I recently went for a baking course and something struck me
hard. It was three hour course at Lavonne at Indiranagar. I love Lavonne! It
has become like by de-stresser place. Every time the crazy gets going, I find a
course at Lavonne and tell DH I am going. But I will talk more about Lavonne in
another blog. This blog is more about what I realized at Lavonne.
Now Lavonne is a very classy place. The folks who work there
are dressed well according to their job description. It’s not a casual bakery
that also houses an academy. It’s not dark and dingy. It’s beautiful!
The class was with Joonie Tan! If you haven’t heard of her,
please go look up her anti-gravity cakes on Facebook. The class was relatively
short one compared to most of Lavonne’s classes and it was more about technique
than kinds of dessert. But for me anything Lavonne is fun and wonderful! So it
was that I decided to spend 9 am to 1 pm on that Friday at Lavonne learning
Sharp edge ganache
As we were going about plastering our cakes and smothering
it with yummy ganache, my ears caught on to one thing. Every so often someone
referred to our teacher as ‘Chef’. I totally loved the sound of it. I thought
it was because it was Joonie, therefore the prefix attached. But as I continued
through the class, a few ladies referred to other classes they had attended and
their teacher in those classes as Chef.
As I looked through
the glass door at the other activities happening in the corridor, Chef Joonie
mentioned that the Diploma students were having their exams. The students kept
walking into our room with their trays of items to use the refrigerator that
was in our class. There was a look of stress and yet professionalism. As I
walked out for a shot break, I peeked into one of the other room and I saw all
hard at work. They were just not baking for the bakery! They had an exam and
they were taking it as seriously as I had taken by lab exams for my PhD
qualifiers. I loved it!
As I looked around everyone wore some kind of uniform! The
Chef wore the high collared aprons, the man who stood behind the counter at the
baking shop downstairs had his own uniform, and the boys who did the washing
and cleaning up also had their own uniform. Then I started noticing that even
the Diploma students had their own uniforms and it seemed like specific hats. I
wondered whether that had something to do with where they were along their
course.
As I drove home with my 6 inch sharp edge ganache cake, I
pondered more on the place I had just left. For all practical purpose it had
the similarity to a well-run hospital. I say hospital because we still live in
a generation where we give the medical professions higher value. But leaving
Lavonne and driving home, I realized that things were changing. There was a
rise in the professions. Just like there were doctors and nurses and residents
and support staff at a hospital each identifiable by their clothing and their
strut, this baking academy had moved baking into a professional level. If I had
to equalize it a bit, the chefs were the doctors, the nurse were those that
supported them (sous chefs), the residents were the Diploma students (still
stressed about the learnings and exams).
To top it all there was the constant referral ‘Chef’. Just
like we did in the hospital. ‘Doctor’. I felt elated at this parallel and I
realized that there were several places that this was coming out.
The rise of the profession. The respect for the occupation.
Isaac refers to his football, swim and gymnastic teachers as ‘Coach’. I
remember that in someplace in the hospital where I worked, they would refer to
the Nurse with the prefix ‘Nurse’ XYZ
While our identity should not be in our profession but in
ourselves, I realized that in giving dignity to the labourer by using theirs
profession against their names, we had finally broken the norm our generation
followed.
Now the enticement toward Doctor and Advocate has been
replaced by ‘Chef’ and ‘Coach’.
