Friday, April 25, 2008

Feminine Female Chefs: A Dying Breed

Do you realise why there are so few female chefs (not including patisserie)? It boils down to the physical work and how the commercial kitchen is really designed for the average male.

To maximise the space of the kitchen, many important things are placed at least one foot taller than the average female – the heavy plates, the microwave and the Salamander (i.e. scary grill with flames from the top). Even though I go to the gym, I can only lift at the most three large dinner plates with one hand, whereas the average guy could probably grab five at a time – so I lose a few precious seconds plating my food. When I am heating food in the microwave like mash (you must be deluding yourself if you think we actually mash potatoes to order) or grilling oysters Mornay in the Salamander, I can hardly see the top of the containers when I reach for the hot stuff. As I am careful not to burn myself, I am slow at the process.

Not only am I not tall enough, my arms are also not long enough when it comes to reaching into a 240°C oven for the food cooking right at the back which involves putting my entire arm into Hell’s Mouth. I lose a few seconds rolling down my sleeves to prevent the fine hairs on my arms from singeing whereas many of the male chefs don’t even bother or aren't hesitant about it.

Male chef hands are so calloused that they function as your built-in kitchen gloves. They don’t think twice about using a single layer of kitchen towel to pick up hot frying pans or trays, whereas I would also lose a few seconds folding my dry towel at least three folds' thick to insulate my girly hands. Why don’t we have kitchen gloves? Beats me! Each chef has a single dry towel to function as your kitchen glove, wipe up smears from plated food, clear your bench space and clean your knife. No one will take you seriously with a kitchen glove.

Let’s also not forget the long and physical hours that you work every week. We are probably looking at an average of 13-hour shifts every day from 10am to 11 pm. You are so pumped with adrenalin from the night’s service that you find it hard to sleep straight away when you get home. Then you get up early to go do the same thing the next day. Like I said before, if you are a single female, you may remain that way for a long time unless you decide to sleep with another chef or a waiter but who the hell has the time of day or energy to do that?

Then there is the constant sexism in the kitchen and the male chefs who will try to bully you. The other week, some fat shit tried to take over my station a few times and I had to tell him to back off and when he gave me more attitude, I called him a Fucking High School Dropout to put him in his place. I don’t think a young 17-year-old feminine girl would have done the same because at that age, you would want everyone to like you. I am closing towards thirty now so I stick my middle finger up to any popularity contest.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Those who can't cook, criticise.

Food critics come in all shapes and sizes. Those by profession usually come unannounced and are discreet to truly gauge the restaurant’s service and quality of food. The credible, uncorrupted ones always pay for their meals in full like every other regular patron and will only ask for the restaurant’s details after the bill has been paid. I remember in one of the top kitchens in Sydney, the female owner turns into a bundle of nerves during “food critic season”. She complained that a particular well-known food critic “likes to play games” with her and once in a while decides to become vegetarian just for the hell of it.
Then there are those cheapskate patrons who come and announce that they are food reviewers, hoping to score a complimentary dish from the quivering chef behind the pass. Some of them may be genuine critics but probably of a lesser-known publication who still want to receive royal treatment. Oh, go fuck yourselves.

Origins of the Michelin Guide
The Michelin Guide was originally a guidebook published by Michelin (yes, the tyre company) to help keen motorists maintain their cars, find decent lodging and eat well while touring. It included addresses of things like gasoline distributors, garages, tyre stockists and public toilets. As motoring became more widespread, a star system was developed and is probably the most recognised and influential culinary rating in Western Europe. Three Michelin Stars is seen to be the pinnacle of the gastronomy echelon.

Although most chefs have tough Type-A personalities, they do have fragile egos. We are easily offended by the tiniest remarks made by customers – when a customer wants their meat particularly well done and complains that it is still “bloody” when it isn’t (please refer to blog dated 30 March 2008), we dismiss them for their ignorance.

Bernard Loiseau was a famous French-decorated chef who was the first star restaurateur to establish the concept of having one’s restaurant incorporated and traded. But as the direction of the restaurant changed to maximise profits, standards were compromised. The Gault Millau guide downgraded it from 19/20 to 17/20 and there were rumours that he was about to lose one of his coveted three Michelin stars. The Chevalier de la Legion d’honneur shot himself in the mouth with his hunting rifle in February 2003. It later emerged that Michelin never planned to downgrade Loiseau’s rating.

What really irritates us the most about a complaint is that it slows down our service because when a complaint comes in, we have to redo the dish immediately, which means that food to the other tables gets delayed by ten minutes or more.

Francois Vatel, famous for inventing Chantilly cream for an extravagant banquet in honour of Louis XIV in April 1671, was supposedly so distraught about the lateness of the fish and other mishaps that he committed suicide by running himself through a sword. His death was treated as a national tragedy (Kladstrup).

There is also a third category of irritating food critics – your extremely fussy patron who thinks that he knows everything just because he watches the Food Channel religiously. The ones who insist on having oysters shucked in the premises but can’t even tell that the grilled scallops came into the kitchen frozen weeks before. And if they are male, more than half the time, they’re gay. Don’t get me wrong, I love gay people but there is some truth behind the bitchy stereotype and I do have an over-inflated ego.

Clemens Wilmenrod, a German television cook, was credited for introducing turkey as a typical Christmas dinner and invented “filled strawberries”. When a viewer accused him of not having invented the “filled strawberry” himself, he put a long cook’s knife against his chest and swore to kill himself if but a single viewer who had already eaten “filled strawberry” before were to call. Wilmenrod committed suicide in 1967 after being diagnosed with a terminal disease (Wikipedia, 2008).

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Vermincelli, anyone?

No matter how clean your restaurant is, you can never avoid pests – especially if you are in an area infested with them. So even if your prices are exclusively exorbitant, you can’t avoid all street vermin because the non-human ones probably came from your neighbours’ kitchens.

Because of this sad truth, the health authorities cannot close restaurants down, provided that the restaurant “attempts to take precautions” such as setting rattraps and making sure that food is not exposed. However, these little bastards are smart – why on earth would you eat a pathetic piece of dried-up, month old meat, when you have daily morsels lying in the bins or nuts in the plastic containers that you could easily chew through.

Nuts are best kept in the fridge in their shells and stored in sealed containers to prevent absorbing other odours. Almonds and cashews are the most hardy, while walnuts and pecans are most prone to deterioration in storage.

We have three resident rats in the restaurant that are so brazen, they don’t even bother running away when you turn on the lights. Squiggles, Fatso and Stumpy literally hang around on the overhead pipes and chew through the hard plastic containers to eat the nuts and almond meal – as I have discovered when I was cleaning out the larder. Did we throw away the stuff? Of course not – it went straight into the delicious desserts that we serve to drunken patrons.

Dessert is the last course of the meal, offered after all the other food has been “desservi”: literally “unserved” (removed), which is where the word “dessert” comes from. Until the mid 19th century it was usual to offer an array of sweets, such as crystallized fruits and nuts, before the actual dessert, which might be a cream, compote, fancy cake, or pastry. (Norman et al., 2005)

Besides the nocturnal visitors, we also have daytime mice that probably avoid the territorial rats. Yesterday when the dishwasher came in the afternoon to start cleaning the day’s dishes, he drained the sink to find a dead mouse in the midst of noodle and rice scraps. It was stiff which meant that it must have been dead for a few hours in the sink water. When I saw this, the girly genes made me scream. I bolted into the toilets to wash my arms in scalding hot water because I realised that I was rinsing dishes in vermincelli the entire morning.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Sex in the Kitchen

You will probably notice a recurring theme in this blog – that as a girl in any organization, you will still face a lot of sexism (especially in the kitchen) as it really is a boy’s club. Cooking in the kitchen is very physical – you have to move fast, you have to be strong to whisk and chop for long periods and you have to carry heavy loads. Many females are stationed in the pastry section (because they “can’t take the heat”) or if they make it far up the food chain, there is a high chance that they bat for the other side and are Grill Butches. Also, no one is going to listen to you if you don’t yell above the clanging pots or don’t act tough enough. Because of this, I have learnt to be really firm and demanding of the junior chefs in the kitchen if they step out of line. The other day, when a junior chef was being a smart ass with me, I got him to make a bucket of Caesar dressing with a whisk. When the other chefs asked him why he wasn’t using the electric Bamix, he exclaimed, “Chef's gone Old School on me. She’s crazy!”

Did you ever stop to think that fruits are the product of sex? When a flower is fertilised, it produces a seed and to protect the seed (and other reasons), it plumps up and the flesh around the seed forms the flesh of the fruit. You can thus consider all fruits a product of plant reproduction, which is why tomatoes, green beans, eggplants, cucumbers and corn kernels are fruits, not vegetables. Seedless fruits are virgins flowers sprayed with hormones, which confuses the flowers to think that they are pregnant, so that they produce fruits without seeds in them.

When you enter a new kitchen, there are three things always asked straight away:
1) What country are you from?
2) How old are you?
3) Do you have a boyfriend/ Are you married?
Perhaps these questions are intended to find out your seniority in the kitchen or whether you are available. If it is the latter, I guess it is understandable since chefs don’t get to meet people during social (i.e. eating) hours. If you are female, straight and not married already, you may remain single for a very long time.

Some fruits are compound fruits (a fruit consisting of the fusion of the fruits of numerous flowers into a single fruit) such as a pineapple. I often describe the process as a bunch of flowers having a massive orgy.