The Cook

Today, many celebrity chefs have acquired a status that places them on par with stars of film, pop, and sports, the descendants of royals in the — not always firm — firmament of celebrity. The Michelin Guide distributes stars to restaurants, and each year various magazines name one lucky individual the World's Best Chef. The Bocuse d'Or is the Oscar of cooking, and in the courtyard of Paul Bocuse's Lyon restaurant, the names of the winners are engraved in a culinary Walk of Fame. But these top chefs are as far from the average cook as were the maîtres queux in princely courts during the Renaissance and the Baroque and the master chefs who won their fame within the new restaurant culture of the nineteenth century. Throughout history, ordinary cooks have suffered from a low status in society.

MANUAL WORK, BLOOD, DIRT, AND VICES

In the Middle Ages, when guilds were important in defining social rank, cooks were members of the less prestigious ones. In thirteenth-century Genoa, cooking was among the least well-remunerated trades. In fourteenth-century Florence, cooks belonged to the minor guilds, along with butchers, bakers, innkeepers, tanners, smiths, leatherworkers, and other humble tradesmen, while the more prestigious Arte dei Medici, Speciali e Merciai was the guild for doctors, apothecaries, and merchants who sold spices, dyes, and medicines.

This low status is explained partly by the fact that cooks were recruited from the inferior social strata but also, to a certain extent, by the strenuous physical work the job entailed, which was not highly regarded by the elite responsible for maintaining the established value system. The aristocratic elite was physically active,

but their bodily exercise was limited by the codes of the warrior caste; the ideal pursuits were riding, fencing, and hunting. Hunting was considered not only entertainment for the nobles but also a serious preparation for military duty, an idea that goes all the way back to Aristotle and was repeated in the Renaissance by Machiavelli. And if the proud counts and barons contributed at all in the dining hall, it was by carving up the big roasts, an art carried out with tools resembling well-known weapons. But this was very far from handling bloody carcasses in cramped kitchens thick with heat and smoke (figure 1).

Blood was associated with cooking well into the twentieth century. Cooks — professionals as well as housewives — were responsible for the slaughtering of animals. Cookbooks had instructions on such work, some of which expressed empathy for the animals — "humane ways of slaughtering at home," as it is phrased in one Danish cookbook from the late 1800s — and how to pluck poultry. In fact, the descriptions were not too different from what we find in an English recipe from the Middle Ages: "Cut a swan in the rofe of the mouth toward the brayn of the hed, & let hym blede to deth."

Further back in antiquity, Greek society had mageiroi, religious officials who killed sacrificial animals for the rituals preceding big banquets, but mageiroi also sold meat at markets and prepared dinners for people wealthy enough to hire professional cooks with a more sophisticated culinary range than ordinary slave cooks.

Heat and smoke were constant problems in kitchens. In 2010, French historian Patrick Rambourg, who was trained as a professional cook, described with great sensitivity how cooks discover that the fire — such an important ally in cooking — suddenly becomes an enemy "when it is not properly controlled." Two centuries earlier, the celebrated culinary artist Antonin Carême presented a lamentation that probably expressed the feelings of many of his colleagues: cooks working in drafty, humid subterranean kitchens would develop painful rheumatism, while cooks above ground had to inhale the mortal fumes from burning charcoal. Even the arbiter of taste under the First French Empire, Grimod de la Reynière, who probably spent more time in the dining hall than in the kitchen, was concerned about the health of cooks and pointed out the dangers they were exposed to when faced with steam, smoke, and fire.

The danger created by filth and dirt is another recurrent theme in many cookbooks throughout history; the concern with cleanliness and hygiene in these books almost amounts to an obsession. And this was of vital importance long before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when domestic science teachers gave it top priority. Around 1600, Francisco Martínez Montiño, chef at the Spanish court, opened his Arte de cocina (Culinary art) with these words: "In this chapter I plan to treat cleanliness, which is the most necessary and important." In his list of priorities, he put cleanliness (limpieza) first, taste (gusto) second, and speed (presteza) third. A similar stress on perfect cleanliness is found in books written at several European courts. In Poland, an administrator for a prince wrote in the preface of his cookbook that a cook must be clean and shaven, have combed hair, washed hands, and pared nails, and wear a white apron.

If we are to believe authors of literary fiction, lack of hygiene is often the reason for low status among cooks. Roger "Hogge" in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, who was not a court cook but rather a professional known for his skill in preparing tasty dishes — blancmanger, for example — has a skin eruption on his leg, suggesting an absence of personal hygiene.

Drunkenness and greed are other vices often attributed to cooks. There is a tendency in food histories to mention northern Europe first in discussions of excessive alcohol intake, but there are sources that clearly demonstrate that this was also a problem in the southern part of the continent. In his household book from 1668, the Italian Francesco Liberati emphasized that cooks must not drink too much. He followed this assertion with a list of the damaging effects drunkenness will have on one's cooking. The list is so specific that the author undoubtedly had experience with such bad habits.

"Greedy glutton" was a frequent expression in the...