“Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work”

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.

For his study, he conducted field research at four restaurants -- including, in addition to the “continental” establishment, a pricey French restaurant, a neighborhood steak house, and a hotel dining room.

The classic account of life in a restaurant kitchen can be found in George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), in which he famously describes how French cooks sometimes spit in the soup. Mr. Fine pays homage to Orwell, but reassures his readers that sanitation standards have improved since then. Still, there are a few things that diners would just as soon not know. He asked one cook what would most shock a layperson. “The stocks,” she said. How gross it looks to look in a stockpot.”