The Ethnic Restaurateur by Krishnendu Ray

Author:Krishnendu Ray [Ray, By Krishnendu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857858375
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2015-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

Marius Isnard, the chef de cuisine, was calm. The sous-chefs and the chefs de parties at each station were in their element. As were we all. When you learn to work in a French restaurant, you submit to a militaristic organization. Even with a team of 150 workers, most of whom had not worked together before, the assignments were so well defined that we knew precisely what to do and how to behave (Franey 2010: 79).

This feeling of confidence and calm in the most overheated haute kitchen in New York City, shared by the son of a village blacksmith, a self-declared “rube” from St. Vinnemer in Burgundy, is extraordinary. The confidence did not come easily or naturally. It came after decades of hard work in kitchens and the embodiment of national propaganda about a cuisine. Much social work had to go into it. First, the very idea of France and its productive provinces had to be consolidated. French cuisine had to become a hegemonic practice in the profession. Most importantly, the required skills, shared nomenclature, and evaluative criteria of an established and consecrated practice had to be embodied.

The confidence was a by-product of the competence to produce and evaluate a shared repertoire of cuts, stocks, sauces, braises, roasts, and desserts. Among these was the skill of clarification of the consommé: basic work repeated by every commis and trained chef until it is internalized, but which is almost never demanded in any institution other than the haute French cuisine restaurant. Franey had done the work of clarifying the stock every day since he joined the staff at Thenin, a Parisian restaurant, at age fourteen in 1934. The cold beef or chicken stock would be poured into a four feet high pot. It would be heated and stirred, adding a mixture of egg whites, carrot trimmings, leeks, crushed eggshells, bones, herbs, and spices. He spent hours stirring and scraping the mixture with a ladle. Three hours later, drawing the consommé out through a spigot at the bottom of the pot, he would leave the floating impurities on top. He would learn to produce, evaluate, and affirm that the consommé, which “is one of the glories of French cooking,” is pure “artistry and perfection” (Franey 2010: 40–1). “A consommé cannot have the slightest hint of cloudiness; it must be rich in flavor, even though it is so light in its appearance. A splendid consommé, perhaps garnished with diced vegetables, serves as the opening act for the rest of the meal” (Franey 2010: 41).

A generation later, coming up through the ranks of a three-year apprenticeship, Jacques Pépin’s scandalous error at Le Grand Hôtel de l’Europe was to stir a ten-gallon pot of consommé barely simmering in the back of the kitchen, catastrophically muddying it (Pépin 2003: 56). By his seventeenth birthday, barely six months out of his apprenticeship, Pépin would nevertheless acquire the “confidence” to run his own restaurant at L’Hôtel Restaurant de la Paix at Bellegarde, twenty miles west of Geneva at the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.