Arts or crafts?

After reading my last post, a friend emailed the following:

"Your last section made me wonder about something, though. Do you suppose that the refined movements of a ballet are the product of muscle memory earned through repetition every bit as unglamorous as the line cook's prep and the stylist's thousands of haircuts?"

I don't know. Ask the ballerina who spent a thousand excruciating hours of her childhood en pointe while some embittered old Frenchwoman rapped her on the calves with a walking stick to correct her posture. Dance, like any athletic endeavour, relies on the brutal monotony of training and repetition until the gesture itself is automatic, leaving the mind free to explore, express, synthesize. Miles Davis practiced a lot of scales before "Kind of Blue" came to be. Tiger Woods goes out and hits hundreds of balls after winning a tournament. It all hinges of training the body to perform fluidly as an extension of the mind, such that the gap between intent and action narrows beyond perception. A great cook works by feel, but the feel comes from doing it wrong, then doing it right, and learning to tell the difference intuitively.

I can sense when a pan is the right temperature to sear foie gras without looking at it or touching it, simply by the distinctive smell that its sprinkling of kosher salt emits at a certain point. I know the sound of a pasta dish cooking down too far and on the verge of sticking, and have developed the instinct to hit the pan with a splash of stock and give it a quick toss before the noodles begin to dry out and scorch. I can flip an over-easy egg with either hand depending on which is more convenient, and I know without watching a clock how long it's going to take for that ribeye to hit a perfect rested medium rare. Why? Because I've screwed up ALL of these tasks more times than I can count along the way before reaching a point where I don't even have to think about it.

I am by no stretch attempting to compare myself to Miles, or Baryshnikov, or Tiger Woods for that matter. Thomas Keller perhaps belongs to that rarefied ensemble, Jean-Louis, Eric Ripert...pick one, whoever floats your boat in the arena of name-brand chefs. My fellow journeymen and I resemble more an army of bricklayers and welders, shipwrights and pipefitters, craftsmen whose hands unerringly perform simple tasks that the rest of us would bungle hopelessly. Brain surgery it isn't, but I wouldn't ask a brain surgeon to make me a lobster terrine any more than I would attempt to excise a tumor from my banquet chef's cerebellum. Granted, the stakes are different by orders of magnitude but the premise is the same.



One of my earliest mentors was a crusty old dyed-in-the-wool Frenchie who taught in my culinary program. He had come up old school -- apprenticed at thirteen, beaten and abused for five years in the finest kitchens in Paris before making his bones as a sous-chef, then arriving in New York at the age of twenty with his knife kit, twenty bucks, and a handful of addresses. He worked the high-end "Frog Ponds" (to cop one from Tony Bourdain), cooked for celebrities and heads of state, then somehow found his way into the position of running the entire food service operation for Yale University. He then went on to found a cooking school, where the beatings were less frequent but the sense of discipline, humility, and professional pride was as much a part of the curriculum as the mother sauces or the methodology of creme anglaise. He sneered at the emergent culture of rock-star chefs, the Marios and Emerils who dominated the early years of the Food Network. I can only imagine what he would have to say about Rachel Ray.



"We are cooks"! He would exclaim, brandishing the twelve-inch Sabatier he had carried with him on a third-class steamship passage four decades ago. To be a chef was to claim a title, a position, a certain presumption of station arbitrarily taken on by two-bit hacks and shoemakers just as readily as by the giants of our profession. He would then produce his official French identification papers, which after forty years of circulating amongst the elite ranks of the American culinary establishment, still listed under the heading of "metier" the humble word "cuisinier". Cook, not chef. Bricklayer, not architect. This was a man who could conjure perfection from a pile of scraps, who taught us to make honest soups and to abhor waste in any form, who bequeathed upon us his mother's blanquette de veau and the recipe for lobster Americaine as he had made it for Mitterand.



Was he a Tiger, a Coltraine, a Wyeth? He could have been, were he driven by the raw desire to succeed. But Michel -- "Uncle Mickey" to those who survived a class with him -- was driven only by the fundamental integrity of producing great food in any context, whether a formal state dining room or a college cafeteria. His mission in starting a school was to produce cooks, nascent craftsmen with the basic skills, passion, and honesty to respect the ingredients and the guest. If we wanted to become chefs, that was our own damn business. Just show him a perfectly made cheese omlette and shut the hell up.