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This week, on the Lady Chef Stampede, we get baked with Amy Scherber, the woman behind Amy’s Bread. Normally I am deeply suspicious of bakers, regarding them as a mutant offshoot of pastry cooks (if you want to know about pastry cooks, I suggest reading some H.P. Lovecraft, who wrote about them in great detail). But two things made me want to write about Scherber. And now you have to keep reading to find out what they were.

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Yee-ha! It’s another installment in the Lady Chef Stampede! This week, the LCS is pouring out a little of its forty for a chef who opened a big door for women, had her own restaurant, and died about nine years ago. Her name: Leslie Revsin.

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I’m having a Lady Chef Stampede, talking about all the women in food whose shoulders we’re standing on today. I know it’s one of those things old people say right before they yell at kids to get off their lawns, but things used to be different way back when. There was a time when Lady Chefs roamed the planet, free and proud. A long, long time ago, back in an era that people called “The 90′s.”

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“Oh my god! I totally remember the 90s!”

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Welcome back to the Lady Chef Stampede. This week, I’m talking about a chef who single-handedly kept alive an entire history of food, but who has received almost no credit. There’s very little about her that I can find in English, but it’s time that everyone celebrated the Lady Chef Supreme, Li Li. But to understand what she did, you have to know about her great-grandfather, Li Shunqing.

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Over the last couple of weeks, Anthony Bourdain has taken to Twitter to question whether or not naming a woman “Best Female Chef” is an insult or not. He wonders, shouldn’t they just be called “Best Chef?” On the one hand, sure, that would be nice if we lived in a world that was totally equal, but unfortunately that’s not the world we live in. So I thought I’d put together this quick post for him to show why I think women do need to be singled out.

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Female chefs are ignored by the press. I don’t know why but, as Eric Ripert points out in Anthony Bourdain’s Twitter feed, 1/3 of his line cooks are women. I know lots of female chefs. If I had to guess, I would put the number around 30 – 40% of people in kitchens are women. But the press pays a disproportionate amount of attention to men. As a result, women get less awards:

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- In six years, 126 James Beard Awards have been given out. 22 of them have gone to women.

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- Since 2000, Food & Wine has recognized 110 of the Best New Chefs in America. Only 16 of them have been women. This year, as in previous years, 1 out of the 10 chefs they recognized was a woman.

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- When Food & Wine announced their People’s Choice Awards, letting readers vote on nominated chefs from across the country, they listed 107 chefs people could vote for. 11 of them were women. In the Great Lakes region, the Southwest, the New York Area, the Gulf Coast, and the Mid-Atlantic they couldn’t find a single woman to nominate.

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- The San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants has never had a restaurant owned by a woman in the number one spot. I’m not even sure if there have ever been more than 1 woman at a time in the top ten.

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Maybe women suck. Maybe they’re just not good enough. Or, maybe, the press gives a disproportionate amount of attention to men and so those are the chefs that overworked and deadline-oppressed nomination committees and food writers focus on.

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I think the press have created a vicious cycle where women (who by Eric Ripert’s rough estimate make up about 30% of his kitchen staff, and who make up about 90% of mine) get ignored by the press, and the more they get ignored the more they get left off nomination lists. The less awards they win the more ignored they are. And this has an impact on investors. If I had money to put into a restaurant, I’d go for a male chef because they will get more press, and more award nominations, and that drives business. A female chef simply won’t.

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Just my two cents, put here full of numbers and facts.

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Today’s Lady Chef is living the dream in a really different way. A home cook who blew up big, she wound up making enough money to support her children and grandchildren by doing that most un-chef-y thing of all: she sold out.

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Growing up the daughter of a union Teamster in Arizona, sometimes living in a tent city, Rosaura Castro was only 16 when she married Pedro Guerrero, a clothing store clerk. She wasn’t much of a cook, he didn’t have much money, but they both dreamed of bigger things. She learned to cook out of necessity and eventually became a famous home cook in the area, with her tamales singled out for particular attention.

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Rosita and Pedro at their wedding

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Always trying to figure out a way to make some extra money, her husband had noticed that on holidays and at street fairs, white people were mobbing even the grungiest Mexican food stalls. The street stalls barely made an effort to look appealing, and he wondered how much more money they could make if they a) looked clean and, b) actually served good food.  A year after his revelation, Pedro and Rosita (Rosaura’s nickname) put his idea in action, serving her tamales at a festival in Arizona, wearing clean white aprons and their best clothes. To underline the appearance of cleanliness they wrapped every single tamale in a white paper napkin. Priced at double the going rate (10 cents) they sold 600 tamales in a day.

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Despite this first flush of success, it took them more than 20 years of planning, scrimping, and saving to try it again, but that didn’t stop them from dreaming. In 1925, Pedro registered the name of their company, Rosita, and even drew the logo:

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But it wasn’t until 1945 that they found the right business partners for their dream of turning Mexican home cooking into a big business. One was Ann Petrie, who owned two restaurants in Mesa, the other was an accountant. Armed with Rosita’s recipes, they started to turn out tortillas, sauces, beans, and frozen foods, selling them to grocery stores across the region. In the late 50′s a trademark dust-up resulted in them having to change their name to Rosarita, but by then they had an audience and after conquering the Southwest, the brand went national. In 1961, Beatrice Foods was impressed by their figures and bought them out. Today, Rosarita Brand Foods is owned by ConAgra.

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An early Rosita factory

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On the one hand, we’re all conditioned to think of this kind of selling out as evil, another step down the path to hell where all food is industrial food and small businesspeople don’t stand a chance. But, in large part, selling out to a larger company is why so many small businesses are started in the first place. Cashing in the way they did allowed Rosita herself, and her daughters, and her granddaughters, to enjoy a life far better than she did. When you spend part of your childhood living in a tent city, making a better life for your children must be one of your biggest dreams. And if the only tools at your disposal are tortillas and an oven, then who can blame you for cooking your way out of that particular hole?

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Today’s member of the Lady Chef Stampede is a woman who was more of a home cook than anything else, but as a home cook she invented a national cuisine. Everyone who cooks Mexican food, from Diana Kennedy to Rick Bayless, are all unequivocal in their assessment: we owe it all to Josefina Velazquez de Leon.
 
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Born in 1899 in the state of Aguascalientes, Josefina’s family was well off until they had their land confiscated in the Mexican Revolution. One year later, her father died of a heart attack. A few years after that, Josefina’s husband of 11 months died suddenly. She never remarried and never had children. Instead, she realized one thing, “Knowing how to cook is the basis of economy.” With no professional training (everything she learned about cooking she learned from her mother) she began to write cooking columns for magazines. Her straightforward style won her fans and with “Knowing how to cook is the basis of economy” serving as its motto she opened her Academia de Cocina Velazquez de Leon sometime in the 1930′s. She started out cooking continental cuisine (with a special focus on making sugar figurines for some reason) but before long she was focused solely on Mexican food. And sugar figurines.

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Most cooking at the time concentrated on European recipes, with Mexican regional foods usually lumped into an “Indigenous” section in the back of cookbooks. But Josefina’s classes tapped into a hunger among Mexican women to learn how to cook “real” Mexican food. Soon she had to rent a second space to deal with the overflow, and shortly after that she began to go on the road, attracting up to 100 women at a time to her touring classes.

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Her stand selling her cookbooks at a book fair.

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Not content to let someone else make money off her hard work, she brought her two younger sisters on as employees, and opened her own publishing imprint (Ediciones Josefina Velazquez de Leon) in 1937 to publish her cookbooks. She also began publishing catalogues where women could order food and cookware from her, making her mail order business a one-stop shopping solution where women could buy everything they needed to make their own sugar figurines, regional Mexican food, or anything else they could imagine in the kitchen. She even had a monthly magazine, The Art of Cooking, that ran for about ten years. Eventually she would publish 140 cookbooks, and host cooking shows on the radio and on TV.

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Before the 1940′s, Mexican cooking wasn’t a unified cuisine, it was just a formless mass of many, many regional recipes, each of them a mystery to each other, separated by distance and tradition. But in the early 1940′s, Josefina began to tour Mexico to gather recipes from all the regions. Her goal was to unite Mexican cooking as one cuisine, not a bunch of regional cuisines that all happened to be next to one another. She would arrive in town and, working with local church groups, arrange to teach a few classes. Women could attend for free, and they were encouraged to bring family recipes and prepare famous local dishes. They understood that Josefina might use their contributions in her cookbooks, but they, in turn, were taught regional specialties from other parts of Mexico. The result of her first trip was Regional Dishes of the Mexican Republic (1946) which was the first cookbook to present all of Mexico’s regional cuisines between two covers. In a nod to all of us living north of the border, she published the bi-lingual Mexican Cookbook Devoted to American Homes in 1947.

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As Rick Bayless says, “She gave a national face to regional Mexican cuisine. She carried a banner that said, ‘We’re all Mexican: Veracruz Mexican, Oaxacan Mexican, Yucatecan Mexican’.” Which makes her final fate even more tragic.

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Class in session (Josefina is second from the right)

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After returning from a trip to Veracruz in 1968, Josefina fell ill and died. Her sisters tried to keep the business going, but without her presence they couldn’t do it. Less than a year later they closed the publishing house and then her school. No one’s sure why they did it, but on the school’s last day they took everything – every knife, every whisk, every plate, every table – and put it all out on the sidewalk where passing strangers could take them. By nightfall, nothing was left. Today,  the building that housed Mexico’s most important cooking school is an auto supply shop, and there’s a massage parlor around back. There is not a single trace of Josefina Velazquez de Leon.

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This week’s Lady Chef Stampede singles out a lady who is not a chef, but a cookbook writer, Mary Vereen Huguenin. I’m making an exception this week to celebrate Charleston, SC, home of Ted and Matt Lee who I’ve known for a long time and whose new book, Charleston Kitchen, just came out (also, full confession: I stole a bunch from their book for this entry).

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You think your restaurant is local? Check out this recipe, “Arise early and go on the Lake and catch about eighteen Big-Mouth Bass, Bream, or Red Breast. Have ‘Patsie’ make an outdoor fire of pine bark, then have her slice about one dozen Irish potatoes and about one dozen small onions…” Or “Drop live cooter in a pot of boiling water,” which is the first step in making Bluff Plantation Cooter Pie. Looking to prepare Mrs. Alston Pringle’s Calf’s Head Soup? “Remove brain from calf’s head,” it begins. “Wash head thoroughly and boil in four quarts of water until tender.”

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This aren’t antique recipes I dug up from some ancient cookbook, but the recipes from Charleston Receipts, first published in 1950 and still in print today, it’s the oldest continuously published Junior League cookbook and it’s the benchmark for those spiral-bound community organization cookbooks everywhere. Having printed close to a million copies of the book since it first came out, and having raised over a million dollars for 40 charities in Charleston (including the Charleston Speech and Hearing Center, Comprehensive Emergency Services, and the restoration of its Charleston Museum Library) the success of the book rests entirely at the feet of Mary Vereen Huguenin.

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Shockingly (for Charlestonians), she wasn’t born in Charleston. Mrs. Huguenin was born in Moultrie, GA to a “distinguished Hugenot family” as the paper called them. Fortunately, in 1932 she married a Charleston man and moved to Halidon Hill Plantation, an old rice plantation which she set about restoring. She joined the Junior League of Charleston, and in 1948 two of the younger members (Martha Lynch Humphreys and Margaret B. Walker) published 2000 copies of Charleston Recipes which contained about 400 recipes.

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Her house at Halidon

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Apparently it sold well, and the older members of the Junior League got interested. With Mrs. Huguenin in charge, they solicited 750 recipes from their members and other esteemed Charlestonians, then spent two months testing and adjusting them. Every recipe was either named after the contributor, or they were listed (along with their maiden name) below. Mrs. John Simonds (formerly Frances Rees) contributed Mrs. Alston Pringle’s Mock Terrapin Soup, Mrs. Laurens Patterson (Martha Laurens) chimed in with Mrs. C.C. Calhoun’s Chafing Dish Oysters, there was Sweet and Sour Pork from a dinner given for the husband of Mrs. Louis Y. Dawson, Jr. (formerly Virginia Walker) by one of the Soong Sisters herself while he was stationed in China, and so on in an endless litany of Charleston families.

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The lady herself

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There’s an archaic feel to this cookbook, larded with out-of-date bits of Gullah folklore and a painful reproduction of African-American dialect. The fact is, most of these dishes were originally designed not to be cooked by the women themselves, but by their “help.” Then there are the receipts, many of which have been forgotten today. Among all the chafing dishes, ring molds, jellies, and aspics there are hobotees, ratifias, pilaus, philpys, syllabubs, and cubillons. It’s like a museum of forgotten food terms. Surprisingly, the recipes work. I’ve made the Cheese Straws and you’d be hard pressed to find a more foolproof recipe. But more than that, as the Lee Brothers write in their new cookbook, “The many threads of English, African, Huguenot, Portuguese, German, Polish, and other ethnic influences on Charleston are palpable in its pages (even if chapter headings and headnotes register as lily white in perspective).” It’s a an outline of the history of traditional Lowcountry cooking coming at a time when so much culinary history has been forgotten, whitewashed, retold, or appropriated. It’s a living library that preserves the roots of Southern cooking.

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What on earth is a receipt anyways?

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The Junior League’s original print run was for 2,000 copies and some of their husbands worried that they’d never sell that many. No sweat. They sold out in four days. In 1951 alone they went back to print three times. Every other year, the Junior League would print about 25,000 copies and then, in the early 80′s, they started turning out 50,000 copies at a time. Overseeing it all was Mrs. Huguenin who devoted her life to being its chief advocate, protector, marketer, and tireless promoter. In doing so, she made herself the custodian of the heritage of Charleston cooking. When White Trash Cooking lifted seven recipes in 1986, she and the League sued, later settling out of court. It probably almost killed her to do something as tacky as file a lawsuit, but it was probably even worse to have 50 years of her life’s work called “white trash” on the cover of a book.

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Mrs. Huguenin’s husband died in 1988, and when Hurricane Hugo hit the following year she chose to weather the storm alone at her beloved Halidon Plantation. The next morning she woke up to find that it had leveled almost every single tree on her property. Five years later, in 1994, she died at Halidon at the age of 84. Charleston’s Post and Courier paid her the ultimate qualified compliment in its editorial page to mark her passing, “Although not born in Charleston, Mary Vereen Huguenin came to represent all that is gracious and stalwart in her adopted city.”

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You can still buy a copy of Charleston Receipts and it looks almost exactly the same as when it was first published. There’s something reassuring about this kind of continuity – a cookbook made of recipes passed down from cooks to their employers, from mothers to their daughters, from grandmothers to their grandchildren. The copy I own? It’s part of that chain, given to me by my mother-in-law who was given this copy back in 1980.

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I’m holding a Lady Chef Stampede, posting about the dozens of women who’ve changed the history of food, now and in the past! Whether they’re chefs, restauranteurs, or writers, these are the women on whose shoulders we’re all standing. Today’s Lady Chef is that most elusive of all creatures: female sushi chefs.

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Masami Teraoka’s “Uni Woman and Sushi Chef.”

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As rare as unicorns, female sushi chefs are victims of archaic forms of sexism that make me feel almost embarrassed to repeat them. I don’t want to make Japan sound like some kind of Medieval dungeon, but there’s no way to talk about the obstacles female sushi chefs face over there without making Japan’s male sushi chefs sound like Movie-of-the-Week villains. Women who want to be sushi chefs in Japan are told their hands are too warm to make sushi (a theory that has been totally debunked by The Lancet back in 1998, men actually have the warmer hands), that all the perfume and make-up they wear will contaminate the fish, or that having their period near super-sensitive, delicate fish will cause them to taste bad.

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On the other end of the spectrum, there was a huge burst of publicity back in 2010 for an all-female sushi restaurant in Tokyo’s Akihabara district called Nadeshico Sushi. But rather than striking a bold blow for female chefs, it swung in the opposite direction. Nadeschico is run by a guy named Kazuya Nishikiori who will only hire women between the ages of 18 and 25. “If someone wanted to work here and was 30,” he said to the Wall Street Journal. “I’d put her in the back.” Most customers thought the sushi wasn’t very good, but that the experience of interacting with a lady sushi chef was so novel that they kept coming back.

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….seriously?

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Japan had a lot of labor laws written post World War II with the aim of protecting women, but they wound up having the opposite effect. Until 1999, women weren’t allowed to work between 10pm and 5am which ruled out restaurant jobs. There’s also a special one-to-one relationship between the best sushi chefs and their customers, which makes even women eating high-end sushi without a man such a noteworthy event that it sparked a 2004 memoir, Solo Woman Sushi, about the author’s experience as a woman dining man-less at expensive sushi restaurants.

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Only able to legally work past 10pm for the past 14 years, add in the fact that it’s generally accepted to take 10 years of training to make a sushi chef and you can see why across Japan’s 30,000 restaurants there are, by the best reckoning, only about 200 female sushi chefs today. Even though many Japanese chefs remember their mothers and aunts making sushi at home when they were growing up, you can still find dozens of out-of-date quotes about women making sushi without too much trouble: “If I saw a woman making sushi, I would be shocked,” a retired naval officer said in an NPR interview in 2001. “I don’t know if I would want to eat there. The ingredients and the procedures may be the same, but I couldn’t help but feel that the sushi has no flavor, no edge if it were made by a woman.”

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Although you can play a woman in this sushi chef game.

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It’s been easier overseas. Dozens of women make sushi across the US and Canada and many fell into it by accident. Yuki Sanda, a sushi chef at Boulder, CO’s Sushi Zanmai, was a professional chef for years when she arrived in Boulder in 1995, but even she was shocked when her boss (a Japanese guy) told her to be the sushi chef. “It’s very rare in Japan,” she said in a 2012 interview. “I haven’t seen any. I heard [of ] a few people, but I haven’t seen.”

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Etsuko Needham, of Vancouver’s Bistro Sakana, was a 20-year veteran of the Kobe restaurant scene but she hadn’t touched sushi until 2004 when she moved to Vancouver. (Note: this informal ban doesn’t extend to sashimi, just to sushi) Once she opened her own restaurant she hired a series of male sushi chefs to teach her the basics, but even they had doubts (one of them took her husband aside and tried to tell him sushi was too difficult for his wife). Now she’s training female sushi chefs with the goal of having an all-female sushi restaurant, probably one whose motto isn’t “freshness and cuteness” like it is at Nadeshico Sushi. Meanwhile, in Toronto, as of 2010 there were literally three female sushi chefs (one of whom cooked for the Japanese consul general).

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Mika Tokita and Etsuko Needham.

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Back in 2001, the New York Times did a piece on female sushi chefs, and their numbers were sobering: six female sushi chefs in New York, nine in Los Angeles. The article is worth reading to get an idea of just how grueling and how much self-sacrifice is required from these women who buck tradition. Most of them can’t just apprentice to a sushi chef, but instead have to spend years proving their worth before they’ll even get the time of day from a master chef. One, Egi Sugimoto (who was the sole female sushi chef at Sushi Rose in Manhattan), had to clean the restaurant and buy her own fish to practice on for months before being taken on as an apprentice. It was two years before she was allowed to serve a piece of sushi to a customer.

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Angela Kim of Toro Sushi.

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The lot of female sushi chefs seems to be changing not thanks to the work of one woman, but due to dozens of them who refuse to give up. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a single female sushi chef who was considered the groundbreaking rulebreaker, and that may be because in sushi things seem to change slowly and with as little fanfare as possible. And, they seem to change more overseas than they do in Japan. It might just be the prejudices of the people writing the articles, but away from their home country, male sushi chefs seem to relax and acknowledge how silly their restrictive traditions are. In 2000, when the owner of Sushi Rose asked his executive chef, Etsuji Oishi if a woman could work on his staff, he recalls, “When I was first asked if Eri could work here, I said nothing…Men and women — there’s no difference. My mother was the chef of a restaurant. I knew women could cook.”

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I’m holding a Lady Chef Stampede! For the past few months, and into the future, I’m posting about the dozens of women who changed the history of food, now and in the past. Whether they’re chefs, restauranteurs, or writers, these are the women on whose shoulders we’re all standing. Today’s Lady Chef: Dione Lucas, queen of the omelettes and the first female cooking celebrity on TV.

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