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| A proud chef indeed (photo by Rage Krishna) |
CHEF
Noun. Early 19th century.
[French = head.]
A person (usually a man) who is (usually the chief) cook in a hotel, restaurant, etc.
I wasn't cut out for the culinary life. One of my first jobs
was as a trainee chef, but the punishing combination of constant stress, unsociable
hours and exhausting physical work meant that I quickly decided to find another
career. The word can still interest me, though, even if the career doesn't - chef is French for ‘head’, is related to
the word chief, and is used in a
number of other French phrases that have found their way into English. A chef
d’ecole, for example, is defined in the OED as ‘the initiator or leader of a school or style of music,
painting, literature’, a chef-d’oeuvre is the greatest work
of an artist or a masterpiece, and a chef-d’orchestre is the leader or
conductor of an orchestra.
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| Not the work for me (photo by Matt Four) |
Are you a chef of any
description?
Do you know of any
other cheffy expressions?
Do please serve up
your most culinary comments into the box below.
(note: I'm still in the remote Romanian mountains with limited internet access - thus no pics for this post, but I'll put them in as soon as I can)
Fawlty Towers skewered the perils of using the word chef brilliantly.
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Sybil: Well, it's a little tricky, Chef's just opened the tin.
Brilliant, Sally. I can't remember that line at all.
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