Food Bloggers versus “Real” Cooks: The Smackdown
It started innocently enough. I was reading the November issue of Gourmet magazine, when I came across a fascinating little item about cinnamon — did you know that when you go to the spice aisle in your local supermarket and buy ground cinnamon, such as McCormick’s and the like, it’s not “real” cinnamon? Yeah, right, who knew? It’s something called cassia. And apparently, cassia is nothing like the real thing. There is something called “Alba cinnamon,” which is the real thing, and comes from Sri Lanka.
Ok, so I’m reading this fascinating little piece of flotsam, and I come across a place where you can buy the actual Alba cinnamon; epicurepantry.com, it’s called. So I log on to the epicurepantry.com website, and it takes me to a site called GigaChef.com. It’s a site geared mostly for folks in the trade — the restaurant industry, that is, and chefs/cooking professionals in particular. Completely awesome, I never even knew this site existed! So it looks as if epicurepantry.com is one of the links when you hover over “The Store” tab at GigaChef.com. Well, since I’m in the restaurant industry, I sign up for a free account to the site so I can access all the stuff available only to members, and actually get to the epicurepantry.com site.
And then, as I’m looking around, seeing where I might find this exotic thing called “Alba cinnamon,” I get completely sidetracked by a post on the GigaChef blog (called “The Pass”), which takes food bloggers to task for cooking from cookbooks and blogging about it, some achieving massive success for it, while line cooks and other kitchen professionals toil under repressive, abusive circumstances, putting in long, thankless hours, and often do not get their due.
The writer, Clara Park, in her post “Cookbook Bloggers v. Line Cooks,” says this:
“Movies like ‘Julie and Julia’ and websites like carolcookskeller.blogspot.com and alineaathome.com are a huge SLAP in the face to the thousands of line cooks all over the world who work tirelessly at the best restaurants and spend their ENTIRE days and nights cooking.
Carol Blymire spent a year cooking the entire French Laundry cookbook and won awards and so much acclaim for doing so that she decided to follow up with an attempt to cook the entire Alinea cookbook. I think my favorite part of her blog site is the warning about unfriendly comments, ‘I’ve got thick skin and can take constructive criticism…but nasty, rude, grossly off-topic, attacking, baiting [comments] won’t be posted. It’s just not cool.’ What about the legions of cooks that worked at the French Laundry (some for free) who endured 14 hour days and various kinds of abuse (both physical and verbal). Legend has it that a cook came back from his honeymoon and overcooked a piece of fish and Keller screamed out ‘I hope you don’t f*ck your wife the way you cook fish!!!’ I wonder how long Blymire would last in that kitchen with all the ‘uncool’ comments flying around…
As for the Alinea cookbook, Grant Achatz is a hyper talented chef that coincidentally also worked at The French Laundry with one of my old sous chefs. I asked my chef about him and he just paused and said, ‘He’s an INTENSE guy—and I really enjoyed working with him…’ ”
[OK, WAIT FOR IT, HERE’S THE GIST OF IT]:
“I think my point here is clear: the people that blog about cooking from cookbooks would not last even a day in any quality restaurant kitchen. It’s relatively easy to cook from a book when you are on your own timeline, make a decent living wage, only have to make enough for 2-6 people and have access to all your own equipment. But what about making risotto for 300 and accidentally nicking your finger while brunoising your onions so that you have a bum finger that has tripled in size with bloody gauze and bandages while your sous chef screams in your ear that you are in the weeds and need to get your ass moving while also keeping an eye on your stocks and sauces AND keeping track of and completing a checklist of all the other crap you have to get done before service starts?”
First things first. It’s the blogosphere. We can all pretty much say what we want, everyone gets to have an opinion, and it’s all pretty much valid. And she certainly has earned credibility, speaks with authority, and knows of what she speaks. Absolutely!! I don’t deny any of that. But I beg to differ on a point or two.
The comment I posted to her blog post, with a couple of very minor edits, was this:
“Seriously? I’m confused — which bloggers are claiming they have exactly the same experience and depth of knowledge that those who cook for a living do? I’m trying to think of even one, and I can’t. I read plenty of food blogs and I can’t remember a single one making that claim. I have worked front of the house for over ten years, my [former] husband has been a line cook, then sous-chef for many years, and I write a blog that talks about food and wine, but I would never claim that my cooking attempts put me in the same league as my [former] husband or his co-workers in the kitchen. Just, like never. I see how hard they work, and I see the toll it sometimes takes. And it is often thankless work. But by your standard, Julia Child is persona non grata. Cooked great meals, wrote great cookbooks, created a whole amazing culinary life, but didn’t make her living cooking in a “professional” kitchen. Damn, I’m gonna have to rethink my admiration of her!”
Ok, I am nothing if not completely empathetic to anyone who works in any capacity in a restaurant — FOH, BOH, or anywhere in between. I’ve been doing it off and on for ten years. But what I do mind is someone denigrating those who genuinely want to know more about cooking, and apply themselves by cooking their way through a cookbook, then blogging about it, simply because this is not as challenging as working in a “real“ kitchen as a “real“ cook. No one is claiming it is. Like I said in my comment, I read plenty of food blogs, and not a single food blogger I follow has ever claimed to know as much or work as hard as those who cook for a living. Not one. So what’s the big deal here? Is it that this Carol Blymire person achieved some acclaim for her two blogs without having to toil in an actual restaurant kitchen?
She’s transparent about it though. She says on her blog alineaathome: “I am not a chef, nor am I a professionally trained cook in any way, shape, or form. I am a home cook who, with only one intro to knife skills class under her belt, cooked her way through The French Laundry Cookbook and lived to tell about it. So, I’ll do my best to explain everything as best I can, but if I screw up a little bit of technical jargon along the way, forgive me.”
Her contribution, to my mind, is that she inspires other folks to cook from these esteemed cookbooks, to make us think that we, too, can do this. And hey, that’s what these cookbooks are for, right, to actually cook from? Unless I misunderstand. Because surely The French Laundry and Alinea cookbooks aren’t meant to merely sit on your coffee table looking pretty and collecting dust. They are for home cooks to use, which is exactly what she’s doing.
OK, then, that’s enough about that, I guess. There are certainly way more important things to get worked up about! And at the end of the day, I found a great new food blog to follow: www.alineaathome.com.
Feel free to weigh in in the comments section!
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