Kitchens. Gary Alan Fine
The novice observes, errs, and learns from those mistakes so as to avoid them: “Practice makes perfect.” A dishwasher, eventually promoted to cook, explained: “As a dishwasher, you sit and watch what the cooks do, and what the shrimp should look like, what color it is, and when it's done and stuff like that. When you're cooking, you try it out, and you get to know it” (Personal interview, Stan's; see Herman 1978, p. 33). This technique, prominent at low-status restaurants, is also evident in higher-status establishments, where the ability to watch trained professionals offsets modest salaries (Waldemar 1985). A cook at the Owl's Nest explained: “I've only been there for a couple of months, [but] I'm really learning.…I would like to come in on a slow night with just [the chef] and I, and let me work the sauté station, and he can work the broiler” (Personal interview, Owl's Nest). The circulation of cooks and chefs spreads techniques throughout the industry. Cooks learn informally from each another and share their techniques with new colleagues:
Tomorrow we do a salad which we haven't served here since I've been here, which I stole from the other hotel…. That's why chefs move around so much. I mean, I can sit here for two years and get everything I know. While I'm here, I can pick up a couple of new things—just from other people who have worked here. I'll leave here just because I'm drained out, and I've got nothing new to offer. I'll then go to another establishment and give them what I already learned, plus what I've just learned here, and things that they have never seen before, and they're happy, and I'm happy because I get to show off what I know. I learned a few things that they were doing differently. Take all that to the next place. In the meantime, you're just expanding and growing.
(Personal interview, Blakemore Hotel)
The informal side of socialization is crucial in any occupation but seems particularly salient in locales, such as kitchens, in which formal models of education are weak, and where some assume that the job can be mastered by anyone with sufficient motivation. If socialization is assumed routine and painless, little provision is made for acquiring knowledge, even though the cost for not learning properly is high. Cooks have, in the words of Wilbert Moore, “a fellowship of suffering,” in which all are attempting to master difficult and unpleasant tasks through role modeling, coaching, and peer support (Bucher and Stelling 1977, p. 268).
Formal Training. Increasingly, cooks learn their craft in institutes such as trade schools (Fine 1985)—some state run, and others private or proprietary, such as the famed Culinary Institute of America. Of the thirty cooks interviewed, eighteen (60 percent) were trained in public trade schools; none of my sample were trained in private schools. Programs in Minnesota required students to attend classes daily for either eleven or twenty-two months. Students learned basic cooking techniques, quantity cooking, restaurant cooking (line cooking) and service, and specialty techniques, including bakery and some ethnic cuisine. These skills are acquired in the artificial environment of the trade school, where students are rarely pressured, overworked, or sharply criticized. While they acquire technical skills, some claim they graduate ignorant of the culinary “real world.”12
Because of this artificial training environment, some chefs fret over hiring trade-school graduates, in absence of information that they know how to prepare food in restaurant kitchens:
I ask Tim, the head chef at La Pomme de Terre and a trade-school graduate, if he likes to hire students with a TVI [Technical Vocational Institute] background. He tells me: “Not really. If they have common sense, I can teach them how we cook. I look for their ambition.”
(Field notes, La Pomme de Terre)
Denver explains to me that “TVI is a great little institution, but there's more to industry than they can teach you. I don't want to belittle the school, but it's a rude awakening when you come out of school. The industry doesn't work like that. There's no way that they can teach you to improvise. There's no way they can tell you to get along with waitresses.”
(Field notes, Blakemore Hotel)
Trade school builds expectations for which the real world is a “rude awakening.” Some consider trade school to be a “dream world.” Cooks agree that while trade-school training is not worthless, it is not an adequate introduction to the skills that they need when hired by a restaurant. Industry lacks a safety net.
Being Taught. American industry does not rely—at least in this century—on apprenticeship. This applies to virtually every occupation, including cooking. Contrasted to European, particularly French, culinary traditions, American cooks either learn by observation or formal schooling (Fine 1985). Even though American restaurants do not rely on apprenticeship, a fortunate cook may gain a mentor, an older cook or chef who takes the young worker under his or her wing and teaches culinary techniques. The respected cook-teacher Anne Willan writes:
I think it is almost impossible to learn to cook completely on the job. Sure, if you have the quite extraordinary luck to find an outstanding chef who's willing to take the time to teach you, then perhaps in that exceptional case, you can get really good training on the job…. very few chefs have the ability, the time, and the willingness to pass on everything they know to young people who are working in the kitchen. It just isn't practical. You're under pressure; you want to go and do the orders for tomorrow's food; you've got someone on the telephone; you can't spend time saying to somebody, “Don't chop like that, chop like this.”…Chefs, quite simply, don't want nice boys who are totally inexperienced messing around as unknown quantities when they have to pay them a sort of basic wage. It's becoming more and more an idealistic thing to pass on skills to the next generation, rather than an economically reasonable one.…So some structured instruction is almost indispensable.
(“Cook's Interview: Anne Willan” 1985, pp. 18-19)
While in some sites, those to be socialized are resistant to or ambivalent about the staffs goals (Becker et al. 1961), novices are often enthusiastically supportive of these goals, more than willing to conform (Gamier 1973). Whereas much research on occupational socialization describes schools, the same process occurs on the job, with less opportunity for resistance. If one chooses to resist, the easiest option is to exit and move to a more congenial location.
Novices are typically delighted to learn at the knee of their superiors as a means of self-fulfillment and advancement: “Lured by its reputation as a standout on the local culinary scene, he landed a lowly post at the New French Cafe. ‘It was like a breath of fresh air,' he recalls. ‘Before you went there, you knew you weren't going to get paid [much], but it's like going to graduate school'—with lessons in beautiful food handling.…He started at the bottom…. ‘I'd work like crazy so I could get up and watch the chef. He'd show me certain things, then let me do them’ ” (Waldemar 1985, p. 154). Cooks in my sample had similar role models in their early work—men whose concern and teaching transformed them into sophisticated cooks:
You take that guy like that Frenchman. He took me right underneath his wing, and I'd do anything for him. He liked you, so he'd take you back in the corner and explain to you what you were doing wrong. One of his instructions to me is that I'm going to show you once and tell you once, and that's all. So I've got a little blue address book that I used to carry in my back pocket, and the minute he'd tell me to do something, and I didn't think I could remember it, I'd write it right in that book.
(Personal interview, Owl's Nest)
| GAF: | What do you like most about being a chef? |
| PAUL: | Being able to take in people and work with them. People who are really anxious to learn. Jon's a real good example. He's a hardworking young kid that wants to learn. He's so excited to learn something new. Teach him how to do this or how to do that. I reflect back and see my own excitement about the first time that I was able to do this or that. It was fun; it was an adventure.(Personal interview, Owl's Nest) |
The chef who chooses to mentor adopts that role in addition to his other duties as an act of altruism, which may be dangerous because some managers replace high-paid workers with low-paid ones. Although mentoring relationships are ideal and produce dedicated and well-trained cooks, they are serendipitous: a chance encounter that makes a life.
TWO
Cooks' Time