One man organised every professional kitchen you have ever eaten from
Before Auguste ESCOFFIER, a restaurant kitchen was a scrum in which one cook made a whole dish from start to finish and shouted at whoever was nearest. He borrowed a structure from the army and split the work into stations: one section for sauces, one for fish, one for roasts, one for vegetables, one for pastry, with a chef running each and one running them all.
Every plate then passes through several pairs of hands and nobody duplicates anybody. That system is still in use in essentially every professional kitchen in the world, and it is the reason the job titles in a London restaurant are French. He also banned shouting, swearing and drinking on shift and insisted his cooks wear clean uniforms — which in 1890 was the radical part, not the sauces.
Julia Child worked for military intelligence first
She was too tall for the women's services, so she joined American wartime intelligence and spent the war typing, filing and then working on a genuine technical problem: underwater mines were being set off by curious sharks before they reached their targets. She was part of the team that cooked up a shark repellent to coat them with.
She did not learn to cook until after the war, taking classes in Paris in her late thirties, and did not publish *Mastering the Art of French Cooking* until she was forty-nine. The television series followed at fifty-one. It is a useful counterweight to the idea that a career has to be chosen at sixteen and begun immediately.
Cooking as an experiment rather than a tradition
Heston BLUMENTHAL had no formal training and started by treating recipes as claims to be tested. The triple-cooked chip came out of asking why a chip goes soggy: boil it until it cracks, dry it in a freezer so the surface moisture leaves, fry it once cool and once hot. The result is an engineering answer to a question cooks had been handling by tradition.
He is also the source of the bacon-and-egg ice cream and the sound of the sea served with headphones, which sound like stunts and were built on real work about how much of taste is expectation. Chefs now routinely borrow equipment and language from laboratories. It is an unusual case of the amateur outsider changing a craft precisely because he had not been told how it was done.
Chef as a job and chef as a face
Most of this grid is famous for television rather than for a kitchen, and those are two quite different jobs. Anthony BOURDAIN's *Kitchen Confidential* in 2000 did more than any of them to describe the actual one — the hours, the burns, the shouting, the drinking — and it was written by a working chef who assumed nobody outside would care.
The rest: RAMSAY, OLIVER, LAWSON, BERRY, STEIN, FLOYD, HOLLYWOOD, CARLUCCIO and OTTOLENGHI in Britain; FLAY, PUCK, LAGASSE, FIERI, GARTEN and Thomas KELLER in America; BOCUSE and the ROUX brothers, who trained a startling proportion of everyone else; and Marco Pierre WHITE, the youngest chef to hold three Michelin stars, who then gave them back. Our restaurant jobs page covers the rest of the brigade Escoffier invented.