Food: When Women Man the Stockpots

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Men are 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 in Hyde Park, N.Y., where 25% of the 1,850 students are women.

Slowly and after considerable struggle, this band of feisty and talented women, mostly in the U.S. but also in France and England, have wrested for themselves the full title of chef. To be sure, female cooks in restaurants have a long and honored history. They were the keepers of the flame who always produced traditional dishes without deviation, both in American mom-and-pop eateries and especially in France, where the cuisine de femme (woman's cooking) was celebrated by Escoffier.

But these women were accorded little status precisely because they never altered dishes. Top honors went to the male chefs, who had undergone long classical training either as apprentices or in professional schools, and who were celebrated for their creativity and inventiveness with new dishes. A case in point: La Mere Blanc in Vonnas, France, was long a famous cuisine de femme restaurant, but it earned Michelin's three-star rating only after Georges Blanc took over from his mother and began to dream up nouvelle haute cuisine.

As in 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."

No one 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. She recalls that men rushed to help her with any heavy task, even when she didn't need help. Revsin managed, however, and in 1972 became the first female "kitchen man" and then chef at the Waldorf-Astoria, an event that prompted headlines in local newspapers.