cooks wash parsley in Dreft, a dishwashing liquid. A cook explains that soapy water “perks up” the parsley (Field notes, Stan's). As a potential customer, I was shocked at this cleansing ritual; the cooks were amused at my reaction. The techniques are simple enough, but the boundary of knowledge is real. All occupations have tricks that are unknown to outsiders, and which collectively constitute socialization.
Some tricks of the trade involve misleading customers. A thorny problem is preparing meat to a requested degree of doneness. For buffets, cooks employ impression management skills to encourage the cooperation of customers: “Denver tells Ron that one technique to satisfy buffet customers is to illuminate the roast beef with red light, making the beef appear rarer than it is. If a customer doesn't want rare meat, the chef holds the sliced meat away from the light” (Field notes, Blakemore Hotel). These techniques ease the life of the cook, without, in theory, affecting the taste of the food. Of course, the customer may not receive what he or she expects, but that is the lot of the client in a mass-service organization, particularly when the client has a loose tie to the organization and none to the worker.
Restaurants sometimes sear steaks on the grill to add the distinctive grill marks and then bake them in a conventional oven. From the lack of complaints and the routine use of the technique, it seems that most customers cannot determine that their meat hasn't been grilled.
Tricks of the trade are not only used to make hard things easy but also to correct seemingly uncorrectable errors. To work is to err. Whether a doctor who misses stitches in surgery, a scholar who makes an erroneous citation, or a carpenter who places a screw poorly, every worker requires slack and the means to cope with that slack (Hughes 1971; Bosk 1979). Cooks acquire techniques for coping with inevitable mistakes. It is the ability to deal with errors, not the ability to avoid them, that characterizes the skilled worker. The following incidents are typical:
Paul is frying eggs for hash, and an egg yolk breaks and begins to run. Paul quickly picks up the pan, holding the point of the broken egg over the flame, sealing the egg. That side of the egg will be served face down.
(Field notes, Owl's Nest)
Howie tells Barbara, the pastry chef, that he mashed one of her cakes when he pushed a dish into the refrigerator. Barbara isn't upset, saying “That's all right, I can cut it down to a smaller portion.”
(Field notes, La Pomme de Terre)
The cracks that appear when cakes and tarts are baked are hidden by covering those areas with topping or whipped cream, with customers blissfully unaware (e.g., McPhee 1979, p. 94)—a technique known to barbers and realtors. Cooks serve the more appealing side of a piece of meat or fish face up—giving them two chances on every dish, just as a photographer has two profiles from which to select. The competent cook can manage the inevitable problems by advantageously using subcultural knowledge of cooking science and customer psychology. To be “professional” is to transform a disaster into a culinary triumph.3 As Orwell recognized, the final product is judged, not the backstage process that produced it.
DOING DIRT
When backstages become front stages, workers face a challenge of cleanliness. Production leaves little time for amenities. Kitchens, like many production lines, are dirty. We recognize this from our own kitchens, but in such settings it is personal, known dirt, under our control. In restaurant kitchens dirt is anonymous; diners wish to believe that the backstage of restaurants is as spotless as the front stage. Alas, the real kitchens of restaurants are not like the “display” kitchens that some restaurants use to entertain their customers.4
Coping with filth is a classic instance of what Everett Hughes (1971, p. 343) speaks of as “dirty work”: “Dirty work of some kind is found in all occupations. It is hard to imagine an occupation in which one does not appear, in certain repeated contingencies, to be practically compelled to play a role of which he thinks he ought to be a little ashamed morally.” To prepare food in a dirty environment is potentially identity smudging.
I asked all the cooks what in their kitchens would most upset the public. A strong plurality cited the mess and dirt:
There's times if you don't know the business and you don't have to do [things], you don't know what it's like to get hit. I guess I'd be upset if I walked back into the kitchen, and there was meat sitting on the board and a fish over in the sink, and the cooler door was open, and there was a couple of buckets sitting on the floor. That would upset me.
(Personal interview, Owl's Nest)
| DENVER: | Fifty percent of the American public, if they saw what goes on inside of the kitchen, they would never eat out again. |
| GAF: | Give me some examples of that. |
| DENVER: | Chicken laying out for a couple of hours while you're panning it up [for a banquet]. When it sits on the table and you're in the middle of doing something else when it came out, and so it's sitting there for a while.…As a matter of fact, my brother-in-law was in here the other night and was absolutely appalled that someone was cutting chicken on the cutting board and didn't sanitize the cutting board again, which the health department really would get you for.(Personal interview, Blakemore Hotel) |
These seemingly candid comments echo Hughes's insight that while this dirt is “structurally” necessary, it is undesirable and seen as embarrassing by the workers. In their values workers are not so different from their customers, except they eventually must take dirt for granted. As one cook stated explicitly: “You want it to look nice, but, you know, it's so busy that you can't possibly clean it” (Personal interview, Blakemore Hotel).5 The demands of the front stage limit sanitation: “[I]f those serving find it difficult to provide quick service and maintain standards of hygiene, it is poor hygiene which can be readily concealed. Many examples arise; for instance, reusing unwashed dishes, using spittle to clean cutlery, wiping china and cutlery with a serving cloth that is dirty through over-use, handling food to test how hot it is, and so on” (Mars and Nicod, 1984, p. 42).6 George Orwell's observation cited above does not reflect how food is treated in these restaurants. His horrifying “traditions” have been largely erased as governmental control over health and concerns about germs have increased; still, the challenge of cooking efficiently and pleasantly while maintaining standards of hygiene is a trade-off, even if it is not always explicitly recognized.
Observing kitchens, I became inured to sanitation “problems”—from not refrigerating sauces for hours—letting bacteria grow—to using filthy towels to wipe pans to touching food with sweaty hands. Perhaps the most salient problem is what to do when a piece of food gets “dirty.” People are fumblers, and food often falls from plates and pans. Food costs money and takes time and energy to prepare. While cooks do not want to waste, they prefer not to serve what they would hesitate to eat.
Among the criteria used by culinary workers in their decision to dispose of “dirty” food is whether it is prepared or “raw” (untransformed). The latter is less problematic—it is believed that heat cures all ills, particularly as the customer will never discover the mishap: “I get Bruce a dish of escargots from the freezer. One of the snails falls on the floor, and I ask Bruce: ‘Can we use that one?' Bruce assures me: ‘Sure. They won't know’ ” (Field notes, Owl's Nest). Even when prepared food lands on the floor, the cook must not be overly fastidious—wiping or reheating will solve any problem:
| DIANE: | Once when I was doing Sunday brunch [at another restaurant], and this was during the French toast day, [another cook] dropped a piece of French toast on the floor, and he picked it up and wiped it off and put it back on the plate. He didn't have time to do another piece. |
| GAF: | Does that ever happen here? |
| DIANE: | If it does, we usually wipe it off. A lot of people have dropped a piece of meat on the floor, and you pick it up and wash it off with hot water from the sink and throw it back in the pan, and it's fine. I really don't think that anything creepy-crawly got into it in that amount
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