While American restaurants—at least those I observed—are not blessed by the same standards of sanitary “care,” Orwell is correct in attributing to cooks the desire to have the food look and taste right without excess concern about the process by which it becomes right. Workers do what they must within the reality of the structure of the restaurant.
PERSONAL ORGANIZATION AS COPING
When one asks cooks what is essential to help them get through the day, they frequently point to personal organization—organizing those projects that comprise the arc of work (Strauss 1991, p. 72). Workers with numerous unpredictably arrayed tasks find that it is not the work but the preparation for that work that is critical. I asked one cook at the Owl's Nest what he considered the most demanding part of his job: “The job is as easy as you make it. If you get the stuff lined up, it's easy. There's nothing hard once you have a system. You know what you're going to do and when” (Field notes, Owl's Nest). Crucial to culinary success is to segment projects and to know their proper order. Without this ordering, what is doable becomes disastrous. The challenge of cooking (and much work) is less what is done than the relationship among acts: “Things seem to fall together really easy for me.…When I have twenty-five different things that I have to prep up, I can usually. I know how to organize things” (Personal interview, Owl's Nest). After my first day in a restaurant kitchen I wrote: “Each action in the kitchen requires but a few seconds. It is almost as though the cooks are working on twenty assembly lines simultaneously—each requires a different action. It also requires remarkable coordination among cooks” (Field notes, Owl's Nest). The skill is to order multiple tasks under intense pressure—even if they are unable to specify the rules for what is to be done when. Each task is relatively unproblematic if provided sufficient time, but the sum is nearly impossible for the inexperienced. The nearly impossible is routine because cooks are experienced enough to adjust their speed and sequencing to meet demands of the arc of work—the totality of tasks. Perhaps the greatest challenge for cooks is when they fall behind or lose track of their tasks. The arc of work assumes detailed behavioral monitoring. The finely tuned system can fall apart, to which anyone who has had their focused concentration disturbed can attest. Cooking under pressure demands attention to an internal agenda. When I asked a cook at the steakhouse about his greatest frustration, he shared concrete instances that confirm the salience of concentration: “Falling behind on your backup supplies like your sour cream and your tartar sauce. Just not having the time or the manpower to recuperate” (Field notes, Stan's). The desire to keep pace means that cooks attempt, whenever possible, to “get ahead,” incorporating slack time into the process. Particularly when dealing with cold food (e.g., salads, sandwich fixings, or desserts) that does not spoil, cooks may prepare more than actually ordered (e.g., Whyte 1948, p. 3)—they have the luxury to overproduce for later use.
One means of facilitating this organization of work is to limit the options available to customers and, hence, the degree of organization needed by workers. This is output control of kind, not quantity. To control the work pace, restaurants may provide limited menus or incorporate the same elements in a large selection of dishes (the latter practice is common in Asian establishments). Restaurants with extensive menus have either simple preparations or a large staff. Repeatedly preparing the same items is easier to organize than offering a wide range of choices: flexibility can go too far in an industrial workplace. As a result, large parties are given restricted menus to ease the chores for the cooks: “A party of seventy-five will arrive for dinner at 7:30 P.M. They are given a choice of two items. Charles, the manager, tells me: ‘We'll sheet pan the steaks.2 We'll seer the steak, then bake it. We must be restrictive with them. That's how all restaurants which serve parties do it…. It comes out nice.' Charles admits that he can taste the difference” (Field notes, Stan's). A limited range of selections effectively controls the enormity of the task. This limitation, however, may provoke dissatisfaction among clients, who if they do not find choices to their liking may patronize other establishments.
EASING THE WAY
Every occupation has informal, sub-rosa procedures that make work tolerable: techniques labeled “the underside of work.” Despite the “official” practices that workers are expected to follow, the practical accomplishment of the job encourages other techniques that lighten the burden of work.
I classify these sub-rosa techniques into three classes: (1) approximations, (2) shortcuts, and (3) tricks of the trade. Approximations are techniques that deny the primacy of formal rules, suggesting that workers have the autonomy to make choices around a zone of acceptable practice. Every cook has the option to make decisions, and, in fact, measuring and timing devices are never so precise that approximation is absent. Professional cooks take these approximations as necessary and natural, whereas some home cooks (and novice professionals) attempt to avoid it, unsure of the effects of their choices. Shortcuts are techniques accessible to all those who know the task: options of which every cook—professional or amateur—is potentially aware. These involve making “improper” choices that bend or break the rules of production, but that save time and effort. Tricks of the trade are primarily known within the occupation, whether in an individual establishment or in the industry as a whole, and are contained within the boundaries of the occupation as subcultural knowledge. Unlike shortcuts, these need not be formally improper but are easier techniques of reaching a desired end.
These techniques differ in the degree to which they do violence to the final product—whether they affect the quality of the finished dishes. Tricks of the trade are generally less noticeable in the final outcome—thus, we label them “tricks”—than shortcuts. Approximations, depending on how approximate they are, may have little or great effect. These terms are used in professional restaurant kitchens with similar meanings although without distinguishing between tricks as knowledge held within the boundary of the occupation and shortcuts as accessible knowledge.
APPROXIMATIONS
Some occupations demand precision. Yet, all produce “slop” with which workers can mess. Few occupations require the microscopic precision of draftsmen or machine-tool operators, but even for these workers there are micromillimeters of choice. To permit approximation is to provide autonomy. Entering through the portals of a commercial kitchen, a home cook may notice a lack of precise measurement. The head chef at the Blakemore emphasized that he stresses conceptual, practical working knowledge:
The basic recipes are in the book. As a matter of fact, when we were in school we didn't figure this out ‘til [final] quarter. In first quarter everyone expected that this is how we make whatever it was. Salisbury steak. This is how we make it. It got to second quarter, they said no, this is how you make it, and they gave you a new recipe. Third quarter they said this is the recipe we're going to use. You thought to yourself, “What kind of education are we getting if they can't even decide how it works?” By fourth quarter we finally figured out that what they were telling us is that if you took all three recipes, the base is going to be there. Hamburgers and vegetables are your base. Whether you put in oregano, basil, tomato juice or tomato paste, that's your option.
(Personal interview, Blakemore Hotel)
Although cooks have recipes, they ignore them, interpret them, and move beyond them to creative autonomy. Recipes are suggestions, not orders, although many home cooks follow them. Restaurant cooks have a different perspective:
| BARBARA: | I think there's a lot of common sense in knowing how to interpret a recipe. |
| GAF: | What do you mean “interpret a recipe”? |
| BARBARA: | It just seems to me that when I read a recipe and I see certain instructions how to fold something in, but common sense tells me that I have to do that very gently in this specific recipe because of the ingredients that are in it. |
| GAF: | Beyond the recipe? |
| BARBARA: | Yeah. And I've seen people make all the same recipe at the same time, and you have five different results, anywhere from disaster to marvelous. It all was dependent on whether that person was paying attention to what they were doing and whether they were concentrating or whether they had common sense to realize how that should look at a certain stage.(Personal interview, La Pomme de Terre) |
Dishes