A century separates the likes of Auguste Escoffier and Anthony Bourdain – one the legendary chef who simplified, modernized, and popularized traditional French cooking during the late 19th century; the other the former executive chef of Brasserie Les Halles and author of the swaggering culinary expose, Kitchen Confidential. In The World of Escoffier, Timothy Shaw vividly documents the conditions in which Escoffier and his contemporaries worked – dark, dangerous, poorly ventilated, subterranean kitchens, brutal and degrading surroundings that drove their inhabitants to alcoholism, contributed to physical disabilities and, in extreme cases, early death. Bourdain, in his best-selling glimpse behind the kitchen door, describes a similarly harrowing environment – where aspirin is eaten like candy, alcohol and drug abuse is rampant, and men and women who cook and support those who do are ground to dust by the intensity of their daily effort. While fire, building, and health inspection standards have done much to improve safety and overall conditions for modern kitchen staff, laboring in a professional kitchen (as executive chef or as lowly plongeur) remains, to this day, as Bourdain has written, “king hell, bone-crushing” work.

While Escoffier enjoyed influence and was widely celebrated in European culinary circles, he – like Bourdain – toiled in obscurity for years in the harsh conditions of professional kitchens. In 1903, he wrote his classic Le Grande Culinaire. His last book, Ma Cuisine, was written one year before his death in 1935. But even so, Escoffier – a gastronomic legend from our modern perspective – never achieved the notoriety (or financial remuneration) enjoyed by legions of lesser figures of the modern food scene whose culinary contributions pale in comparison. Bourdain, after working nearly 30 years in kitchens first as a dishwasher and eventually as executive chef, wrote Kitchen Confidential in 2000. Within two years, he was on American television screens as the host of A Cook’s Tour and, by 2005, had premiered his second televised series, No Reservations. Bourdain, while known for his potshots at food personalities such as Emeril Lagasse, Bobby Flay, and Rachael Ray, has benefited from a celebrity chef culture that he himself describes as a “remarkable and admittedly annoying phenomenon.”

Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson and Sharon Zukin explore how the “glorification of individual chefs” is a modern trend, a logical and necessary outgrowth of the substantial investments chefs and their underwriters make in opening new restaurants. Contemporary chefs, they write, are “no longer crafts workers or even artists … but media stars.” Emeril, Mario, and Ming – like Cher, Madonna, and Prince – are single-name super novas, not simply chefs but culinary empires. We have super-sized our chefs. We have turned cooking into televised entertainment, something to be passively enjoyed in the same manner as Monday night football or mid-morning soap operas. Would Bobby Flay, without the modern media machine, be anything more than a boy with a grill, a hardworking chef turning out respectable southwestern cuisine in New York City?

To suggest, however, that the defining difference between chefs of the late 19th and late 20th centuries is that today’s chefs are media stars is an overly simplistic reduction. In the United States alone, nearly one million outlets for eating are staffed by more than 13 million people – line cooks, assemblers, and wait staff among them – but also many chefs who don’t have a television show, aren’t represented by an agent, and never dueled with an Iron Chef. Most Americans can recite a litany of celebrity chefs fed to us by the Food Network – Mario and Morimoto, Paula Deen and Paul Prudhomme – but these are not the men and women who turn out our meals, night after night, at our nation’s restaurants. “What’s been lost in all this food-crazy, chef- and restaurant-obsessed nonsense,” Bourdain observes, “is that cooking is hard.” Shaw, Escoffier’s biographer, writes of French cooks “who shudder at the memory of apprenticeships served only forty years ago,” men who were subjected to “experiences very similar to their 19th century counterparts.” Hard work and rough treatment are realities in the lives of those who work in professional kitchens. Whether being struck by a 19th century Parisian chef, verbally berated by a fiery Gordon Ramsay on an episode of Hell’s Kitchen, or simply overrun with orders for chicken piccata at a neighborhood Ruby Tuesday’s, life behind a stove in a professional kitchen is a life replete with hardship and difficulty. While the status of the profession itself has certainly changed – and indeed the status of certain individual chefs – most men and women of the apron work in relative obscurity. The 19th century had its stars, Escoffier among them. We, however, have created superstars to feed the public’s endless appetite for food entertainment. Despite the glamorization of the lives of chefs, the work, as Bourdain has observed, is hard. Safer, cleaner, more regulated – but still “king hell, bone-crushing” work.