Chef Alan Kerr, centre, and students in the integrated culinary production class at Niagara College prepare chicken in several international styles.Glenn Lowson/The Globe and Mail
Think of Julia Child gleefully stuffing a goose.
With stately joie de vivre, she gave North Americans fistfuls of fine French cooking, focusing on kitchen technique and whipping her buttery concoctions into shape. Yet each half hour of The French Chef had time for the only merest intimations of culinary history.
That's a big difference between TV and a true culinary education.
Fine cooking is based on layer upon layer of history. Students in culinary programs are encouraged to develop flair and inventiveness, but first come the history lessons.
"We are a skills-based program, but you have to understand the background of cuisine," says Christine Walker, a chef and academic chair of the chef school at George Brown College in Toronto.
The emergence of trade colleges, particularly after the Second World War, was centred around teaching job qualifications, but there often wasn't much study in the history of those professions and trades. Culinary training was a little different because it was based on some basic historic precedents, often French ones.
"When I talk about a julienne knife cut [that is, cutting long, thin strips], or a brunoise [a cut that is first julienned and then diced], or a roux [the use of flour and fat] to thicken sauces, we need to understand where they came from."
The organization of a commercial kitchen also stems from history, namely the brigade de cuisine setup attributed to chef Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935), who famously assigned each cook to a station in the kitchen, giving each a specific job and effectively a rank. To know the hierarchy and work flow of a professional kitchen, you must know about Escoffier.
Food studies, however, have grown explosively over the past three decades, incorporating discussion of larger social changes and issues of science and sustainability. Chef education has followed suit.
The question, then, is not whether history is important in cooking school, it's how much history is necessary for a student still mastering the broiler or whipping pastry dough in the Cuisinart.
"Students often ask, 'Why? Why this certain garnish?' Well, the answer is usually always historical," says Ryan Whibbs, professor and co-ordinator of George Brown's undergraduate bachelor of commerce program in culinary management. He holds a PhD in food history.
"You'll often see in food writing today, people will argue about authenticity, and authentic ingredients, that [in order to have] authenticity we have to return to a certain geographic place and usually a certain historical time," he says.
What, for instance, is boeuf bourguignon without the pearl onions, the bacon and red wine? You need to know the tradition in order to build upon it or change it, Dr. Whibbs noted.
All national and regional cuisines have rich histories. An Asian dish will typically have stronger spices and richer recipes than what's served in North American restaurants. This is where the new search for authenticity comes in. And there is more of a drive now to teach that. A contemporary chef de cuisine without a knowledge of, say, broth recipes from around the world and their origins is a chef with limitations.
"If I'm going to talk about broth, I have to speak about Asian style broth, what they do with ramen and pho," says Olaf Mertens, chef and professor at the Canadian Food and Wine Institute at Niagara College Canada in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
Crucially, this expanded sense of history now goes beyond famous male chefs and looks more and more at women, from those leading Michelin-starred restaurants, to the centuries of home-cooking tradition.
"In the past, we have had a lot of what you might think of as the Great Man Theory of this recipe invented by this person, or this cooking method invented by that person," Dr. Whibbs at George Brown says.
"What we've found since the early part of the 2000s is that actually a lot of these kind of nice, black-and-white stories don't reflect the reality of what happened. If we go back further in time, we can see evidence of different recipes in different places, and it really breaks down these Great Men or, as I call them, Great Recipe Theories," he says.
François Pierre de la Varenne is recognized for having created in the 1600s the basics of modern French cuisine, with an emphasis on butter and herbs bringing out natural flavours, rather than a reliance on spices which had previously given French cuisine a more piquant taste. Yet rather than just being la Varenne's invention, research shows that he was part of a broader trend in noble households at the time, Dr. Whibbs says. For contemporary chefs, this provides a new, wider lens in viewing the development of French dishes and their authenticity.
"That's always the case with food. Certain people did great things, but the more great things [attributed to them], the less truth those stories have," he says.
Also, as it turns out, Escoffier's brigade de cuisine really wasn't such a modern creation, Dr. Whibbs says, but is better seen as a codification of long-standing tradition dating as far back as medieval times, when servants even then were given specific stations in the kitchen.
Yet, the Escoffier template remains key. It means that the preparation of different foods is sectioned off in the kitchen. This chef at that station is in charge of cooking a certain dish, fish for instance, while that cook at another station cooks a different dish, perhaps vegetables. So when starting from that historical context, that lingua franca, trained chefs have a common footing, but are then constantly learning throughout their career how to incorporate new dishes into the menu and the kitchen workflow.
"I think the best are those who, as they mature, see themselves more and more as a student of cooking, instead of being a master. Quite often if you're talking to someone who is a know-it-all, they don't know it all," says Michael Olson, chef and professor at Niagara College.
But Escoffier can seem a world away from today's cooking shows and food media, with their flash and emphasis on technique, hot tempers and chilly egos. They also ramp up the sense that chefs are there to wow foodies.
And then there is social media and the incongruity of people posting cellphone snaps of restaurant dishes. (What about how they actually taste?) Is this threatening students' view that a historic grounding is even necessary?
"Now with social media, people are always alert and finding new dishes and pastries to create," says director of operations and pastry chef Hervé Chabert at Le Cordon Bleu's school in Ottawa, in an e-mail. "We allow students to have an element of their own creativity in their final pieces and a lot of this comes from trends that they've seen and discovered."
Yet, he indicates it all still circles back to historical context, especially when it comes to French cuisine. "We continue to teach these traditional techniques … as they can be applied across many current trends in the culinary world. Most chefs have studied under French mentors at some point or they went to Europe to develop the skills and techniques in the restaurants there and brought them back to Canada with them," he says.