entrepreneurs who are innovative and exciting and we're going to mix up things and it's going to be really unexpected and you're going to have like weird

It's going to be tuna carpaccio instead of steak carpaccio. And we're going to like, they basically start like innovating in a way that people hadn't really done. Innovating in terms of what is being cooked as well as how it is being cooked. And then that is when food starts to get tiny. Yeah.

which occurs at the same time as thinness starts to really emerge as a sign of wealth.

Right.

and a gas and a suspension of herbs or whatever. - Yeah, you're breathing in the essence of potato pie.

Which derives largely from a guy called Ferran Adria, who opened El Bulli in the 90s, which was considered to be like the best restaurant in the entire world until it closed. And your guy at Noma as well in Copenhagen. So these two guys who are like, cooking is absolutely nothing to do with eating now. Adria said in his book that...

that cooking is a language through which all the following properties may be expressed. Harmony, creativity, happiness, beauty, poetry, complexity, magic, humour, provocation and culture. I mean, sure. Yeah. But does it need to be? I mean, for these guys, yes. Um...

Because what they have done is they have each guy, like each stage basically, and it's really not that long. Like from like 1750s through to now is not a huge amount of time. But each kind of like 50 years or so, there is a push forward that pushes professional cooking at the highest level further away from feeding and more towards experiencing. Yeah.

And it is because the whole thing was designed at the beginning to be as non-feminine as possible because feeding is considered to be a feminine activity. Like feeding people is considered feminine.

to be something that women do. And so in order to not be feminized and not be considered to be a domestic service worker or not be considered to be engaging in a female activity, they have deliberately created professional norms and institutional arrangements and professional ideals that minimize female participation and which

play on the most masculine ideas of reason and culture and arts that they can think of. And a lot of the stuff that I read, like basically is like, you know, this is the same question as to that people ask is why they're no great female artists. Like, why is it that when you're asked, um,

on the street to like just randomly name five artists you're almost always going to name five men and it is because western culture has said like post-enlightenment post-renaissance culture has said that the individual reasoning well the reasoning individual who creates culture is um is the ideal and has been specifically designed to not be a woman yeah

Therefore, it is really, really hard to be a woman who breaks into that and becomes like a really famous chef or really appreciated for their art. In the same way, all of this has focused a lot on a very specific form of cooking, which is French cooking. And it is only very recently that people cooking in non-French

French styles, like not just non-Western, but non-French. But anyone who is cooking like Indian cooking or Thai cooking or Chinese cooking or African food has been always considered to be considered

considerably lesser and less skilled and less creative than if they are cooking French cooking. And I've been noticing this for a really long time in MasterChef that they're kind of gradually doing their best to move away from it. But if you watch MasterChef, whenever you get a person who is basically not doing French or Japanese cooking...

They always have to say that they're cooking like their mom's dishes or they will always be told that they're cooking their culture and that they are doing like they're expressing their native culture in some way. They're not doing something that is skilled and learned and

and creative. They're always kind of pushed into that domestic idea of feeding and nourishing rather than creating geniusly. Yeah, I think there's also, you see the idea around of like, you have to do an elevated version of something. Like what is a haute cuisine version of a curry or something where it's just a way of invalidating

genres of cooking i read a great this is years ago now but i remember a great twitter thread by an indian chef who or he might be an indian food historian who was like talking about the myth that indian spiced cooking developed because meat goes off in heat and it was necessary to cover up

Yeah. The idea of rotten meat. Yeah. And that that is why Indian food is heavily spiced. But that's not what it is. Indian food is heavily spiced because there is an art and a skill to layering spices that naturally grow in India. Yeah.

that the foods that were available to Indian cooks were spices and that the layering of spices in order to season food is actually something that is carefully learned, practiced. It's an art form as well as a form of culture. It's not just like, oh, these Indian guys covering up their horrible rotten food. And there's a very racist...

tradition that derived from the time when the British and French are marching around India is the time when they are starting to develop these ideas of perfect cooking and they're reading and being enmeshed in cultures at home that say simplicity is the way to go and these are the perfect sources and then they're in India and they're going no like these 17 spices are very carefully blended together and they're

they're all the same 17 spices and blended differently over here in this separate dish and it's very careful actually and they're like or are you just barbarians I'm gonna see if I can find it because it was fascinating but like it is a white man who is a chef yeah and that is

is designed that way because all of this is emerging in the age of high empire and it is worth keeping that in mind as well like why are there why are all the chefs you can think of also white guys yeah and why do they talk that way about

literally any food that isn't French or Japanese. Weirdly, Japanese food, because of Nouvelle Cuisine, actually, Nouvelle Cuisine discovered Japanese cuisine and was like, we like you guys. So that has a slightly longer cultural tale in Western French-focused cooking that allows it

That gives it a bit of a cultural cachet. But pretty much everybody else, they're like, ah, you and your nurturing, feeding, ladylike behavior. If only you two could learn how to be more difficult about it. If you could learn how to make the experience of cooking and eating food completely miserable, then you two would be a great artist. For some reason, the New York Times recently have really gone in on the...

a lot of restaurants like modern restaurants I think it's because their restaurant critic just quit but just before he left like the past six months for health reasons right because he was like you can't yes you can't be a restaurant critic for a long time and expect your body not to punish you for it

Oh, don't even. Yes, he did say that. And then he was like, the Guardian, I'm just going to call out the Guardian now as well, like did a response to that. And they asked female, for some reason, only female restaurant critics in the UK about how they manage their health while being a restaurant critic. And all three of them talked about their weight. And

And I was like, one, why did you only ask women about this? And two, I'm concerned. But health and weight are not the same thing, my friends. Health and weight are not the same thing. But the New York Times have really gone in on basically really intense experience restaurants that frighten you and are designed to like basically like the ones on the menu. Yeah.

that are designed to make you feel bad for not being the chef which is not to say that like a tasting menu can't be great we went to we went to a fancy tasting menu style place when we were in the netherlands last year and like yeah we did this thing and it was very quiet and the chef kept coming and talking to us about all the food and it was absolutely delicious like it was very very good sometimes they're delightful yeah and it was you know he obviously really cared about it

But it was recognizably food that was delicious to eat. And the experience was just that he kept telling us about food. And that was great. You know, the food should be good. The food should be enjoyable to eat. I do very strongly believe that, yeah, food should basically be fun. Yeah, it should be fun. And it should mostly be about eating. Maybe that's just because I'm a filmstine who doesn't really care about art. Yeah.

That's the end of that question. Livia is now actively bashing me in the face. It must be time for her to eat. Must be time. Maybe she's just heard me say the word fish repeatedly. Oh, no. Sorry. She just got so excited she fell off the chair. Oh, Livia. Nothing funnier than when a cat falls over. Right. Thank you to everybody who has joined our Patreon. We...

I was positively overwhelmed by the amount of stickers I have sent out this week and it has been very exciting. So if you would like a sticker, then you can join us over at Patreon now and I will post you a sticker with my very own hands from my very own house. And there's blue everywhere and I need to make this a more streamlined production, but currently it is not.

But yeah, so thank you very much to everybody who has joined us over there. Yeah, thank you so much. It's been very flattering to see how many of you want to hang out with us more and support us. And you can do that or you can go to Ko-fi. We're still over there. You'll still get a sticker if you give us some money. And...

Yeah. And then you can also find all of those things on our website and you can ask us a question like the next question, which I realized as I was literally just before we recorded this, I went to get the next question and realized that like two people have asked us this, so we should put it on the list. And one of the people who's asked us this is also Carolina. So Carolina gets two questions in a row.

So well done, Carolina. No more questions for you for a while. So it is Carolina and Mimi Finn who have both asked, what is the history of Yugoslavia? Yeah, we're going to get into that. Yeah. So we're going to... My main knowledge of Yugoslavia is the 1990s and it was all pretty bad. So...

Maybe get a drink ready for the next one. Yeah, yeah. Anything more to add, Janina? I don't think so. Probably not. I mean, maybe, but who can remember? Who can remember? The sun is out. It's summertime now. Briefly. So it's too hot to be thinking. Yeah. I'm going to go and make some nourishing food that requires no art. Yeah. Sounds ideal. Yeah. Bye, Janina. Bye. Bye.

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