Word: kitchener
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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More and more women are bucking the old stereotype that they are not strong enough or creative enough to wear the chef's toque and lead a kitchen staff...
...chefs. Women are cooks. Or at least that was once the conventional view. No longer. Now, whether in their own restaurants or as employees, women across the U.S. have earned their toques as chefs: the leaders of kitchen staffs, not merely cooks who work at their own stations. To suggest a woman as chef even ten years ago would have prompted laughter. Women, went the old calumny, are not creative enough to be chefs. And anyway, how could they lift those hot 60-qt. stockpots? "Very carefully," says Joan Woodhull, 20, a recent graduate of the Culinary Institute of America...
...other arenas, women seeking full status in the kitchen have had to prove themselves by beating men at their own game. Most neither requested nor accepted help along the way. Mary Sue Milliken, who with her chef-partner Susan Feniger owns the Mexico-inspired Border Grill and the Oriental-eclectic City Restaurant in Los Angeles, recalls that in earlier kitchen jobs, "I insisted on hand-whisking 80 quarts of hollandaise sauce made with two cases of egg yolks...
...paid heavier dues than tiny, 5-ft.-tall Anne Rosenzweig, who during her first unpaid apprenticeship was made to lift all the stockpots alone, even though men in the kitchen helped one another. "The European chef there was miserable and kept saying that women had no strength, no stamina and no concentration," says Rosenzweig, who went on to become the controversial vice chairman at Manhattan's exclusive "21" Club, as well as chef-partner at her own New York City restaurant, Arcadia. Overprotectiveness, not abuse, was what almost undermined Leslie Revsin, a chef at the Barbizon Hotel in Manhattan...
Many women chefs have discovered exquisitely simple solutions to problems that arise because of their lack of the male's physical strength. Culinary Institute graduate Woodhull's is possibly the most obvious. "It's more stupid to do something dangerous in the kitchen than to ask for help. And asking for help doesn't mean you're not a good cook," she points out. On the other hand, advises Lynn Sheehan, a student at San Francisco's California Culinary Academy, where nearly half the 400 students are women, "if you feel you need more upper-body strength, go work...