C - Courtesy
When did it become the defining characteristic of a culinary genius that he must be a foul-mouthed yahoo with psychopathic tendencies and a hair-trigger?
PRs and newspapers dwell with lascivious indecency on stories of Marco Pierre White slicing off a cook’s whites with a knife and whipping him with wet tea towels. Jamie Oliver only shed the taint of a pier-end comedian when he was heard cursing illiterate trainees and Gordon Ramsay has built a lucrative TV career on scripted insults, brooding malevolence that would look poorly acted on Eastenders and an almost certainly fictional working-class Scottish upbringing.
The first Chef I worked for was an entirely amiable Swiss called Jacques who lived with his family over the restaurant. He used to invite me into his office to share desserts he’d invented and share his worries about his daughter becoming ‘Born Again’. After service and half-way down the second bottle he’d suggest that I went upstairs and ravished her as a general prophylactic against a deeper relationship with her Lord and Saviour. Aside from this one Lutheran aberration he was a quiet, kindly and deeply creative man who rarely raised his voice above a whisper.
Next, I worked for a little fat Frenchman called Giles who regularly wept when he had to drown the rats he caught in gluetraps. Later it was a barrel-shaped Jewish New Yorker called Howard who used to send his Mother her dinner from the kitchen every night then take a ten minute call at the height of service wherein she’d enumerate his failings.
All the cooks I’ve worked for, in fact, have been charming, polite, good people who loved food and wanted to teach. If you want a real bastard of a boss, I’ve discovered, look to public relations people, advertising men and TV presenters.
I thought, maybe, I just hadn’t worked for the real top dogs. Then I read this…
“Remembering the indignities and brutalities suffered in his youth, he forbade drinking on the job, swearing, shouting, and any vulgarity. If a cook erupted into a fit of temper, he was quietly admonished…”Here you are expected to be polite. Any other behaviour is contrary to our practice.” In the face of unpardonable breach of such decorum, he habitually pinched his left ear and announced in a soft voice, “I am going out. I can feel myself getting angry.”
Maybe simple courtesy doesn’t make good TV. From the quote, it seems Escoffier didn’t have to worry about such things.