Are You a Shoemaker?

In a workshop today a chef related a story about working at the old Le Cirque. He told us that Jacques Torres would often refer to the savory cooks as shoemakers because they were always fixing dishes at the end of the preparation process, adjusting the seasoning and compensating for any mistakes. On the other hand pastry chefs weighed and measured all of their ingredients each time they made a recipe and so the dishes were prepared properly from start to finish. It was an interesting anecdote because scales are becoming much more common in the savory side of the kitchen. As cooks the transition to weighing and measuring was not a natural one. We chafed at the tyranny of the scale before realizing how much easier it made things in the end. As Wylie once said to Alex, "How can you reproduce a dish if you don't know what went into it?" How indeed. These days the scale is never far and scribbled post it notes decorate the kitchen cabinets. We've learned to embrace precision, although heaven knows there times when we were guilty of being shoemakers without ever realizing that it was happening.