​In my second year at the Stratford Chef School, I was assigned as student executive chef for a tribute dinner honouring the great chef Fernand Point. The dinner was on the last night of classes before the Christmas holiday. On the surface, the menu appeared simple, but its execution required skill and subtlety. I was a perfectionist and hell-bent on achieving Michelin three-star results in a teaching kitchen in rural southwestern Ontario, no matter the strain. I’d fallen hard for Point while doing my research and, crazy as it seems, of all the people I needed to please on that night, I most wanted to get it right for him.
 
Point steered the course of French cuisine toward the future at his restaurant, La Pyramide, in Vienne, France. Moving it away from its often overwrought classical past and toward a sophisticated, lighter approach still recognizable today. He worshiped ingredients and thought they should shine. Flavourful reductions began to simmer alongside the flour-thickened sauces of the past. Elaborate menus were scaled back. Most of the three-star chefs who would later create Nouvelle Cuisine were apprentices in his kitchen. They were carriers of his lessons. They loved him, as did his peers.
 
I’d been in the kitchen until late the night before the dinner, working with the student assigned to pastry. The dessert for the evening was Gâteau Succès. We were busy piping rounds of almond meringue and slowly baking them to a crisp finish, whipping buttercream to a light fluff the colour of fatty cream and then flavouring it with praline. In the end, the success of our pastry prep left me feeling in control and entertaining gilded dreams of the dinner. That bliss would be short-lived as, the next day, one small detail went astray.
 
The evening’s main course was one of Points most famous creations, Poularde en Vessie, chicken cooked with aromatics in a pig’s bladder. The bladders were the final item to be struck off my prep list and were essential to reproducing the dish with historical accuracy. I’d written into the evening’s script a grand parade through the dining room of a just-cooked and fully inflated bladder set on a silver tray, just like the pictures I’d seen in historic cookbooks.
 
I’d ordered the bladders from the local European butcher well in advance, and they seemed pleased to fill my unusual request. My last stop before heading to the restaurant in the early afternoon of the dinner was to collect them. Mr. Weideman and his son Daniel presented me with a long strand of bladders, blown up like balloons, and strung together like something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. The holiday riot of their delicatessen lost its coloured-foil lustre as I instantly realized they were too small.
 
I’d had to paste a smile on my face big enough to conceal my disappointment. With bulging shopping bags in each hand, I headed out into a wet, heavy snow that clung to my boots with the weight of the failure stuck in my head. The stainless steel sky tinged the town the colour of despair. My mind was racing to find a solution to a problem that had come on like the flu.
 
The kitchen was empty when I arrived at the restaurant. I’d planned time to review my orders before the day’s activity began. By nature, I am tightly wound but on that afternoon, my nerves clanged like the sauté pans heaved into the dish pit during service. I prided myself on being fastidious and yet one of the details I’d attended to with such care had gotten away. I couldn’t think what to do about the bladders and settled on hand-wringing instead.
 
When the teaching chef arrived, he could read the distress on my face. We set the crew to work, and the chopping and hustle calmed me. The chicken would be cooked for dinner service, so we had the luxury of a few free hours. Out of the blue, the chef wondered aloud if Ziploc bags could substitute for the bladders. We had enough time and ingredients for a trial run. I put a large stockpot of water on to boil while someone ran off to the store to buy the bags.
 
We needed this solution because we didn’t know that pig’s bladders vary in size and shape. The bladders I received could accommodate a small bird like a squab or a quail but certainly not a chicken.
 
The bag containing the chicken, liquor, and aromatics stayed suspended in the barely simmering water bath. The ethereal scent of the bird when it emerged from the bag shattered my worry. The chicken was succulent with the flavours of cognac, Madeira, and black truffle. In late December of 1991, long before the advent of modernist cuisine, we had invented a primitive form of sous-vide cooking. The Ziploc intervention worked a charm.
 
We all exhaled and the rest of the night’s prep was done with ease. The first course, gratin de queues d’écrevisses, was a luxurious dish of langoustines in a shellfish reduction, rich with cream. It took Point seven years to perfect this dish. The chicken was garnished with glazed baby root vegetables from a local farmer. Saint Marcellin cheese followed, wrapped like a gift from nature in chestnut leaves, perfectly ripe and earthy.
 
My cheeks were flushed from the heat of the kitchen, and I was giddy with the success of the evening as the last dessert left the kitchen. Something important had happened to me. On that winter night, in the tender, early days of my development, I had fallen truly and deeply in love with French cooking. I spent the next decade pursuing its masters. As I passed through the dining room greeting the guests, several told me that Fernand Point was smiling down on me that night. I recognized the compliment as a generous offering to a young cook, but I also knew in my heart, having passed the test of recreating the work of a great master, it was true.
 

“Some claim that men must be central in the curriculum because they have done most of what is important or distinctive in life or in civilization.” Peggy McIntosh[1]

I taught young women and men destined for culinary careers for more than 15 years. I was passionate about food theory and was frequently assigned this curriculum. In an introductory course, two of a total 28 hours was assigned to culinary history. It’s a paltry allotment and the squeeze forced me to leap and careen through our culinary evolution.

My passion for the subject led me to study independently. I soon realized that some of what I was passing on was seriously impaired by its western orientation. Through Susan Pinkard’s, A Revolution in Taste, I came to understand that Catherine de Medici’s role in the evolution of haute cuisine was overstated. Pinkard calls it “one of the evergreen myths of culinary history.”[2] The fork did not spring from Catherine’s hand nor was it evidence of Italian superiority at the table. Rather, it points to the trading ties Italy had forged with the east. The fork came from Byzantium. Other culinary innovations, such as ices and sorbets, came from Persia. Catherine de Medici was a carrier between the east and west.

I loved seeing this truth light up in the faces of my students of Turkish and Persian descent. For me, it was a minor lesson in the benefits of inclusion. A realization began to take shape in me that our culinary culture could benefit from more truth seeking and telling.

I usually inventoried for my students the chefs who made vital contributions to our evolution — Apicius, Careme, Escoffier, Fernand Point and Paul Bocuse. I was French trained and had inherited an immense respect for a few of these figures. But I was mostly asleep, repeating by rote the things that I had been taught and deemed to be true. The exclusivity of this version of our history was slow to dawn on me.

That changed in my early 40's when I discovered chef Eugenie Brazier, a woman whose achievements eclipsed that of Fernand Point and Paul Bocuse, and whose absence from our history demonstrated our perverse cultural bias to celebrate only the accomplishments of white, European males.

How is it possible that a woman we’ve never heard of could outshine the likes of Paul Bocuse? Using the French measuring stick of Michelin authority it is on record that Eugenie Brazier was the first chef to be awarded three Michelin stars in 1933 and the first chef to hold six stars, three stars for each of her restaurants in Lyon and col de la Luère. That later achievement remained unchallenged until chef Alain Ducasse exceeded it with nine Michelin stars in 2005. Paul Bocuse has never held six Michelin stars, nor has Fernand Point. In this regard, chef Brazier’s achievement lands her in the rare company of chefs like Joel Robuchon and Thomas Keller. In his forward to the book, La Mère Brazier. The Mother of Modern French Cooking, Paul Bocuse writes that Eugenie Brazier “remains one of the pillars of global gastronomy” who “taught all of us about flavors and gave us a taste for hard work and work well done. There would have been no success for any of us without her; something we often forget these days.”[3]

But Paul Bocuse also provides a good example of just how this kind of forgetting happens. His attitude toward women in professional kitchens is no secret. We shrug off as French idiosyncrasy the fact that he refuses to employ women in his kitchen. (Ironic, given that his namesake school in Lyon benefits immensely from the tuition contributions of many female culinary students.)

In the Lyon episode of Anthony Bourdain’s CNN program, Parts Unknown, Mr. Bocuse bares his unseemly bias when speaking of his first mentor. Early in the episode, tribute is paid to Brazier but when Anthony Bourdain and Daniel Boulud are in Mr. Bocuse’s presence at his restaurant, she is dealt a fatal blow. When asked what he remembered about her Mr. Bocuse’s only comment is about her temper. Nothing about the early skills she imparted, about a cuisine that won the highest level of gastronomic approval, or of her Michelin achievements. Anthony Bourdain closes the subject by characterizing her as a “truly terrifying figure.”[4] Three esteemed male chefs feasting on the remains of an incredibly talented woman. How I wish that scene had been left on the editing room floor.

How is it that Paul Bocuse is celebrated for a cuisine that hasn’t evolved in more than forty years while nothing is said of Brazier’s cooking? Are we to believe that Bocuse never raised his voice or pushed an apprentice hard? Are we to assume that what happened in chef Brazier’s kitchen has never happened in a Michelin three star kitchen? I worked in a Michelin two-star kitchen for a French man and on most nights I could see his tonsils clear across the kitchen from the pass.

When does it stop being okay to degrade an esteemed contribution because a woman makes it?

In the compressed culinary history I delivered, Catherine de Medici was the only woman of significance clear through to the 1970s when Alice Waters and Julia Child came along. Eugenie Brazier was not there. Worse still is the fact that we don’t see our culinary history as diminished by her omission.

What is the danger in celebrating chef Brazier? If we can so easily paint such an accomplished woman out of our history who else might be missing? What of the great American chef Edna Lewis? What of the long line of Bise women, beginning with Marguerite, whose cooking has achieved Michelin acclaim at the Auberge du Père Bise? Are we afraid that given this knowledge, young women might build more ambitious professional lives for themselves?

The real lesson I was inadvertently imparting to the young women and men who sat in my classes, carrying all the enthusiasm of a brand new career, was that women did not contribute significantly to culinary history. I’m humbled by the fact that, charged with advancing the minds of a young generation, I accepted this biased view and passed it on, unquestioned. But I’m buoyed by the fact that my own curiosity and desire to teach better led me to a much richer understanding.

I want young women and men to know that this canned version of culinary history is a half-truth. It is a fictionalized account not worth learning. Brazier’s accomplishments challenge the idea that white European males have done most of what is important or distinctive in culinary culture. As Anthony Bourdain, Daniel Boulud and Paul Bocuse demonstrated, the achievement of white, European males rests mainly in their ability to muscle a particular version of events into the books. It’s well past the time for an inclusive history to be written. Let’s begin with the message that we deliver to our young.

[1] Peggy McIntosh. White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies. (Massachusetts: Wellesley College, 1988)

[2] Susan Pinkard. A Revolution in Taste. The Rise of French Cuisine. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) p. 30

[3] Drew Smith trans. La Mère Brazier. The Mother of Modern French Cooking. (New York: Rizzoli, 2014) pp. 6 — 7

[4] Lyon. Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. Season Three. Episode Three. Sunday April 27, 2014.

I know there are people who find Twitter chaotic and shallow, but I was reminded recently why I love it. Early one afternoon, during a break from work, I came upon a post by Patrick Johansson (@Butterviking) in which he contemplated an omelette from the celebrated French chef Escoffier that had a stuffing of breadcrumbs fried in butter.

I forget how I came to follow Patrick; it was likely through reading an article about his craft. Patrick and his wife Zandra live in rural Sweden where they produce butter that’s used by some of the world’s best cooks, most famously Danish chef Rene Redzepi.

I understood Patrick’s fascination with the omelette, whose scant ingredients and simplicity would shine a bright and delicious light on butter, so I was compelled to begin a conversation with him. I reached out, not on behalf of the omelette — as delicious as it sounded, but because the mere mention of Escoffier elicits in me a Pavlovian response and makes my heart glow warm.

Escoffier’s seminal work, Le Guide Culinaire, was a basic text in my first year of chef school, and he played an important part in the first tentative steps I took in a professional kitchen. Escoffier’s cookbook gave me the basic tenets of cooking and that warm glow reflects a sentimental mix of respect and admiration for a man —long gone—who was a great teacher.

Le Guide Culinaire is not a straightforward read; Escoffier wrote in a professional shorthand which I recall struggling with. Each entry consists of a number, a recipe title, a list of ingredients with measurements, and a very sparse instruction. A recipe generally has a root cooking method — sometimes more than one — and more detail is to be found in the preface to each chapter, where a lengthy descriptor breathes life into that list of ingredients.

Patrick was drawn to entry number 1502, Omelette Grand’mère (an apt name for such a humble dish.) The parsimonious instructions — plenty unnerving to a cook in first blush — are as follows:

Add to the beaten eggs a pinch of chopped parsley and whilst still hot 25 g (1 oz.) small dice of bread fried in butter. Make the omelette immediately.

The preface to Escoffier’s omelette chapter reinforces the idea that omelette-making is simple — disconcertingly so. (I do admire his flourish in drawing a piece of butter over the finished omelette to give its surface gloss.)

Omelette technique is at once basic and skilled. It will reveal flaws in a cook, which is why it’s so often used as a test of skill. To witness mastery in action watch chef Jacques Pépin’s omelette-making on YouTube. Trust me, it looks far easier than it is.

If all this seems quaint or old-fashioned, it’s important to note that I studied cooking not that long ago (at least, it seems that way to me), when chefs like Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Marco Pierre White were redefining modern French cooking and blazing a trail — now a super highway — to international celebrity chefdom.

There are two other historic chefs I carry in my culinary heart: Fernand Point and Eugénie Brazier. Colleagues from the Rhône-Alpes region, both cooked in Escoffier’s receding shadow, and each had a turn at professionally shaping a very young Paul Bocuse.

One of the first menus I oversaw as a student executive chef was a tribute to Fernand Point. It was an elegant, French dinner and included a signature dish, poularde en vessie Marius Vettard, chicken cooked in a pig’s bladder with foie gras, truffle, Madiera and brandy. Maybe it was the evening, the unbridled luxury, or my first run at overseeing a kitchen, but I fell head-over-heels for M. Point’s culinary joie de vivre. I also fell hard for French cooking that night and its attractions have never faded.

Not too long ago, I found myself on the boulevard Fernand Point in Vienne on a quiet, grey September day. I had long wanted to make this pilgrimage to the chef’s restaurant La Pyramide, to know a little more of this man and that extraordinary moment when modern French cooking was born at his stoves.

I came to know of Eugénie Brazier later, during a period when I made regular trips to Lyon. It should come as no surprise that I have a keen interest in women working in professional kitchens. Eugénie was a grande dame among the legendary Mères Lyonnaises, at one time owning two restaurants, each with three Michelin stars, and carving for herself a delicious — and rare — spot in French culinary history.

I ate twice at her restaurant, La Mère Brazier on the rue Royale. The second time, the kitchen was under the skilful command of chef Mathieu Viannay, and all was a tribute to Eugénie. I was filled with that exquisite mix of wonder, gratitude, and delight when served one of her most famous creations, vollaille de Bresse demi-deuil, tableside. I did not want the meal to end, and hold out hope that the gastronomic gods will indulge me with a return.

Is it strange and sentimental that I feel this deep and enduring connection to long-gone masters? Am I drinking too deeply from the well of romanticism? Or worse, is this the type of nostalgia that comes with age and is barely tolerable to the young?

It’s trite and utterly insufficient to say that I’m drawn to these culinary greats because their passion has stood the passage of time. So I’ll stay with the mystery, and continue to pay my respects to the masters who shaped me. What I do know with great certainty is that I can’t imagine who I would be without them. That’s as simple as omelettes and great butter.

Whose shoulders do you stand on?