MOTHER SAUCE

Motherhood, professional kitchens, and navigating the road ahead.

I have respect for The Greats – the “Fathers of French cuisine,” and “the kings of chefs and the chefs of kings,” who turned the dirty job of cooking into the star-studded profession that it is today. During my time at culinary school, I learned how Marie-Antoine Carême, Auguste Escoffier, Fernand Point and Paul Bocuse advanced cooking techniques, improved restaurant service and developed recipes. All of these men undoubtedly changed the way we cook.

It is Carême and Escoffier who are credited with creating The Mother Sauces – the five French sauces that are used as the base for dozens – even hundreds – of other sauces. They are the origin and root of the family tree for Western Cuisine.

Yet, while the creators are male, the soul and namesake of cooking’s foundation is female. The male-dominated industry has always shared space with women, some of who contributed significantly to the its story.  While the tensions in the kitchen surrounding gender might seem like a contemporary issue, women have been throwing elbows, fabricated chickens and wielding knives in the professional setting for a very long time.

I’ve long felt that the bias of history has skewed our perceptions, only giving us the partial story. Because of history’s well-known tendency to so often celebrate the accomplishments of white, European males, as a professional cook, I had believed that I’d entered a world created solely by men. It’s certainly not a difficult thing to believe considering the modern social construction of the professional kitchen.

In the brigade of old chauvinist chefs, Bocuse is famously known for saying that “a woman’s place is in the bed,” rather than the kitchen. In a job interview less than a decade ago, the Executive Chef once told me that “I’d have to be more a bitch if I wanted to get things done.” I was too kind. Too professional.

MotherSauce is a story and a conversation about motherhood, women, food and our community experience.  It’s messy and incomplete. It’s about history and current affairs. It’s personal and it’s political. Unlike the historically celebrated male chefs, women’s cooking careers and choices are often an intersection of public and private spheres. I hope to explore some of that personal and professional here on these pages. I hope that it is a Mothersauce --  a building block to learn, grow and maybe find something delicious on the way.

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