The head day cook at a “continental” restaurant in St. Paul, Minn., makes his cheese sauce with powdered cheese and orange food coloring. If you use actual cheese, he says, “it gets too sandy.”
This sort of tidbit is sprinkled all through Gary Alan Fine’s Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work (University of California Press; 303 pages; $48 hardcover, $17.95 paperback), a sociological study of professional cooks. But Mr. Fine, a professor of sociology at the University of Georgia, is after more than just recipes. He aims to examine the everyday practices of restaurant cooks against the larger social and economic background of the restaurant industry.
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