It's only food, for heaven's sake

I’m a fairly dab-hand in the kitchen, if I do say so myself. I like food and I really like cooking.

My culinary acumen, I always suggest, grew out of adversity. An advantage (about the only advantage I can think of) in having an alcoholic mother and being the eldest child was that I learned to cook at an early age so that my younger brothers could be fed decent meals when dear mama was hors de combat.

I gained further skill by not having had a sterling domestic track record in the past. If I wanted to eat well, and healthfully during my sporadic bachelor forays I had to prepare good dishes for myself. I also found, if I had a new female ‘friend’ and I could offer her my own Coquilles St. Jacques, it could be a pleasing prelude to intimacy – or not. But, at least the grub was good.

In my current, and I hope ‘forever’ home situation, I have the best of all possible worlds in that Wendy, aside from all her other attainments is a professional chef and has worked in the culinary realm in the past. Consequently, we tend to divide the food preparation chores, or at least alternate evening meals.

One thing Wendy learned above all else is that professional kitchens are ‘not’ nice places in which to earn a buck. She's worked in the past in places that ranged from short-order diners to very high-end hotels. The ‘culture’ in all of them sucked, she said. The underlings, all the way from sous-chefs to the pan scourers are treated like crap by the egocentric chefs. Many of the lower order employees are substance dysfunctionals, via booze or drugs, many have prison records, and virtually all are treated like the scum of the earth, and in that she could hardly blame them for their misbehaviors.

Meanwhile, the chefs (with only a few exceptions in her experience) were abusive, sometimes violent, profane and arrogant, and treated workers in a manner that would never be acceptable in any other workplace. And, at the end of the day, despite their love of themselves as ‘artistes’, they are really only cooks whose role is to ‘serve’ the paying public.

The only ones she found to have a realistic take on the business were the Asians – predominantly the Chinese, who regarded cookery as something they must toil at in order to make money in order to send their kids through college, so that their kids could turn their hands to something ‘respectable’ like doctoring or lawyering.

So, where does our love affair with and exaltation of cookery come from? Why on earth would we find some sort of perverse pleasure in watching the immature and abusive antics of off-the-wall ‘celebrity chefs?’ People who, in my opinion, should be arrested for their abuse of employees. If I want to watch chefs at their most repulsive, I’ll watch that wonderful old British series Chef, with the superlative Lenny Henry. But, the point of that series was that Chef himself was utterly screwed up and ended up virtually losing everything from his beautiful and long-suffering wife to the posh restaurant for which he forsook aforementioned wife. In other words, he was an emotional and mental basket case and not to be admired.

So, at the end of the day, I can only blame the French for this. It is the nonsensical concept of haute cuisine as a sort of art that ruined old-fashioned cookery. All that Escoffier pretension took whipping up some decent grub to new heights of snobbery and the dining world never really recovered. At least it never recovered from the attitude. That was why I loved Julia Child. Dear old Julia cut through all the bullshit, mainly exhorted us to use lots of real butter and to be careful with sauces and those who like cooking found out that most Gallic cookery is pretty easy-peasy.

So is most other cookery if you have a bit of a passion for preparing good food. And you can do the whole thing without attitude.