of personal judgment and collective construction, rather than objective fact. The representation of a dish is engraved in a customer's mind, but the means by which a presented dish is judged in light of this representation is complex, affected by cost, the reputation of the house, sophistication of one's palate, and the spirits consumed. The contextual understanding of objects is critical to their evaluation (Dickie 1974).
Audience awareness and demands determines what constitutes an acceptable shortcut. Each occupation has its own audience, but all are evaluated by someone. The question in each work sphere is not whether to limit quality, but how to do so. If the client will not notice the difference, does a difference exist? A difference exists in that the cook knows that he could do “better,” and this affects his occupational self-esteem; yet, other pressures may make this trade-off necessary or desirable. Like all service workers, cooks have at least three audiences for their products: (1) themselves and their peers, who strive for high subcultural standards as long as they can be reasonably met with appropriate effort; (2) management, which demands profits by keeping labor, material, and fixed overhead costs low, and by having customers return to the establishment; and (3) customers, who insist on what they define as high quality, but who are possibly unaware of what quality consists of, and who also demand “good value” (low profit) in the given market niche.
The culinary challenge is to balance these demands. These are not personal standards but demands built into the structure of the setting and the expertise of those evaluating. How dishes are prepared, while grounded in interaction, is also constrained by a set of external and communal standards.
In order to ease their burdens, workers often cook a large quantity of a food at one time and then reheat the food as needed:
The mushroom mousse is cooked halfway through. As Diane tells me: “It takes a long time to set. So we do it this way to save time.” They also do not cook beef Wellington to order but reheat slices when needed.
(Field notes, La Pomme de Terre)
The cooks prepare prime rib by putting it in the hot au jus sauce to heat up, after having previously cooked it to certain degrees of doneness. Al comments: “It's not really the best way to do it, but here [he shrugs] it's what we got to do.”
(Field notes, Stan's)
Cooks also reuse pans to prepare most dishes, only briefly wiping it out to remove some of the previous flavor. Doors of walk-in coolers remain ajar because they are too much trouble to open dozens of times a day. Likewise, all food is cooked at the same temperature. Kitchens do not have enough stoves to vary temperatures. All food that needs to be floured is dipped in the same flour—whether shrimp, scallops, or onion rings. There is not enough staff or energy for cooks to do differently. These techniques are practiced in home kitchens and do not presuppose extensive knowledge. Anyone is capable of choosing these techniques, even though many customers have idealistic views of backstage life in a kitchen.
Convenience foods. The most compelling balancing of values and outcomes can be seen in the decision to serve convenience foods. In theory, all who work in, or are served by, a kitchen object to convenience foods. Customers desire food made from scratch, or what is the point of dining out? Likewise, managers do not want the public to know they serve convenience foods, scarring their reputation. Cooks dislike convenience foods, which diminish their role in the kitchen, transforming them from skilled craftsmen to manual laborers—culinary de-skilling. The chef at the Owl's Nest commented that his goal was for the restaurant to be a good “scratch house,” preparing food from “scratch.” Yet, each restaurant served some convenience foods although “more” convenience foods were served at Stan's and the Blakemore Hotel than at the Owl's Nest and La Pomme de Terre, and their staffs seemed less defensive. With the exception of La Pomme de Terre, each restaurant served instant mashed potatoes, and La Pomme de Terre used canned tomato products, which could have been made from scratch if the chef desired. The issue is not whether to use convenience foods but when. Every occupation engages in shortcuts; the question is what kind, and how will their use be justified rhetorically.
Instant mashed potatoes demonstrate the value of convenience foods. Few customers consider “real” mashed potatoes glamorous, and, thus, these spuds have little economic value. Yet preparing them is labor intensive. As a result, cooks admit the utility of instant potatoes: “Some chefs will say, ‘Well, only fresh vegetables, we'll stick to that,' and that's good. And others will…use boxed vegetables or canned vegetables. There's a quality difference…. Stuff like mashed potatoes, it's unrealistic to cook off eight thousand tons of potatoes and then mash them. Instant is so much easier” (Personal interview, Blakemore Hotel). Yet, there are limits to what is legitimate. Cooks who rely too heavily on convenience foods are scorned by others. They have chosen to be de-skilled:
One cook complains about the current chef: “They shouldn't have any canned, I'm not real big on frozen vegetables…. They had a chef [previously]…he didn't even like dry garlic powder. He was picky. Denver likes everything in cans…. They use too much fake stuff, too much canned stuff. They ought to use real stuff.”
(Personal interview, Blakemore Hotel)
The head chef describes the adjustments that he instituted when he took the job: “Probably the hardest part of the whole thing was retraining, to reestablishing things and getting back, doing things the basic way, cutting out the shortcuts, incorporating as much as possible fresh items as I can. Getting back to a good basic cooking.”
(Personal interview, Owl's Nest)
Cooks resent those who use too much convenience food, but they recognize that they themselves indulge. The decision about when and where to use convenience foods is not personal but organizational, with policy set by the head chef or the manager, who responds to imagined customer demands. Rather than operating under rules shared by the industry as a whole, each restaurant has its own cooking traditions, in which the proper use of convenience items has been negotiated and then established.
Shortcuts are inevitable but are troubling reminders of ideal standards and the distance between reality and these standards. They measure what could be achieved given ideal conditions. The time-space limits of the kitchen direct the kinds of dishes that come forth.
TRICKS OF THE TRADE
Like all workers, cooks rely on techniques that make their occupational lives easier but are not widely known to the public. These tricks of the trade are subcultural in character. One cook asserted: “It takes a degree of skill to be a cook, and it takes a greater degree of skill to be a good cook. If a new man were asked to make something…he wouldn't even know how to cut. He would use a layman's method to cut something, not a chef's method. Also he wouldn't have the knowledge of the materials—the meat, produce, staples, and other things” (Schroedl 1972, p. 184). The novice cook must be socialized to acquire the “operational knowledge base” of the work (Bishop 1979). Just as some tasks are imagined to be easy and are not—preparing mashed potatoes or consommé—other tasks seem difficult but are easy. Preparing a tomato peel in the shape of a rose (“a tomato rose”) looks complicated but with practice can be done in seconds, even by a clumsy sociologist. Omelettes have a frightening reputation but are easy to prepare: “Denny, the day cook, prepares a mushroom omelette by cooking one side, adding the mushrooms on top, and broiling it for thirty seconds, then folding it. He pokes with his fingers to prod it into an ‘ideal' omelette shape” (Field notes, La Pomme de Terre). A key skill is knowing those techniques that transform a difficult, time-consuming task into one that is easier, without a loss of quality: “Ron is preparing a dish that requires chopped orange peel. Denver, the head chef, explains that he should grate the oranges rather than chopping the peel. Ron immediately recognizes that this is more efficient. Denver replies: That's why I get the extra nickel’ ” (Field notes, Blakemore Hotel). To melt sticks of butter, cooks casually toss the wrapped stick in the pan. When the
