Questions I am often asked from people on Facebook and Instagram.

Are you a Chef?

Are you a photographer?

When is your cookbook coming out?

Are you going to open a restaurant?

Can you share the recipe?

I learned to cook at my parent’s kitchen. I was, you might say, homeschooled.

Learning from an early age to make meatballs, lasagna, frittatas, roast chicken, hamburgers.

I was an apprentice to Shirley and Fred Barone. (1)

I consider myself a chef (2). I consider myself a photographer. An artist. A gardener. A Renaissance man.

I have worked on and off on a cookbook.

But I have no plans to open a restaurant–although I have often dreamed about what it would look like and what I would prepare for my guests.

Here are a few things I have made for Susan, my wife, the past few days.

Chicken Noodle Soup with Veggies.

Pasta with Chicken Sausage, Tomatoes, Pine Nuts and Spinach.

Hamburger with Mushrooms and Polenta.

Salad with Smoked Salmon and Hard-boiled Egg.

Ricotta Cheesecake with Pine Nuts and Raisins.

Mac And Cheese with Bacon and Spinach.

Turkey Cutlet with Roasted Mushrooms and Tomatoes over Polenta.

And here we are enjoying a Roasted Chicken Dinner.

Looking for a special recipe? Simple use the search box. Search salmon, haddock, meatballs, salads and soups.

(1) “A Brief History of the Kitchen Brigade.” The Austin Chronicle, Feb. 22, 2002.

The next time a restaurant kitchen delivers a complex meal to the dining room, deftly timed and executed, consider the fact that this military precision is no accident. The traditional system of kitchen structure — the brigade led by the chef — has venerable roots in European military organizations.

From the 14th century on, traveling armies had to be fed; cooks were selected from among the ranks. During peacetime, rulers set up tournaments to keep their warriors prepared for future battles; the military cooks followed knights to castles and ultimately became the cooks to kings and nobility, orchestrating huge and complicated meals and feasts for vast entourages.

Trade guilds soon developed; these were carefully controlled monopolies for cooks that ensured the membership steady employment. Expensive and exclusive, these guilds adopted uniforms, rigid hierarchies, and systems of exhaustive apprenticeship. Until after the French Revolution and the subsequent rise of restaurants, this caste of cooks continued to work exclusively for the aristocracy.

The classic double-breasted white jacket is vestigial — it originated when chefs were servants of the king and presumably might be called upon to serve in battle as well as in noble households. By the 1820s, chefs were wearing uniforms purportedly based on those worn by soldiers in the Turkish army. White eventually became the standard to emphasize cleanliness and good sanitation.

There are numerous unsubstantiated legends about the origins of the chef’s tall white toque; one version attributes it to the tubular black hats worn by Greek Orthodox priests. Antonin Carême, the 18th-century chef to Tallyrand and various Rothschilds, is also credited with bringing the toque into the kitchen. Supposedly inspired by a woman’s hat, he inserted a snappy cardboard tube into his cap, and the style caught on. Traditional stiff, pleated toques are about 8 inches tall, but executive chefs wear them up to 12 inches. The story told in my culinary school is that the extra-tall headgear enables subordinates in need of guidance to quickly spot the chef in a crowded kitchen. (Of course, the women students circulated an alternate theory.)

Late in the 19th century, following a French army career, gifted chef Georges-Auguste Escoffier developed the modern brigade system in London’s Savoy Hotel. For maximum efficiency, he organized the kitchen into a strict hierarchy of authority, responsibility, and function. In the brigade, widely adopted by fine-dining establishments, the general is the executive chef, or chef de cuisine, assisted by a sous chef. Subordinate are the chefs de partie, each in charge of a production station and assisted by demi-chefs and commis (apprentices). The number of station chefs can get exhaustive, including the saucier (sauces), poissionier (fish), grillardin (grilled items), fritteurier (fried items), rotissier (roasts), garde manger (cold food), patissier (pastries), and tournant (roundsman, station relief).

Today, most restaurants use some simplified variation of Escoffier’s kitchen brigade. Typically, the executive chef coordinates kitchen activities, sets standards, manages costs, and directs training and work efforts. The sous chef sees that the food is prepared, portioned, and presented according to the executive chef’s standards. The line cooks run the stations and prepare menu items according to specifications, aided by assistants and apprentices.

(2) All That Cooking.

History of Cooking

The following document is a chronological frame of events throughout history that have a director indirect influence on food, wine and related topics. It is by no means the be all and end all, and in no way pretends to represent every event. It is continually being updated as the author uncovers new facts, figures and subjects of relevance. Every effort has been made to cross reference, but I am only human and a mistake may have occurred.

“Cooking is the art and science of preparing food for eating by the application of heat”. The term also includes the full range of culinary techniques: preparing raw and cooked foods for the table; final dressing of meats, fish, and fowl; cleaning and cutting fruits and vegetables; preparing salads; garnishing dishes; decorating desserts; and planning meals.

EARLIEST TYPES OF COOKING
The origins of cooking are obscure. Primitive humans may first have savoured roast meat by chance, when the flesh of a beast killed in a forest fire was found to be more palatable and easier to chew and digest than the customary raw meat. They probably did not deliberately cook food, though, until long after they had learned to use fire for light and warmth. It has been speculated that Peking man roasted meats, but no clear evidence supports the theory. From whenever it began, however, roasting spitted meats over fires remained virtually the sole culinary technique until the Palaeolithic Period, when the Aurignacian people of southern France began to steam their food over hot embers by wrapping it in wet leaves. Aside from such crude procedures as toasting wild grains on flat rocks and using shells, skulls, or hollowed stones to heat liquids, no further culinary advances were made until the introduction of pottery during the Neolithic Period.

The earliest compound dish was a crude paste (the prototype of the pulmentum of the Roman legions and the polenta of later Italians) made by mixing water with the cracked kernels of wild grasses. This paste, toasted to crustiness when dropped on a hot stone, made the first bread.

ADVANCES IN COOKING TECHNIQUES
Culinary techniques improved with the introduction of earthenware (and, more or less concomitantly, the development of settled communities), the domestication of livestock, and the cultivation of edible plants. A more dependable supply of foodstuffs, including milk and its derivatives, was now assured. The roasting spit was augmented by a variety of fired-clay vessels, and the cooking techniques of boiling, stewing, braising, and perhaps even incipient forms of pickling, frying, and oven baking were added. Early cooks probably had already learned to preserve meats and fish by smoking, salting, air-drying, or chilling. New utensils made it possible to prepare these foods in new ways, and such dishes as bacalao a la vizcaina (“dried cod”) and finnan haddie (smoked haddock) are still eaten.

B.C.
The cultivation of soybeans in China predates recorded history and spread from there to other countries in eastern Asia before the modern period. So essential was the soybean to Chinese civilisation that it was considered one of the five sacred grains (the others being rice, barley, wheat, and millet). The popularity of soybeans in the Orient was due to their wide use as a food.

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