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 butter melts, they remove the paper (Field notes, Blakemore Hotel). At one restaurant, 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