Following Cecil’s answer at http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_025.html, I thought the teeming millions may be interested to know that, although the actual origin of the chef’s hat is not truly known, there are several variations of the origin in circulation.
One is that in ancient Assyria, where poisoning was a common way to shorten the reign of a sovereign, chefs were very carefully chosen and held a position of great importance within the court. Due to this position they were entitled to wear a ‘crown’ of sorts (though made of cloth) and the ‘ribs’ of the crown became that puffy bit on top … the pleats on the modern chef’s hat.
Another is that a cook employed by Henry VIII was going bald and an unfortunate hair found its was into the king’s food. The chef’s problem was then solved as the kind removed the source of the problem (his head) and ordered the next chef to wear a hat, which I’m sure he did quite eagerly.
Of course, the story that Cecil heard is also one of the widely circulated origins, too.
The pleats, by the way, are supposed to indicate that any true chef can cook an egg at least a hundred ways and so there are, traditionally, 100 pleats on a chef’s hat. Most modern chef’s hats don’t actually have 100 pleats, but they used to, apparently.
The height of the hat, however, may be attributed to chef Marie-Antoine Carême, who redesigned the chef’s uniform in the 1800’s and decided that the hats should be different sizes so that chefs and cooks were distinguishable. The chefs wore tall hats, the cooks wore short ones. Carême’s own hat was supposedly 18 inches tall.
What I want to know is, why do chefs and cooks almost invariably wear pants with a fine black and white check pattern? I asked one once and he had never noticed before. :rolleyes:
As a chef, I’ve always been told that the hats have several functions:
1: Keep hair out of your face and the food w/o having to wear some nasty ass hairnet.
2: Direct heat from cooking away from your head (hence the tall hats with a hole in the top. (I have no idea if this is true or not, but it is one of those things that seems like it could be but is probably crap. Yanno?)
3: Absorb sweat and heat from your head/forehead. No one wants to drip sweat in to food and I can say, for sure, that this makes those stupid hats actually useful for me.
4: For laughs.
5: Tradition. Bleh.
As far as the checked pants… As far as I can remember the only reason other than “tradition” was that the check pattern hides stains. Since the coats are designed basically to the same purpose (they’re reversible), that doesn’t seem entirely unlikely.
On a personal note… The checks make me look fatter, I don’t like them.
Slight nitpick (but it will help if you ever do a search on the subject). It’s not a check (or checkerboard) pattern. It’s houndstooth. I always assumed it’s because they don’t look dirty when they get stuff on them.
One of my pet peeves is that nobody teaches method these days. It usually applies to people somehow accepting obvious crank science, but can also be extended to word origins or cultural origins. Like the chef’s hat. You don’t need to know the actual answer, IOW, to be able to tell when some answers are no more than fanciful stories. You just need an understanding of how cultural artifacts come into being.
Cecil’s answer is pretty skimpy all around, to be sure, but it has some basic plausibility to it. The chef’s hat, he says, derives from a previously existing use - nothing comes out of nowhere - and evolved through continual adaptation inside of a connected culture.
Look at the OP’s stories, though. If chef’s hats really started in ancient Assyria, then why don’t we find a line of hats in their descendant cultures? What explains the huge gap? What were the hats like to begin with? Are there illustrations? What other badges and symbols of office did similar favored groups wear? The lack of continuity dooms this.
The other story has a different problem. (Not to mention that it completely contradicts the Assyrian tale.) First, all stories attributed to a famous historical personage are likely to be invented. Real scholars have poured over every detail of their lives and times in ways that ordinary people cannot begin to suspect. If a real person is connected with an origin of something it would be well known to all rather than an obscure detail nobody has heard of. Second, you have the coming out of nowhere issue. It is violently implausible that no earlier king ever had a fit about hair in his food. It is violently implausible that a king as well known as Henry could have had a chef beheaded without every history telling the story. It is violently implausible that chefs all over Europe would have adopted a similar hat from such an example.
These are no different than folk etymologies. The stories don’t reflect the way the real world works. I have no idea if Cecil is right or not, but I can feel positive that the OP is wrong without having to know a thing about the history of chef’s hats. Repeating versions in circulation simply spreads nonsense; it’s like repeating versions of the origin of the “whole nine yards.” A story, no matter how good it is - in fact, especially if it’s good - is not an explanation, let alone the truth.
It’s more important that the look clean all the time then it is for them to look cleaner at the beginning of the shift.
My wife, while in culinary school, was required to show up to each class in a nice clean, ironed set of whites. Stain, wash it out, can’t, buy new clothes. I belive if a student showed up to class in dirty whites they were sent home. If they spilled something in their whites in class they had to change into another set. Cleanliness was very important. Of course this was a class to become a chef not a dishwasher or the person who scurbbed the grill, but they still wore houndstooth.
Okay, just to address a couple of small issues here:
Firstly, I did not claim to be a historian and did specify that the actual origin of the chef’s hat is unknown. I looked. I searched. I checked quite throroughly. I was ready to pack the camels and head off on an archaeological quest in search of the true origins, but my wife stopped me. As there are several versions of the origin in circulation it is pretty obvious that most, if not all, of them are not true and the result of imagination and storytelling. There are, incidentally, conflicting versions of Cecil’s story, too. It happens. The true origin simply is not known.
I did not represent these versions as the Truth, the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth. I didn’t even suggest it. In fact, I specifically said “although the actual origin of the chef’s hat is not truly known, there are several variations of the origin in circulation.”
Was that not clear enough?
I understand that I seem to have touched on your personal raw nerve, but I was not conducting a history lesson, I was passing along trivia. May I humbly suggest that you learn to spot the difference. :rolleyes:
Tough. Passing along inane trivia that can’t possibly be true is of interest to whom? This is supposed to be a board about fighting ignorance. Should we really thank you for lowering our collective IQ by a few points?
When you’re here a while longer and see more of these threads, perhaps you’ll appreciate how little value these fairy stories about origins have.
Ah, so you are proposing that unless information is scientific and empirical, then it is worthless?
I’m really not going to get into an extended discussion about the value of information, nor am I going to play silly games with you. I will, however, point out that fighting ignorance means making information available, not supressing it based on some arbitrarily assigned level of worth.
I did not represent that the information posted was an historical account of the origin of the chef’s hat, so it would be good if you would stop trying to imply that I did so.
You may also wish to consider that the amount of time that you have contributed to the board does not make you an authority of any kind at all and if your only contribution is to shoot down newer members, then it would seem that you are promoting ignorance by suppressing discussion.
You are not personally interested in this particular information. Accepted.
Please don’t presume to make that judgement for others and please keep your childish insults to yourself. My IQ is not in question and, given the standard bell curve, is probably considerably higher than yours. Please note that was not an insult. That piece of information was a fact.
That your IQ is probably higher than a randomly-selected member of the general populace, I can accept. But I would be very careful about assuming that here. I would also be very careful in reading a personal insult into anything anyone has thus far in this thread. We are not allowed to insult each other in this forum (or in any of the other fora here, except for the BBQ Pit). We are, however, allowed to attack each others’ ideas, and even encouraged to do so if the ideas are wrong. It’s a different culture than one will usually find on the Web, and it takes some getting used to. Once you do get used to it, though, I think you’ll be comfortable with it.
Yes, but the thing is that he actually did insult me.
“Should we really thank you for lowering our collective IQ by a few points?”
Sorry, but that was intended as an insult.
As for my comment; I wasn’t ‘whipping my intellect out’ as a challenge. As I see it, my comment was invited by EM’s nasty little insult. Given that my IQ is well within the top one tenth of a percent of the population, it is more than reasonable to assume that it is not below average here.
Quite apart from that, I really don’t like individuals that try to impose their values on others and become insulting when challenged.
I like the Straight Dope. I enjoy the fora. I try to contribute in some small way. I do accept that there are people that have other ideas and hope to learn from those people. I’m not going to put up with someone insulting me, though, even if they do try (rather feebly) to disguise it so that it makes it past the censors, so please don’t ask me to.
I did not say that your IQ lowered the average. I said that glurge does that. A very large distinction.
The point is simple. Either you believed the anecdotes you supplied had even the tiniest shred of truth to them or you did not.
If you did, then you needed to read every word of my post.
If you did not, then you deliberately inflicted upon us the glurge spewed by the idiot holes of imbeciles. You’ll find that such an act is not treated kindly here. Nor should it be.
While I’m asking, do you have a cite for the rest of your OP? Beyond Wikipedia, that is? Lack of cites are another lapse our culture frowns upon, and for similar good reason.
Insulting bad information is our stock in trade. Newcomers here often think that is the same thing as insulting the information provider, but that’s the same mistake that new writers in a critique session make when someone tears their stories apart. To make progress they have to learn that we care more about their words than we do about them. That may be humbling even for those of reputedly high IQ. Maybe especially those.
Enough already. We’ve moved too far beyond the chef hat question here, so I’ll close this thread. Anyone–anyone at all–wishing to comment seriously on the origin of the chef hat may open a new thread.
It is not unreasonable to mention other proposed explanations, especially since Cecil seems less than 100% sure of himself in this case. It might be better if there were evidence to go with the explantions mentioned, but there isn’t much evidence in the column either. Even if not true, the proposed explanations may still hold some interest as examples of the folklore of cooking.
It is not unreasonable to attack the proposed explanations as unlikely. However, it is unreasonable if the poster is personally insulted for mentioning them. Exapno Mapcase comes close to the line in this case. I interpret the lowering the IQ line as a dig against the post rather than the poster, so I won’t issue any warnings. I might lean the other way if a similar situation arises in the future.
