A so called 'chef'

I feel a bit of an impostor to call myself  a chef. I think that's what I put on the census, and it's what I said to the woman in the small room at the bank, but in twenty first century Britain, it's a word that's close to meaningless. The world as we know it is maintained by a largely invisible support agency known, somewhat ominously, as the 'Catering Industry'. Many of its initiates wear white jackets and stripy aprons, but the distinction between what constitutes a cook, a chef, a caterer, is largely arbitrary. What may at first seem like a meretricious question, dripping with hierarchical snobbery, a caterer's existential crisis, matters if we want to take a step back and look at the culture of cooking and eating in general.

The majority of students educated in catering colleges will go on to jobs, where the closest they will come to making a hollandaise is slicing open the carton. The jar in the dry stores may have the words 'demi-glace' on it, but will they know what the words mean, and more importantly, will the importance of those words have been drilled into them as first principles? My experience (brief as it was) of catering college, was of a cadre of experienced and seasoned professional chefs, so disillusioned with having to teach a retarded syllabus, that they no longer cared about the tradition of rigour and skill that they were watching die. Much of the greatest damage to British cooking has been wrought by those who have been professionally trained. When it comes to the output of catering colleges, supply far exceeds demand, there are just not enough good restaurants out there. In Sheffield for instance, it has usually been to the special occasion restaurants out in the boondocks that the star pupils end up, such as Fischers, Rowleighs or The Vicarage. Working your way in, the proportion of top drawer restaurants per capita decreases wildly. For most of us, professional cooking in Sheffield means working a succession of variously demanding unfulfilling jobs to satisfy the pipe dreams of inept, wannabe restauranteurs. Having finally escaped that cycle is a source of great relief.

The distinction between 'high' and 'low' cooking is now so blurred that the eating public has a far different understanding of what constitutes a restaurant, to the idea that held sway, say two decades or so ago. I am not arguing for the success of the ridiculous 'gastronomic revolution' whereby a few telly chefs turned us into a nation of food lovers overnight, but things are certainly on the up. A great deal of the credit for this must go, not to home grown talent, but to immigration. Where once good food was to be found behind the faux-Moghul woodwork of your local *insert stereotypical Indian name here*, we can now savour the cooking of regionally specific gastro-cultures of not only the sub continent, but of Persia,Thailand, and the cornucopia of brilliance that is China. The horrific street corner pastiche of the 'Sweet 'n' Sour' years are, thankfully, almost gone.

We're all cooks, and the only thing that matters is good cooking, but might there still be something to be salvaged from the old legend of the 'chef'. The notion, based in French technique and practice, without  which the modern culinary world, both professionally and culturally would not exist as we know it.  An old master who can master the fire and the flavours of his wok, such as the Sichuanese Yo Bo is as deserving of respect as Fernand Point or his spiritual acolyte Thomas Keller; they are masters of their craft. This is something I would love to be, but until then, I'm uneasy calling myself chef.