Apprentship Notes

Last night has sat down and read some of my apprenticeship notes which brought back a flood of memories of in the era of fine dining and classical cooking.  Reading them made me think of repetitive memory skills training that were taught in those days by the chefs in the kitchen. Daily we were questioned on different skills are recipes or cooking methods by the chef or the chef de parte who you reported to directly in the corner where we worked. I distinctly remember and I really didn’t cook for the first 16 months but learned all the basic skills such as by week off vegetables in a certain way after breakdown animal carcasses and understand which the tender parts of the animal were and what cooking methods you would apply to them. It made it much easier for me as it went on to the sauce kitchen and understood well even cut large bones into 3 inch lengths so that we could cook them evenly in a stock. Why we always had what is called in this country the mother sauces available at all times in the small sauces were made to order on the sauté station.

Frankly, this continual repetitive teaching gave me a great start to my culinary career where I was required to know basic formulas, basic ratios, and basic skills and be able to reiterate them verbally to the first-year apprentices. Looking back the teacher taught me how to teach so as I went further into my apprenticeship I brought along the first-year apprentices so that they would carry on the tradition of learning in the kitchen. Sadly today everybody has to look at either recipe a cookbook and because of that the reflex memory skills of cooks in most kitchens are very limited. I’m always to this day in the learning mode and tomorrow I shall be the lead examiner at the MCI for chefs taking their certification exams. Sometimes when I proctor exams I see the lack of thinking through basic principles of cooking which causes the dish or the skill not is exact and appropriate. Some people try to take exams as if they were in competition. A very wrong strategy and exam is a testing of one’s skills and the ability to perform at a certain certification level. There are no gold silver and bronze medals at the end of the exam except one either passes or fails and most of all has a great learning experience. So back to the apprenticeship thinking, and learning because it all starts with somebody showing another person the skill or a cooking method and by doing so they turn their learning lights on and enables them in the future career to become a teacher. So back to chef’s great saying “the world’s greatest chefs are the world’s greatest cooks “no more no less but just that simple statement reminds me with humility of the great teachers who told me that I’m in a lifestyle learning system to the day I die. Now I’m going to cook dinner

Chef