Mis en Place
"Mis en place" is a French phrase meaning to have all your ingredients (including tools and equipment) prepared, measured and laid out before you start assembling and cooking. In the realm of TV chefs with which I am occasionally obsessed as a viewer, it's essentially what happens before the camera starts rolling, and what makes everything look "so easy, you can do this at home!" It's a subtle subterfuge, as is so much else on the tube, that lulls the viewer into thinking what's done on TV can then be effortlessly replicated at home – along with the equally subtle message that any home cook who can't imitate that ease has something seriously wrong with them. The worst offenders are shows like the Martha Stewart-produced Everyday Food, which cheats even more by positing that their cooks are "Real People" in "Real Situations." As Jean Hagan's Lina Lamont might put it, "Well, of course they're real people – ain't everybody?" Only these folks are so "real" that they're actually referred to as cast members and they all happen to be professional chefs!
And believe me, the situations are anything but genuine as well. Look at those kitchens! It took me four apartments before I lived in a place with a kitchen big enough to allow me a pot rack, and that's only because I'm lucky enough to have a husband who knew what to look for at Ikea and how to properly mount it against the wall. I'd never even heard of a standalone oven-sized broiler until I saw it on TV in shows like Food Network's Good Eats, where Alton Brown (incidentally one of my favorite TV-foodie personalities) persists in assuming every viewer has one. My broiler has always been that little section tacked onto the bottom of the stove, with the pull-out shelf just big enough to slide in one foil pan a few inches under the heat source, and if you leave stuff in there more than a few minutes your smoke alarm will go off and the aluminium will start to smoke so it's hardly worth bobbing and bending to try to cook something in it. None of this space-the-size-of-an-entire-stove with adjustable shelves so you can choose how far away from the flame to put the food. I'm sure the fact that Good Eats is sponsored by a cooking-range company has nothing to do with this occasional myopic assumption. (To Brown's credit, he does often grasp concepts like reasonably priced gadgets, and I wouldn't mind owning stuff like this plunger set he sells if I had more use for it.)
It's the great divide playing itself out again, isn't it? The airy, well-lit kitchen more spacious than most people's living rooms, with the enormous pot-rack in the middle just like in the commercials between the cooking steps which rarely involve cutting or measuring the entire quantity of ingredients and almost never mention cleanup. That's all left to the behind-the-scenes sous chefs and other show staff, as invisible as the camera people and producers. Everything must appear seamless to foster and further the illusion of cooking as something Anyone Can Do In A Flash.
Only real people don't have flashes. Many of us who aren't telegenic (and how would a camera fit in our kitchen anyway?) don't sit down and plan our meals a week in advance. We come home around 7 PM after a full day's work plus an exhausting two-way commute and wonder if we remembered to take something out of the freezer two days ago to thaw in time for tonight's dinner. If we did, we quickly skim through our most-used-recipe collections to see what we can put together that won't completely wipe us out. If we don't own our house or don't live in a house we probably don't have grills, so we wonder why we keep any recipe involving grilling or broiling in the first place. Anything that needs marinating is out except on weekends, because we don't feel like eating dinner an hour before bedtime. For me, anything involving a food processor, blender or other electronic device is also out on weeknights; I have a few of those gadgets but they're in storage under the microwave cabinet because I don't have the open surface space to keep them within easy reach. We then count the ingredients involved in our chosen recipe and whether we have all of them (many of us don't keep all the "staples" in our fridge or larder all the time) and how many measuring spoons and cups and gadgets we'll need to get the whole thing together, because the recipes rarely factor in this type of prep time – as I call it, "the five things I need to do before I can get to the one thing I need to do." And we resolve we're only doing Actual Cooking for one thing, usually the entree, as the store-bought frozen veg can just as well go in the microwave. (Maybe if we're really ambitious we'll cook some couscous to go with the main course, as that means boiling water and a little margarine or oil, dumping in the couscous, and taking it off the heat so we can concentrate on what we're Actually Cooking.)
So we get out the cutting boards and chopper and cups and spoons and utensils and pots and pans, stand for awhile peeling and chopping and measuring out and washing the meat, by which time we've tired ourselves out so much we need to sit down again for a few more minutes, so that when we come back it's like the Magical Sous Chef Fairy has been in our kitchen and gotten everything ready and now we can Begin To Cook. (We won't even discuss the Washing-Up Fairy here, but she's been known to waylay many a weekend morning for me.)
The way I look at it, mis en place is half the battle, and it's the difficult half. If I had someone come in every day who acknowledged my kitchen's limitations and did a mis en place for me so all I had to do was stir things together and heat them, I could indeed cook like the pros. Anybody could. Instead I cook like a real person with limited space and even more limited energy. I'm still waiting for the cooking show that caters to that reality.
"Mis en place" is a French phrase meaning to have all your ingredients (including tools and equipment) prepared, measured and laid out before you start assembling and cooking. In the realm of TV chefs with which I am occasionally obsessed as a viewer, it's essentially what happens before the camera starts rolling, and what makes everything look "so easy, you can do this at home!" It's a subtle subterfuge, as is so much else on the tube, that lulls the viewer into thinking what's done on TV can then be effortlessly replicated at home – along with the equally subtle message that any home cook who can't imitate that ease has something seriously wrong with them. The worst offenders are shows like the Martha Stewart-produced Everyday Food, which cheats even more by positing that their cooks are "Real People" in "Real Situations." As Jean Hagan's Lina Lamont might put it, "Well, of course they're real people – ain't everybody?" Only these folks are so "real" that they're actually referred to as cast members and they all happen to be professional chefs!
And believe me, the situations are anything but genuine as well. Look at those kitchens! It took me four apartments before I lived in a place with a kitchen big enough to allow me a pot rack, and that's only because I'm lucky enough to have a husband who knew what to look for at Ikea and how to properly mount it against the wall. I'd never even heard of a standalone oven-sized broiler until I saw it on TV in shows like Food Network's Good Eats, where Alton Brown (incidentally one of my favorite TV-foodie personalities) persists in assuming every viewer has one. My broiler has always been that little section tacked onto the bottom of the stove, with the pull-out shelf just big enough to slide in one foil pan a few inches under the heat source, and if you leave stuff in there more than a few minutes your smoke alarm will go off and the aluminium will start to smoke so it's hardly worth bobbing and bending to try to cook something in it. None of this space-the-size-of-an-entire-stove with adjustable shelves so you can choose how far away from the flame to put the food. I'm sure the fact that Good Eats is sponsored by a cooking-range company has nothing to do with this occasional myopic assumption. (To Brown's credit, he does often grasp concepts like reasonably priced gadgets, and I wouldn't mind owning stuff like this plunger set he sells if I had more use for it.)
It's the great divide playing itself out again, isn't it? The airy, well-lit kitchen more spacious than most people's living rooms, with the enormous pot-rack in the middle just like in the commercials between the cooking steps which rarely involve cutting or measuring the entire quantity of ingredients and almost never mention cleanup. That's all left to the behind-the-scenes sous chefs and other show staff, as invisible as the camera people and producers. Everything must appear seamless to foster and further the illusion of cooking as something Anyone Can Do In A Flash.
Only real people don't have flashes. Many of us who aren't telegenic (and how would a camera fit in our kitchen anyway?) don't sit down and plan our meals a week in advance. We come home around 7 PM after a full day's work plus an exhausting two-way commute and wonder if we remembered to take something out of the freezer two days ago to thaw in time for tonight's dinner. If we did, we quickly skim through our most-used-recipe collections to see what we can put together that won't completely wipe us out. If we don't own our house or don't live in a house we probably don't have grills, so we wonder why we keep any recipe involving grilling or broiling in the first place. Anything that needs marinating is out except on weekends, because we don't feel like eating dinner an hour before bedtime. For me, anything involving a food processor, blender or other electronic device is also out on weeknights; I have a few of those gadgets but they're in storage under the microwave cabinet because I don't have the open surface space to keep them within easy reach. We then count the ingredients involved in our chosen recipe and whether we have all of them (many of us don't keep all the "staples" in our fridge or larder all the time) and how many measuring spoons and cups and gadgets we'll need to get the whole thing together, because the recipes rarely factor in this type of prep time – as I call it, "the five things I need to do before I can get to the one thing I need to do." And we resolve we're only doing Actual Cooking for one thing, usually the entree, as the store-bought frozen veg can just as well go in the microwave. (Maybe if we're really ambitious we'll cook some couscous to go with the main course, as that means boiling water and a little margarine or oil, dumping in the couscous, and taking it off the heat so we can concentrate on what we're Actually Cooking.)
So we get out the cutting boards and chopper and cups and spoons and utensils and pots and pans, stand for awhile peeling and chopping and measuring out and washing the meat, by which time we've tired ourselves out so much we need to sit down again for a few more minutes, so that when we come back it's like the Magical Sous Chef Fairy has been in our kitchen and gotten everything ready and now we can Begin To Cook. (We won't even discuss the Washing-Up Fairy here, but she's been known to waylay many a weekend morning for me.)
The way I look at it, mis en place is half the battle, and it's the difficult half. If I had someone come in every day who acknowledged my kitchen's limitations and did a mis en place for me so all I had to do was stir things together and heat them, I could indeed cook like the pros. Anybody could. Instead I cook like a real person with limited space and even more limited energy. I'm still waiting for the cooking show that caters to that reality.
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