No such thing as a sane chef

The heat in the kitchen is not for the faint hearted, wrote food connoisseur Matt Preston while contemplating why chefs are a mad lot.

Stories of chefs’ foul-mouthed outbursts and white-hot rages have long intrigued me.

Having earned my keep during uni days working behind bars and waiting tables, one quickly discovered first-hand that a chef’s nature is a fine line between creative genius and psychopath.

And, oh, the temper tantrums.

One chef I worked with was so enraged by a customer sending back a perfectly good pasta, he boiled the second lot using liquid he provided from his er, own tap.

But the fury is usually reserved for the hapless staff, with horror stories of kitchen hands, more commonly known as “dish pigs’’, the lowest rank in the food chain, being forced to wash up in just an apron and boots if they dared rock up to their shift two minutes late.

Then there were the apprentices pushed into industrial-size stock pots, with the lid screwed on tight, for making the smallest of errors.

One of Melbourne’s best-regarded chefs was once so cross with an underling who didn’t return a service tray properly, he put a hot tray on his forearm, burning him so he would learn his lesson.

I’ve witnessed grown men scamper out of the kitchen, whimpering and in floods after getting a roasting from the head chef, never to be seen again.

Having a top chef as a housemate was a heady time, not to mention acquiring a nasty little late-night drinking habit. The midnight dinner parties with paella, or pandan panna cotta whipped up in the flash of a pan, were of epic proportion.

And boy were there plenty of drunken tirades.

The most furious and scandalous tales come straight from our present day food demigods. Many of whom, to again borrow words from Preston, have reached rock-star status.

Anthony Bourdain and Gordon Ramsay have made careers cooked up on their tempers. But no one whips up white-heat furore like the man dubbed the godfather of cooking.

The Godfather of Chefs, Marco Pierre White

Marco Pierre White is reputed to be the man who made Gordon Ramsay cry.

It’s Marco week on MasterChef, which like donuts has made a comeback, and is the top-rating reality show on telly.

Tales of Marco, with cleaver, ripping and smashing phones off the wall have become legend.

The Atlantic’s Donovan Cooke fondly remembers working 16-to-18 hour shifts in MPW’s kitchen — “a volatile environment’ — and says he still has the burns from when the original bad boy chef would shut the oven door on him with a gentle nudge, his arms still in it.

Nonplussed, Cooke says the kitchen’s working-class production line, where you started out scrubbing potatoes and worked your way up the chain, was all about striving for perfection. “There is simply no room for error.”

Matt Preston adds: “If you search the internet for the words ‘crazy chefs’, you’ll get more than 6.6 million hits.’’

“If you search for ‘sane chefs’ you’ll get a measly 482,000 hits by comparison.”

Preston says the nature of the kitchen has long been steeped in a form of militant hierarchy, hence the obergruppenfuhrer attitudes.

He says the culinary order and always obey philosophy evolved from the kitchen organisation of the Turkish palace in the 15th century, which was modelled on the Byzantine army. More than 1000 staff were kept in line by the Imperial Kitchen Superintendent, no doubt more ruthless with his staff than throwing the odd frying pan. The kitchen had to cater to the sultan’s every whim.

A form of this organisation later evolved into the classic kitchen ‘’brigade’’ - another army term -founded by great French chef Escoffier, with his Chef de Cuisine, the Napoleon of the kitchen.

Dandified MasterChef judge Matt Preston — who can go past those argyle pants and cravats? — says many culinary tales of crime and punishment from the old world kitchens are a thing of the past, largely due to the rise of the open kitchen, and changing attitudes.

You can hear a pin drop in Tetsuya’s kitchen, it’s so quiet and precise, while Attica’s Ben Shewry, considered Melbourne’s chef of the moment, is all about embracing and teaching staff and going on food foraging trips.

Cooke agrees and says things have changed with the open-kitchen format, where everything is carried out in front of the prying eyes of the paying customers. “It’s all in the eyes”, Cooke says, staring them out if one of his staff dares do something wrong

“And I’ve learnt to swear in 15 different languages so the customers are none the wiser,” he laughs.

Chefs are mad, creative wizards. As Alice told the Mad Hatter: “You’re entirely bonkers, But I’ll tell you a secret, all the best people are.”

Source : The Daily Telegraph    May 18th 2015