The Clock on the Stove

When I was in fourth grade, some weasel of a boy told me the following joke:

Why don't women need to wear watches? Because there's a clock on the stove.

I remember that what mortified me was not the blatant sexism of the joke told by this twelve-year-old-twit, but rather that I didn't get it. In my world, stoves didn't have clocks. My mother's stove was a gas range, and gas ranges don't have clocks because the heat from the fire burners is far too strong for electronics.

Kind of like a woman in the kitchen.

New York Magazine recently ran a feature called "A Woman's Place" about the difficulties of being a professional woman chef in New York City. It was in the form of a group-style interview with seven of the city's most prominent female chefs: "April Bloomfield (The Spotted Pig), Rebecca Charles (Pearl Oyster Bar), Alex Guarnaschelli (Butter), Sara Jenkins (formerly of 50 Carmine), Anita Lo (Annisa), Jody Williams (Morandi), and Patricia Yeo (formerly of Monkey Bar and Sapa)."

I've had the pleasure of tasting the savory warmth of gnudi at Spotted Pig melt on my tongue and of indulging in the buttery toastiness of the Lobster roll at Pearl... So brava, ladies, brava.

Like the article says, historically women have been the rulers of kitchen in the domestic sphere. And then -- like any good export of the the sexism capital of the Western world -- France showed that great chefs, male, were fit to cook for the king.

Female chefs in recent history tend to carry the weight of domesticity: Julia Child, Martha Stewart, TV chefs like Giada DeLaurentiis and Ina Garten, even Alice Walker might be considered more of a domestic than, say, Ferrán Adria (who is certainly more of a chemist than anything else...test tubes... really...). The sex appeal of these women is that they make food that reminds you of home, that somehow appeals to Oedipal mother-love. Giada and Nigella Lawson are babes, and (or because?) they cook and look great doing it. "How to be a Domestic Goddess," anyone?

I find these women brave, and I truly admire the less conspicuous chefs who command the hot strips of New York's most competitive kitchens. Perhaps the professional restaurant kitchen is one of the last openly sexist places of work, where testosterone-laden competition makes it difficult -- if not impossible -- for a woman to truly succeed in the restaurant world.

This is ironic, considering that the role reverses in the domestic sphere. If ever my father tried to cross my mother in Her Kitchen, it was tantamount offense to a Yankee crossing the Mason-Dixon line. It just wasn't done, and the consequences were dire. I witnessed explosions throughout my years at home when we crossed the line to assist with a meal. Timing was everything, and if we ever challenged the "rate-limiting factor" of a dish, we were toast, broiled, boiled over and put back on the spit for another go-around in the fire. I'd like to see Gordon Ramsay take my mother on, because I know that my mother commands Her Kitchen so well that even Ramsay would shy away, muttering defeated curses under his hushed and humiliated breath.

So for a woman to succeed in a kitchen, she's got to be a fireball. Sexy, powerful, unafraid of getting burned or cut or splattered by fat frying in a pan. And then she must also be able to fight the other fires of competition with the ultimate Alpha Male: He Who Cooks and is Still a Man's Man. The male chef has the ultimate sex-appeal. So no matter how you slice it, men once again get the one up on women... or do they?

I have daily dreams of abandoning all of my financial responsibilities and becoming a sous-chef to sweat it out under the guidance of an older, wiser Chef de Cuisine. I do the private, at-home-chef thing for the Nanny Family, and that's a cakewalk. I've done dinner parties, wine tastings, Italian family holidays, cooking one-on-one for my father when my mother was away. This doesn't really constitute a resume, but let's look at the details a moment:

Thanksgiving, 2005. Paris. First Thanksgiving on my own. Galley kitchen, 4ft by 6ft with a narrow walking space. 1.5ft by 2ft working space. The menu: Turkey roulade with wild mushrooms, pinenuts herbs and cheese (I can't remember what kind of cheese), peppers and zucchini stuffed with roasted winter vegetables and homemade breadcrumbs, honey-glazed carrots with mint, more vegetables I can't remember, plus amuse bouches galore and roasted peaches for dessert. Served for 21 people, prepared from scratch, in seven-straight hours of sweaty, back-breaking work (see photo above). I wanted fresh ingredients from the market, so in my ambition, I prepared the meal in one, single day. By the end of that night (3am), I was more possessed than Lady Macbeth -- and I couldn't eat a damn thing I made. I lost my appetite completely. But everyone said it was great.

Yet that was at home, in my domestic little French kitchen. I wasn't on the line, I wasn't handling multiple requests for multiple diners with multiplicitous tastes. It was my menu for my guests and they were having the menu that I created myself. So perhaps my first Thanksgiving wasn't that impressive after all -- perhaps it doesn't qualify me for a job in a professional kitchen.

So what's the alternative for women who aspire to cook professionally? A pastry chef? Ovens are hot (I've a scars to prove it), but they cook slowly. It's not like a gas, full-range stove with all six burners going at once and pans flying everywhere. Go to Casa Mono and sit at the bar while you have your tapas and Rioja -- you'll see what I mean. Fire is sexy. So ladies, keep cooking with fire. And move. Quickly.

The Tradition of Good Taste: An Interview with Jacques Pépin

Even amidst the busy bustle of the farmer’s market where crowds of locals and summer travelers picked through the ripe and colorful produce, his familiar smile drew me straight to him. Indeed, he had already drawn quite a crowd to his little booth off in the shade where he sat signing his new book, Chez Jacques: Traditions and Rituals of a Cook; but it wasn’t the crowd of admirers that gave him away. It was this smile of Jacques Pépin, so familiar and inviting, that instantly helped me to recognize one of the first and most esteemed celebrity chefs of our time.

A resident of Madison, Connecticut, Mr. Pépin lives just minutes away from the town in which I grew up. Throughout my growing up in Connecticut, I had occasionally heard of Monsieur Pépin’s comings-and-goings about town; making celebrity appearances at local epicurean events, signing books at R.J. Julia Booksellers, performing cooking demonstrations at Cook’s Kitchen. I had even spotted him once, late one night on the Shoreline East commuter train. But when I heard that Mr. Pépin would be in person at the Florence Griswold Museum’s annual Connecticut Farmer’s Market, I quickly arranged an interview with him, then jumped on the MetroNorth from New York and made my way home.

Yet despite all of his local fame, Jacques Pépin is not just a local celebrity. He is one of the original celebrity chefs who brought French gourmet cuisine to the United States, and has since taught chefs and ameteur cooks alike about the elegant possibilities that can be had in every meal.

Born in France near Lyon, Mr. Pépin came to the United States in 1959 and soon became a rising culinary entrepreneur and one of the original celebrity chefs. He has accomplished so much throughout his career; from cooking for Charles de Gaulle to cooking with Julia Child, Jacques Pépin is unquestionably one of the culinary greats. But unlike many celebrity chefs of the moment who portray a chef's career as fame, glamour, and glitz, Mr. Pépin has always maintained a sense of humility and realism about working in the kitchen: “You still sweat a lot, and you still work Saturday and Sunday, and you still work 16 hours a day, you don’t make that much money. So you really have to go into that business for the right reason, which is really having the bug and loving what you are doing.”

Now in his early seventies, Mr. Pépin looks as though he could still handle the energy and the stamina required by this life of a chef. On that summer afternoon of the interview, wearing a patterned short-sleeved button-up shirt with his grey hair swept into a dapper coif, Mr. Pépin had the relaxed yet sophisticated air of an epicurean Frenchmen, truly in his element surrounded by food. He welcomed his admirers with sincerity and signed their books with care; even after decades of international celebrity, it seemed as though Mr. Pépin still had an appreciation for these simple rewards of his fame. “I certainly did not go into that business [of being a chef] to ‘become famous,’ because it was totally unheard of until 30 or 40 years ago.”

When Jacques Pépin first started his career, being a chef was not the glamourous career that a culinary career seems to have today with the current obsession with foodie culture. Back then, being a chef was still very much considered a position of service: “At that point, we were quite low on the social scale. Any good mother would have wanted her child to marry a lawyer or a doctor, or to become a lawyer… but a cook? But now, we are genius.”

Being a “genius” is one thing that Mr. Pépin can include on his list of qualifications, not only for his culinary aptitude, but also for business savvy, his ability to translate French cuisine to Americans (and vice-versa), and his academic background in liberal arts. Like any great artist, Mr. Pépin dedicated much of his life to learning all of the nuances of his craft. After beginning in his mother’s restaurant, Le Pélican, at age 12, Mr. Pépin left school the following year to begin his French apprenticeship under chef Lucien Diat at the Plaza Athenée. Upon coming to the United States, Mr. Pépin enrolled for a PhD in Civilization Literature. Yet even though Columbia did not accept his final thesis about the history of French cooking within the context of French literature, Mr. Pépin’s educational experience gave him a context into which he could place his own work and translate the nuances of French cuisine to his American audience. Later in life, he used this academic background to become a teacher himself: “I teach that [field of study] at Boston University now, the same class, and there is a Master in liberal arts with a concentration in Gastronomy. The crazy part of it is that we’d be very happy to have that today at Columbia.”

All the while that Jacques Pépin was learning about the art and literature of French cuisine, he was simultaneously learning about American food culture of mass production during his ten-year apprenticeship with the Howard Johnson Company. It might seem anathema for a French gourmet chef to be learning from the hands of a chain-restaurant entrepreneur, but for Mr. Pépin, it was the birth of his American gourmet career. “I wanted to work in a totally American environment, learning the language and learning about American eating habits and about production – mass production – and chemistry of food.” He credits the success of his work with New York restaurants to his experience at Howard Johnson, both his consulting on Windows of the World in the World Trade Center and his restaurant, La Potagerie on Fifth Avenue.

It seems so very hard to believe that the McAmerican way of cooking could provide anything of use to the hands of a young French chef. But Mr. Pépin fully esteems his American experience, and was even ready to defend American produce over a comparison to French. “The earth is the earth. If you grow it the right way, it is the same result.” A walk with him around the local farmer’s market showed that such a claim might be true; but ultimately I got Mr. Pépin – an avid gardener himself – to admit that there was some truth to my bias for European goods. We discussed wild mushrooms (Mr. Pépin is an avid mushroom-hunter in Connecticut and upstate New York as well as in Europe), which he cited as evidence to the mystery of diminished taste in American produce: “Now I’m talking about walking 15 miles up the mountain here or there, so it’s not like its cultivated or anything. It just doesn’t have as much taste as it has in Italy or in France.”

Just like Mr. Pépin may have to apply extra seasoning in America to bring out the flavors of produce, he also makes an effort to keep some of his French “rituals and traditions” in his life here in the United States. Like true epicurean, Mr. Pépin’s culture is one that truly involves the use of all of his senses. “My culture is a culinary culture, and that takes place around the table, and there is much more than food.” He and his wife, Gloria, are avid epicureans, and he cooks often with his daughter, Claudine, who has also made herself in to a well-known chef. Summer seems to be the time when these cultural traditions come about most easily: “From going mushrooming to playing pétanque, you know we play boules, to going frogging as we did the other day, to going to the beach to get the tiny little white bait that we fry like French fries, to doing the garden.”

For Mr. Pépin, incorporating these epicurean traditions into his life is what defines him. Much in the spirit of building a community, Mr. Pépin sees his culinary culture – particularly the communication of recipes – as a way to keep traditions and pass on cultural rituals. “If we do a ritual like playing boules, those rituals are part of a culture and part of the culture is those rituals, and those rituals are expressed in traditional recipes.” Like the academic that he deeply is, Mr. Pépin cited Claude Lévi-Strauss: “The process of cooking is the process by which nature is transformed into culture.”

The ritual of cooking is, for Mr. Pépin, the ritual of narration. Is it telling a story, keeping traditions, and bringing people around the table in conversation. As we made the last turn to a stall in the farmer's market, I couldn't help but ask him what he was planning on making for dinner. Gloria had purchased red leaf lettuce, fresh corn, and a few tomatoes, and I was curious what he was crafting with those simple ingredients. But like any good chef, Mr. Pépin did not have a recipe in mind, and would just follow his senses: "For dinner? Well, we'll just go home, look at what we have, and then, well, we'll see."