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Chef

is a French word, which has entered other languages, denoting a professional cook. It is a contraction of the phrase chef de cuisine hence originally a description of rank as much as, if not more than, occupation. There are chefs in many other fields, not least chef de bureau (administration), chef d'équipe (fire-fighting, industry, or sport), chef de patrouille (scouting), or chef d'état (politics). Even within the sphere of professional catering there is the chef de rang: the waiter in charge of a group of tables in a grand restaurant.

Although there had obviously always been cooks in charge of other cooks—there is the 15th-century description of the chief cook whose job was tasting and testing, not cooking—the phrase itself did not appear before the beginning of the 19th century, passing quickly from France to England and other countries which had adopted the lingua franca of haute cuisine. Before that chefs were called cooks, sometimes qualified as man-cooks, master-cooks, cook-maids, professed cooks, principal cooks, or even (in the case of La Chapelle on the title page of The Modern Cook, 1733) ‘chief cook’. In particularly grand and conservative establishments in France before the Revolution, the head cook might be called écuyer de cuisine, supported by ranks of specialists such as rôtisseurs, pâtissiers, and so forth, as well as a body of cuisiniers.

The adoption of a new professional description must surely reflect a change in cooks' circumstances. The necessary preconditions of change and adjustment, both of material facts, and of more delicate matters of professional identity and self-esteem, were found in post-Revolutionary France. The households of the old nobility were disbanded, their masters either dead or in exile, and many of those employed in the kitchens, or in more senior positions such as maîtres d'hôtel, turned restaurateur (another new professional group that arose at this time) to provide food to all comers, so long as they could pay. Others entered service with new families whose establishments were less elaborate. The settled hierarchies of the ancien régime were in disarray.

Into this vacuum floated the possibility of a new breed of cook: the artist-cook, described with eloquence and conviction by the most influential practitioner and writer of these decades, Antonin Carême (1783–1833), who both orchestrated developments in contemporary haute cuisine and acted as role model to many aspiring cooks. His meteoric passage through the kitchens of all Europe gave cooks the necessary impetus to reappraise and improve their standing. In his view, the cook should create the menu, order supplies, provide the artistic inspiration necessary for the great set-pieces of ceremonious dinners, and oversee the cooking. He sought to combine the two roles of maître d'hôtel and artist-cook, hence his praise of a former employer, the Princess Bagration, for allowing him both to cook and to supervise the serving of his dinners.

Carême offered an intellectual platform for cooks to redefine their professional status, while the way in which high cookery was developing towards stratified working methods to achieve complex culinary ends gave practical reasons for at least some cooks to rise to the top of the heap. Carême himself had made visible his own self-esteem while cooking for Lord Stewart, the British envoy in Vienna, in 1821 by putting a tube of card into the floppy bonnet customarily worn by cooks to make the ‘high bonnet’ that is now the chef's hat or toque.

In his own writings, Carême refers to the rank of chef de cuisine. He describes how twenty cooks turn a convoluted tarantelle ‘in a chasm of heat’ during the preparation of a meal, where not a sound is heard save from le chef, who alone has the right to speak. In L'Art de la cuisine française au XIXe siècle he describes how the chef des cuisines became maître d'hôtel, and the title page of his Pâtissier royal parisien (1815) describes him as chef pâtissier. The English translation of Carême by William Hall, ‘cook to T. P. Williams, Esq.’, published in 1836 under the title French Cookery, describes the author as ‘some time chef of the kitchen of His Majesty George IV’.

The combination of practical and intellectual ambition that is evident from Carême's writings—a man with a mission for his craft—is wittily underscored some years later by W. M. Thackeray in his novel Pendennis (1848–50). He describes the arrival at Sir Francis Clavering's opulent country seat of

Monsieur Alcide Mirobolant, formerly Chef of his Highness the Duc de Borodino, of his Eminence Cardinal Beccafico, and at present Chef of the bouche of Sir Clavering, Baronet:—Monsieur Mirobolant's library, pictures, and piano had arrived previously. He was aided by a professional female cook who had inferior females under her orders. It was a grand sight to behold him in his dressing-gown composing a menu. He always sate down and played the piano for some time before. Every artist, he said, had need of solitude to perfectionate his works.

This is the artist-cook with a vengeance, modelled, it is thought, on Alexis Soyer (1809–58), chef of the Reform Club. Mirobolant's emotional scrapes notwithstanding, his tender sense of personal dignity was most deeply affronted by the hero of the novel calling him ‘cook’.

The concept of the artist-cook had also been encouraged by middle-class enthusiasts for fine cooking in post-Revolutionary France such as Grimod de la Reynière who invested much intellectual effort in the creation of a menu (a joint activity of the cook and the employer). In his Manuel des Amphitryons (1808) is an early use of the term ‘chef’, introduced when discussing the various functions in the kitchen. He recommends specialization; life is too short to learn more than one trade to perfection. In a large kitchen, he observes, ‘the chef and his aide are employed exclusively on the range’, the rôtisseur and pâtissier on the spit and the oven respectively.

It was the invasion of territory hitherto occupied by the steward of the household (in England) or the maître d'hôtel (in France) that gave the cook new status. Maîtres d'hôtel had often themselves trained as cooks—the great Monsieur de Saint-Clouet, cook to the Duke of Newcastle, eulogized by William Verral in A Complete System of Cookery (1759), went on to become maître d'hôtel to the Duc de Richelieu. They wrote cookery books, for example Beauvilliers, L'Art du cuisinier (1814), and they had books written for them such as Massialot's Cuisinier roïal (1691), ‘necessaire à tous Maîtres d'Hôtels, & Ecuïers de Cuisine’. But when the cook began to compose his own menus as well as design his own pièces montées and supervise the order of service, it was a definite extension of his duties into the realm of the steward, and would be utter conquest when the clerk of the kitchen and provision of all supplies became subject to the chef as well. The job definitions of the British cook and author Charles Elmé Francatelli (1805–76), a student of Carême's, indicate the shifts in function. At the outset of his career he was chef de cuisine (so called) to the Earl of Chesterfield and several other noble households where presumably he had independence within his own sphere. In 1841 he became ‘maître d'hôtel and chief cook in ordinary’ to Queen Victoria. The royal household was conservative enough to retain the old offices and their titles, but the chef has now combined the two most relevant to his calling.

In its passage into other languages, particularly English, the word chef has come to stand alone, and describe function more than status. As with other words that were once all to do with rank, it has been universalized and democratized. Every cook is a chef, though a short-order chef in a hamburger restaurant occupies a position light years from the original connotation of overall command. For many years, however, the usage was quite precise. A chef de cuisine is still by profession a cook, who happens to control the work of other cooks. Victor Hugo, discussing Carême's patronage of the arts during his time with James de Rothschild, calls him cuisinier (Choses vues, 1847–8), never chef; the French trade association was one of cuisiniers, not chefs; the French chef and writer Pierre Hamp in his autobiography Kitchen Prelude (1932) was careful to restrict the name to those who were properly so called, remembering from his time under Escoffier at the Savoy that ‘Another cook, head of department, who also left was Bozzone, the sauce man, the next in rank after M. Charles, an Alsacian who was called “chef”, for Escoffier went by the name of “Kitchen Director”.’

It was in fact the organizational reforms by Escoffier's generation that caused the extension of the term ‘chef’ to a wider body of workers. The functions of large commercial kitchens were rearranged. Hitherto, independent sections had each produced a certain type of finished dish, but under the new regime the departments, called parties, were split along operational lines according to the components of a dish: one making sauces, another supplying raw ingredients, a third doing the grilling, and so on. A single dish would call for contributions from several parties, thus would take less time to go to table than when in the hands of a single cook. It is a process of industrialization (see Mennell, 1985). Pierre Hamp may not have used the terms, but eventually the men in charge of these new departments were called chefs de partie. Their assistants were sous-chefs, and apprentices and learners began to be called commis-chefs. Soon everybody, except the washers and cleaners, was some sort of chef.

It was a small jump to the complete confusion of chef with the word ‘cook’, at least within the sphere of hotels and restaurants—and at least to outsiders, for if you were working inside the kitchen, there was never more than one man who demanded to be called ‘Chef’. ‘Cook’ remained the usual description of one who worked in an institution, no matter whether man or woman, and of women who were employed as cooks in domestic service. Men-cooks in private households in the 20th century were often given the courtesy title of chef, although Anatole, Aunt Dahlia's matchless Frenchman in P. G. Wodehouse's The Code of the Woosters (1938), remained simply a cook.

Chefs were invariably male, mainly because a large restaurant kitchen was a man's world. Women who worked commercially remained cooks, cuisinières, or ‘mères’ such as Mère Poulard of omelette fame. Since technology and social progress have allowed the entry of more women into once all-male brigades, so they have also been given the same titles. The professional cook is hard to find outside domestic service and the school kitchen. Memories of the original meaning of the word ‘chef’ as a description of rank not function persist however. Chefs still cook, there is no verb ‘to chef’.

In the last half-century there has been considerable change in the social origins of chefs and in their status in wider society. In part this might be due to the rise of ‘celebrity chefs’ exposed to the public gaze on television and in charge of their wholly owned restaurants which accrue much greater social capital than hitherto. Books that explore the meaning of modern professional cookery include Ruhlman (2001); Chelminski (2005); Hoketsu (2001).

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