Taking the Heat is a timely sociological study of the gendered divide in professional cooking. While often coded as “women’s work” and associated with the domestic sphere, cooking as a profession has long been and remains male dominated, with a clear gap in status and pay between “cooks” and “chefs.” Like other creative careers from architecture to fashion to Hollywood, professional cooking poses many challenges that women must overcome to make names for themselves. Women often labor anonymously in the background, while men are heralded as celebrity creative geniuses. Taking the Heat demonstrates that even in creative fields, where many assume that talent is what most determines an individual’s career trajectory, institutionalized sexism “can impact occupational success” (p. 6).

In their study, Deborah A. Harris and Patti Giuffre take a multipronged approach to explain why women have lagged behind, examining the history of professional cooking, the influence of food critics and writers, and the experiences of women in the field. The authors use a qualitative approach, with thirty-three interviews with women in central Texas who had experience as professional chefs. They also analyze more than 2,200 articles in national periodicals from 2004 to 2009. The authors’ analysis of food media demonstrates that critics often perpetuate the “traditional home/haute and women/men dichotomy in professional cooking” (p. 82).

Harris and Giuffre begin with historical context to examine how cooking became professionalized and how it was gendered. The key development was the creation of French haute cuisine in the seventeenth century, when chefs for elites often came from the military, whose hierarchy and discipline still influence professional kitchens today. Yet it was the nineteenth-century that saw key turning points, as well as the influential figures of Marie-Antoine Carême and Georges-Auguste Escoffier. Carême was the first “celebrity chef” who helped create the five French “mother sauces,” wrote cookbooks, and even designed the still distinctive chef’s white jacket and toque, which all served to elevate chefs’ status as highly trained and respected professionals. Meanwhile, the nineteenth century also saw the emergence of restaurants as new public spaces where chefs could control the menus, rather than bowing to the preferences of their noble employers as in centuries past. Escoffier’s career exemplified this transformation in his work at the Savoy Hotel in London in the late nineteenth century. He applied his military background to create the hierarchy that is still present in professional kitchens. Each dish was broken down into its constituent parts, with each line cook tasked with adding a specific element to it. This process allowed for more standardized and efficient production so that a kitchen could feed hundreds of diners with reliable quality. The profession was male dominated throughout this period in the United States and Europe, with women largely excluded from culinary educational institutions and cooking competitions. Not until the 1980s, according to the authors, were more women able to gain a foothold in professional kitchens. Yet social historian Jan Whitaker has examined how women did work in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in professional kitchens in cafeterias and restaurants like tearooms that catered to women.^{Footnote 1} Whitaker notes, however, that the food and cooking of it in these establishments were gendered and that after World War II, it was extremely rare to find a woman “chef,” rather than “cook.” Certainly, more historical work on this topic is warranted.

Once women did enter professional cooking in larger numbers toward the end of the twentieth century, they faced many challenges. They struggled to fit into a male-dominated workplace, to earn respect, and especially to avoid rampant sexual harassment. Taking the Heat was written and published before the start of the #MeToo movement, and only two of the thirty-three participants had ever made a formal complaint about sexual harassment, though many had experienced it. Another key challenge for the participants was how to wield power as women in leadership positions, with the limited choices in approach laid bare in the title of Chapter 4: “Bitches, Girly Girls, or Moms.” While decisive, assertive leadership is praised in male chefs, a woman may be labeled a “bitch” for the same traits and behaviors. This criticism is, unfortunately, an old and enduring one. In 1947, Life magazine complained that too many career women at the time thought they had to “look like Rosalind Russell, talk like Walter Lippman, and act like Molotov … and on the whole … [were] very difficult to get along with.”^{Footnote 2} On the other hand, in kitchens today, being too feminine at work can be perceived as being weak. The most palatable option for many study participants was to play “mom” or “big sister” in the kitchen, roles that provided authority, though in an “intrinsically feminine” manner (p. 148). Leading with this approach meant demonstrating care for employees, mentoring them, and flattening the hierarchy in the kitchen to move away from the professional kitchen’s militaristic origins. This type of leadership led to less competition among the staff, less sexual harassment, and a more professional atmosphere. In this way, the study’s participants believed that women were having a beneficial effect on professional kitchens, rendering them “more democratic, humanistic settings” (p. 161).

Unfortunately, half of the interview participants had exited the field by the time the study was over. For most, the challenge of having a family was the main reason. While other professions are also characterized by long hours, they often include more health benefits and higher pay that allow women to better support their families and hire help. Thus, to achieve a more equitable future, the restaurant industry needs to move away from a low-wage, no-benefits model and instead show employees the same type of care and concern that successful female chefs show to their staffs.