The Chefs at Work

In many ways, cooking is an imprecise art. No two pieces of meat, no two ducks or chickens, no two fish are precisely the same. Their age, their size, the weather, the room temperature, the latitude, almost anything will affect them. For this reason there is little talk of weights or timings in real cuisine. It is the tongue, the finger, the eye, the nose or the ear of the chef which tells him whether a thing is right or wrong. To a large extent it is, as Thuilier says, the spirit which counts; and to tell a chef how much butter to use is like telling a painter how much blue to put on his seascape. For if no two ducks are the same, still less are two chefs the same. Indeed, no one chef is the same on two different days. Chapel’s poularde en vessie is quite different from Pic’s. Outhier’s volaille Jacqueline used to include the wings and legs. Now he uses only the breasts. The dish has the same name, but it is quite different, because if you change one thing you naturally adapt everything else to preserve the balance, as a sailor adjusts his sails to the wind.