How Cooks Became Chefs: A Brief History    

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.
 
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.