FOOD : A Kitchen of One’s Own : Women as Chefs--A Nationwide Phenomenon Focused in California

IN RESTAURANT REVIEWS, magazine articles and popular food books, you can see the beginnings of a revolution--the rise of women chefs. For the first time in history significant numbers of women are cooking in top restaurants--and getting credit for it. The phenomenon is nationwide, but many talented women chefs work in California, home of California cuisine. Just as a lack of vested traditionalism allowed room for experimentation and the invention of a new way of cooking, so, too, it allowed for gender reshuffling in the kitchen. The story begins, however, in France, where the modern restaurant originated.

The history of the French food business starts with the medieval guilds, the antecedents of our modern labor unions. There were guilds for butchers, for bakers, for pastry chefs. Training for and admission to each profession was rigidly controlled by guild regulations. According to the “Larousse Gastronomique”: “In France, a butchers’ guild had been established by the 8th Century; a man had to serve three years’ apprenticeship and buy, dress, cut and sell meat for a further three years before he could become a master butcher and buy an official diploma; both privileges cost a great deal of money. The guild was directed by a master of master butchers and became extremely powerful, arrogating to themselves not only the monopoly of selling beef, veal, mutton, pork and sucking-pig but also sea and river fish.

“Charles VI revoked some of their privileges, and their power declined for a time, but in the 16th Century, they were raised to the status of tradesmen, and were subject to statutes, among which were ordinances which forbade them to open new stalls without authority, keep open after a certain time, solicit custom or abuse customers, sell cooked meat, or pursue any other trade but that of a butcher. . . . The royal regulations were maintained until the end of absolute monarchy.”

One way in which to circumvent the costs of guild admission (and also perhaps to avoid some of the grueling work involved) was to be the son of a master craftsman. “Larousse” tells us, for example, that for bakers, the “apprenticeships lasted five years, followed by four years working for the bakers’ guild. At the end of the nine years, the apprentice, unless he was the master baker’s son, had to present his chef d’oeuvre and, on paying for a certificate, might at last practice as a master baker.”

French women, who were by law prohibited from owning most property, could rarely afford to buy their way into the guilds’ training systems. Property laws also forbade, in most circumstances, their inheritance of family businesses. They could never be the master baker’s “son.” (There were exceptions: Women sometimes took over their fathers’ positions in the guilds controlling fine arts production. For example, Sabina van Steinbach continued her father’s work on the sculptural facade of the Strasbourg Cathedral.) Social conventions reinforced the legal restrictions: We haven’t found any record of a French woman in the food guilds before the 20th Century.

In the mid-18th Century, the traveler to Paris had only a few options for a meal outside a private home or palace. According to Brillat-Savarin, in his “Physiology of Taste,” such a traveler would be “forced to have recourse to the fare provided at his inn, which was usually bad. There were one or two hotels boasting a table d’hote . . . which, however, with few exceptions offered none but the barest necessaries, and could only be had at a stated hour.

“He had, it is true, caterers to fall back on; but they only supplied complete meals, and whoever wished to entertain a few friends was obliged to order his requirements in advance; so that the visitor who had not the good fortune to be invited to some wealthy house would leave our great city in total ignorance of the resources and delights of French cookery.”

A soup vendor named Boulanger changed all that. In 1765, the sign over his establishment read: “Venite ad me omnes qui stomacho laboratis et ego restaurabo vos” (“Come to me all ye whose stomachs suffer and I will restore you”). Boulanger offered his fare throughout the day and into the evening. He allowed his patrons to select from a menu. One dish he served--sheep’s feet in white wine sauce--caused quite a stir. At that time, only traiteurs (“caterers”) were allowed to serve whole pieces of meat or fowl and ragouts . Since Boulanger, who was not a member of the traiteurs ‘ guild, was apparently serving a ragout , he must be breaking the law. The traiteurs took him to court. The judges ruled in Boulanger’s favor, holding that his sheep’s feet creation was not a ragout and, therefore, not illegal for sale to the public. They had ruled in favor of the forerunner of the modern restaurant.

The restaurant differed from all its predecessors. The customer could choose what he wanted from a menu, know each item’s price, order practically whenever he wanted to and enjoy his meal on the premises. The exciting new form of food venture attracted many diverse entrepreneurs, and after the Revolution of 1789 a great number of chefs who were forced to leave the aristocrats’ payrolls opened their own restaurants. A new profession was born.

A record of the better French restaurants from the late 18th Century until World War II is given in “Larousse Gastronomique” under the heading Restaurants of Bygone Days. Of the 62 establishments listed, only five were associated with women, two of whom are described as “excellent cooks”; none is referred to as a “chef,” an appellation given most of the 52 men discussed. The terms cook and chef are not interchangeable. Only when a cook has training, respect and responsibility does she become a chef. Cooks work in homes or in diners; chefs work in restaurants. Is it possible that the two women--Mere Saguet and Madame Prunier--were chefs whose historical record has been distorted, however inadvertently, by sexism in labeling, or practice, or both? French male chefs have a history of objecting to their female counterparts on three points. They hold that women are weak, that they are disruptive in the kitchen, that they have inferior sensibilities.

Certainly, the 19th-Century kitchen portrayed by Marie-Antoine Careme, the founder of classic French cooking, shows how demanding the place could be: “Imagine yourself in a large kitchen such as that of the Foreign Ministry at the moment of a great dinner. Twenty chefs are at their occupations, coming, going, moving with speed at this cauldron of heat. Look at that great mass of live charcoal. . . .

“Add to that a heap of burning wood in front of which four spits are turning, one of which bears a sirloin weighing 20 to 27 kilograms. . . . Only the chef has the right to make himself heard, and at the sound of his voice everyone obeys. . . . For about half an hour the doors and windows are closed so that the air does not cool the dishes as they are being dished up. . . . But it is the burning charcoal which kills us.”

Paul Bocuse, best known of the nouvelle cuisine chefs, rekindled the debate some years ago when he said over French radio that women were “too weak” to lift the heavy kitchen pots, called marmites . In response not to Bocuse but to the issue of women’s physical weakness, Julia Child said, “I don’t buy that nonsense that women can’t lift heavy pots. There are always plenty of people around to help.” The fact that there are other styles of kitchen preparation also deflates Bocuse’s allegation. Madame Trama, chef and proprietor of Tante Madee restaurant in Paris, said, “I don’t need big marmites . I make my dishes in little copper pots--to order.” The tradition of women running smaller kitchens in the French countryside is well-documented. The French provincial and regional cuisines, sometimes called cuisine de terroir , cuisine de misere or even cuisine des femmes were heavily influenced by the meres cuisinieres .

The second allegation is that women will be sexually disruptive in the kitchen. Georgette Descat’s son, who is business manager of her Lous Landes restaurant in Paris, while being interviewed for an article about women chefs, repeated what he had heard male chefs say about their female counterparts: “They’ll throw the place in an uproar. The men will feel them up and jump them on the piano (slang for “stove”). The big chefs don’t say they won’t hire a woman, but the fact is they don’t.”

The last criticism of women as potential chefs is the most absurd. In his “Gold Cook Book,” published in 1947, Louis P. De Gouy, a master chef, wrote: “Despite all the arguments to the contrary, men, in general, seem to have a keener sense of smell than women (though it is admitted that men are greatly inferior in some of the other human qualities); they have a true gustatory tongue for flavor--one of the reasons that men exclusively are engaged in wine, tea, and coffee tasting. They make, therefore, the best chefs.”

De Gouy’s statement seems too ridiculous to merit response, but it unfortunately expresses a sentiment shared by other male chefs; women are perceived as innately inferior when it comes to cooking.

To fight back against this kind of chauvinism in the professional kitchen, French women started an organization to help themselves. As writer Sonia Landes explains in the New Boston Review, “When Annie Desvignes, a restauratrice in Vervins, was refused admission into the Society of Chefs because she was a woman, she called her good friend and friend of women chefs, Robert Courtine, for help. Courtine, better known as La Reyniere , is the influential food writer for Le Monde.”

Courtine addressed Desvignes’ plight directly in his newspaper column. In an open letter he wrote: “Why do you need the company of men to discuss cuisine? Form your own association.” That is exactly what happened on Dec. 20, 1975, at Ty-Coz, a Parisian restaurant. Six women chefs met, and the Association des Restauratrices-Cuisinieres emerged. From that small core, the group has grown to include chefs from 59 establishments. Each member chef is also the owner of her restaurant. Few of the members work outside France. As the years passed, Courtine still seems enamored with the group. In his introduction to its latest directory he wrote, “These women cook like a bird sings.”

More recently in the United States, the Los Angeles Women’s Culinary Alliance was formed by a group of young professional chefs. The organization was not formed in response to sexism or bias but because the founders felt that there was a real need for an organization that would provide a sense of community for women in the food profession. There are currently 150 members.

Early in this country’s history the food for those who could afford fine dining came directly from the French tradition of grande cuisine . A French chef was a status symbol for the wealthy. When Thomas Jefferson became President, he hired a French chef for the White House. Significantly, he also “brought in two black women to apprentice with the master and to learn his techniques.”

The situation in the Jefferson White House, although more elaborate, was not unlike the way the rest of the wealthy lived. The obligation of cooking was primarily a chore for the domestic servants. Barbara Wheaton, a culinary historian, writes: “Even a modest household might have hired a girl to help. In the idealized world of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Little Women,’ the faithful Hanna Mullett has served the March family since the birth of the oldest son. . . . She washes and irons, cooks, and tends the children. Much of the food charitably taken by the family to the sick and needy is prepared by her.” Besides providing the meals at home, women operated and cooked for many of the boarding houses that thrived during the last century.

For the most part, the women who were paid to be America’s cooks are historically invisible. There is one instance of a well-known Southern cook auctioning off her services. In 1850, Mammy Pleasant sold her skills for a whopping $500 a month in San Francisco, a city burning with gold fever. She is an exception, however. There are no books on the subject of early American women cooks; those who should be given credit remain nameless.

But while paid servants and boarding house cooks are lost in the anonymity of history, cookbooks provide a substantial record of women’s participation in this country’s culinary history. The list of cookbooks written by women is long. Among the most famous, one can cite: “American Cookery” (1796), by Amelia Simmons; “Mrs. Putnam’s Recipe Book” (1856); “The Quickest Guide to Breakfast, Dinner and Supper” (1890), by Aunt Gertrude, and the famous “Boston Cooking School Cook Book,” written by Fannie Farmer in 1896. Women also wrote cookbooks for church groups, clubs and auxiliaries.

During the late 1960s, a number of recent college graduates went to France to learn cooking techniques and then returned to America to work for someone else or to open their own restaurants. A new generation was ready to take over the professional kitchen. They were well-educated, young, experimental and free from the conventions of the past. Actually, there were few conventions to hold onto: There never was a guild system in America, and the feminist movement had shaken the assumptions about accepted behavior according to gender. The new restaurant could easily accommodate men and women in its kitchen. In a sense, both were pioneers.

Easily the most recognized California women chef and one of the most brilliant names to come out of that vanguard was Alice Waters. Waters says she has always loved the French way of life, that she tried to be “as French as possible.” She studied French literature at the UC Berkeley. Then she started teaching at a Montessori school and, with some friends, shared the dream of opening a small, neighborhood restaurant “like those little one-stars in France.” That small, neighborhood restaurant became Chez Panisse, which is now internationally famous. The restaurant and indeed California cuisine was based on the inventive use of local, very fresh and increasingly exotic produce, along with grilling and lightened sauces.

The Old World attitude that women can’t cook professionally is waning in America. True, one women applied for a kitchen job and was offered the post of hatcheck girl instead. True, one woman chef currently working in Los Angeles was doused with cold water thrown from a skylight by a Frenchman who didn’t like working with women. But there is a growing number of tally marks in their favor. In 1987, in New York, chef Anne Rosenzweig is orchestrating the renovation of the famous 21 Club; in Los Angeles, Lydia Shire, as executive chef, controls the culinary inspiration as well as the kitchens of the Four Seasons; in Europe, the female chef-patron of the Auberge du Pere Bise has regained a three-star rating for the restaurant from Michelin--which it seems last recognized a woman chef with its three-star accolade in the 1950s, when Mere Brazier in Lyon was honored. In London, the Sunday Times named Vivian Abady its Chef of the Year. As Joseph Baum, creator of two highly successful restaurants in New York, the Four Seasons and Windows on the World, told William Rice, the food and wine columnist of the Chicago Tribune: “What Anne (Rosenzweig) and Lydia (Shire) are doing represents a new dimension, a change in scale. Their success will mean all the barriers will be down.”

ELKA GILMORE, OF Camelions in Santa Monica, is a prodigy. At the age of 12, she entered the restaurant business as a dishwasher--she had decided to write a book on dish washing--at Cafe Camille in Austin, Tex. When the pastry chef there left to open his own place, the Swedish Hill Bakery, Gilmore followed him. She learned to make croissants and pastries in the mornings before school. By the time she was 16, she had dropped out of the University of Wisconsin to become chef of L’Etoile, the leading French restaurant in Madison. “I guess I was precocious,” she remarks.

Deciding that she needed more experience, she went to New York City but “hated it there.” So she moved to Boston, where she worked for 2 1/2 years, first at Rebecca’s and then at Romagnoli’s Table. She started as sous chef at Rebecca’s, then became chef. While there, she took classes with Madeleine Kamman. In 1980, Gilmore spent the first of two seasons working in Nantucket at the Summer House Restaurant. There she met her current partner, Marsha Sands, whom she describes as having been “desperate” for a chef at the time. “She would have hired anyone who showed up. She was lucky it was me.”

Sands, a native of Los Angeles, decided she wanted to open a restaurant here. Gilmore elected to go first to France, to study and acquire more experience. A friend of Sands’ whom Gilmore had met in Los Angeles, owned a hotel in a small town in Provence. Gilmore went to work with the male chef there and became the American chef en visite , which meant that she created a couple of items for the daily menu. In retrospect, she finds her French experience valuable: “It was an opportunity to see the quality of ingredients,” she says. “It’s real obvious why the French sauces are the way they are. The butter here just isn’t so wonderful. You don’t want to do a sauce that’s primarily emulsified butter here. I guess that’s why I got so fat in France.”

But Gilmore was lonely in Provence. She spoke little French. Being the only woman in a traditional French kitchen was incredibly isolating. “I’m not a loner type of person,” she says. “I really thrive on community. Besides, it’s hard enough to keep up your self-image (even) when people are telling you you’re great. And it takes a while to get it back. I felt guilty for feeling bad, like I wasn’t tough enough, not strong enough to cope.” Intending to stay a year, Gilmore returned to Los Angeles after six months.

She immediately began looking for a restaurant. One day she saw a “For Rent” sign on a prime Santa Monica property. The courtyard building had once been the studio of architect John Byers. A historical landmark, it couldn’t be structurally changed. Negotiations were long and difficult, but the restaurant opened in December, 1983.

Sands and Gilmore named their restaurant Camelions, the Middle English spelling of cameleons . The word was appropriate: They had envisaged a restaurant at which the menu changed every day--even though those changes require apparently endless hours of labor.

Asked to describe her food, Gilmore hesitates. “Regional? The terms California cuisine or California-French cuisine (are) meaningless. There are no catchwords to describe what I do. I simply start with the highest possible quality of ingredients, generally from the immediate area, and then create dishes based on my range of experience and exposure. I’ve worked with traditional French and Italian techniques, so what I do is fairly eclectic. Like the carpaccio of raw tuna, a kind of Italian sushi. Now that chefs are such a big deal, it’s easier to be really personal. At least the great chefs--like Wolfgang Puck--take their own intimate experience and make personal statements.

“California cuisine,” she says, “that’s $30 or more a person and the grill.”

Elka Gilmore recently won the California Seafood Cup, in an invitational competition for which 10 chefs from all over the state entered original recipes for a blind judging. Gilmore’s creation--a plate of two mousses made up of two fish each, three sauces, stuffed baby Japanese eggplants and fried risotto cakes--won her the chance to compete in the American Seafood Challenge, a national event sponsored by the American Culinary Federation, the group that sets the qualifications of the American Culinary Olympic Team. Participation in this kind of an organization is something new for Gilmore. Most members are very traditional old-school chefs. “I’m the first to admit I’m media hungry. I’m in this to promote and to support my career. The worse that could happen is that I don’t like it. You know, I’m the type who goes on a roller coaster not because I want to but because I don’t want to be 40 without having done it. I have to push myself to take risks.”

Asked if her joining such a traditional organization represents compromise, she answers: “I’ve yet to discover the answer to not having to prostitute oneself to a certain extent and still support oneself. If I did exactly what I wanted to--produce the absolute best cuisine--I’d have a restaurant that no one knew about with 15 tables and only open at dinner.”

Gilmore is the organizing force behind the Los Angeles-based Women’s Culinary Alliance (WCA), which she helped found late in 1986, feeling that there was a need for an organization that would provide a sense of community for women in the food business. She must have been at the right place at the right time. The WCA has grown from a small core group to a paid membership of more than 150 in less than six months. Monthly meetings feature seminars ranging from discussions of the effects of new immigration legislation on kitchen staffs to demonstrations of pastry making. Gilmore knows that she is working in a very competitive industry. With the other board members of the WCA, Susan Fine and Mary Sweeney, she has shaped an organization with an atmosphere to counteract the competition, an atmosphere conducive to good communication. The large number and wide range of members--chefs, executive chefs, caterers, writers, public relations professionals, wine merchants, muffin distributors--is testimony to the timeliness of her social vision, just as the tremendous critical and financial success of Camelions is evidence of her creative vision.

MIMI HEBERT RUNS a French-Canadian aub in the middle of Beverly Hills. After 12 years in Venice, Chez Helene has moved uptown. “Our lease ran out, and I decided it was time for a change,” Hebert says. With characteristic style, she hasn’t changed her prices. In the only house among elegant boutiques and expensive hotels, the new Chez Helene looks--as did the old--like a home you would like to live in, with its dark wood antiques, fireplace and chandeliers made for candles instead of electricity.

Hebert grew up in Quebec and went to a Roman Catholic school. There she learned to bake her first cake, to concoct her first soup. Her early years at home also nurtured a love for cooking. Her family’s roots extend to Normandy and Brittany, regions famous for excellent provincial cuisine, for heavy cream and butter, seafood and Calvados. Later she studied French cuisine with Prof. Henri Bernard in Montreal. Gault and Millau liked her style enough to award Chez Helene a place in their latest guide to the restaurants of Los Angeles.

“French-Canadian cuisine is heavy food, very tasty, and it’s not fancy,” Hebert says. “To the contrary, nothing is flambeed. It’s really peasant food. I use a lot of mustard and herbes de Provence . “ Hebert believes that this style of cooking has all but disappeared from Quebec, only revived for the holidays.

When she first started at Chez Helene, she was everything--chef, waitress and dishwasher. She was soon invited to become a partner, but that didn’t decrease her workload. Eventually, Hebert became the sole owner. In retrospect, she says, “My first sign that I would make it was when I saw customers coming back. For me, this is the best sign. If you have customers coming once, that’s easy. You just have to have reviews and publicity. But to keep them coming back--that’s the hard part.” Many of Hebert’s old customers have followed her from Venice to Beverly Hills.

Chez Helene is probably the only French-Canadian restaurant in the state, a fact she is proud of. “There’s a tendency now to open restaurants that are all the same,” she says. “I do the kind of cooking I like to do. I can cook nouvelle , but what I prefer most is simple, peasant cuisine.” One critic called her food “honest.”

“I feel very lucky,” Hebert says. “I love my work. Every morning I get up and I’m happy to go to work. For me it’s the only way.”

COULD IT REALLY be true that once upon a time, after a rainstorm in Paris, two young chefs shook hands under the emerging rainbow and promised that someday they would be their own bosses--and that, a few years later, they would be the chefs and owners of the very successful City Restaurant and of the Border Grill, both in Los Angeles? “Yes,” say Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger. “It’s completely true.”

Their partnership seems to have been destined from the beginning. They met at Chicago’s Le Perroquet. Feniger had studied at the Culinary Institute of America in New York (one of very few women in her class), worked in a fish market and then with a Swiss chef in Kansas City.

Milliken started at Chicago’s Washburne Trade School, then worked at the Chicago Hilton. Next she went to Maxim’s in Chicago, where the kitchen was so large that the chef called out his orders on a loud speaker.

While at Maxim’s she began her assault on the doors of Le Perroquet. “When I went to apply, I went all dressed up in my suit, and Jovan (Johann) said, ‘I don’t have any openings in the kitchen, but do you want to work as the hatcheck girl?’ ” A year later, when the head chef went on vacation, she and Feniger were running the kitchen. “And that was really a shock to Jovan, the owner,” Milliken

says.

How did it happen? When Milliken did get into the kitchen, she started at the bottom, and when she moved to pastries, Feniger came in to replace her at peeling shallots. And they followed each other around from station to station. “It was so easy,” Feniger says, “because we both wanted to learn. We didn’t have to get there till eight, but we’d arrive at six and get everything set up.” Milliken continues: “If we wanted to bone a baby lamb we’d have to go in early to allow for some time when no one else was there. We’d have an idea of how to do it, but you need to try it 20 times to get it right.” At Le Perroquet they became close friends. When Feniger moved to Ma Maison in Los Angeles, and Milliken moved to Deerfield to open the Society Cafe, they kept in touch. Their continued connection was fated. Two weeks before Milliken left to work in France, she called Feniger, only to find out that her friend would be in France at the same time.

Feniger went to the south of France and studied with Louis Outhier at L’Oasis in La Napoule. Milliken worked in Paris with Dominique Namahais in the now-famous Restaurant D’Olympe. “We talked on the phone, crying to each other about how difficult it was, being in a foreign country, the language barrier, the cultural differences,” says Milliken.

In the early 1980s, Feniger was again working at Ma Maison. Every day on her way to work she drove down Melrose Avenue. Her route took her past the City Cafe, a small restaurant whose owners operated the eyeglass business next door. One day, when Feniger went in for eyeglasses, the people behind the counter discovered, in casual conversation, that she was a chef. They asked if she had any ideas about a new salad dressing for them. A few months later, she was running the shoe-box-size kitchen. Of course, she called Milliken; promises must be

kept.

Today, at City Restaurant, they have some advice for those thinking of starting their own restaurants. “You better love it, because it’s every moment, every spare moment that you have,” Milliken says. “And you’d better have a lot of stamina, because you come up against things in opening a restaurant that you just can’t believe.” Feniger continues: “No matter how well-planned and perfectly ready we thought we were for every possible problem, there were more--more problems with government things and with city things. But we were never thrown off.” All the difficulties are worth it, they say. “The rewards are all there, equal to what you spend in emotion and anxiety and hard work--and the isolation from your personal or social life. All the sacrifices are worth it, because the rewards are there, too. We would never have done anything else.”

Copyright 1987 by Aris Books. Reprinted by permission.