Search: chef's hat
Why: On When Parents Text:
Answer: La toque blanche! Like a tuque, only not Canadian. And its origins are legendary. Theories:
- Head cooks in Assyrian households were allowed to wear high cloth headdresses patterned on the crowns of their royal masters. This encouraged valuable servants to remain faithful to their masters, who lived in constant fear of being poisoned.
- The ribs or pleats in the headdress represented the ribs in the king's crown and were stitched into the cloth and stiffened with starch.
- The pleats - there are 100 of them - represent the 100 ways that a good chef should be able to cook eggs.
- Today's toque blanche is a result of the gradual evolution of head coverings worn by cooks through the centuries.
French cooks of the 18th century generally wore the casque a meche or stocking cap, the colors of which varied according to rank. Mr. Boucher, chef to the French statesman Talleyrand (1754-1838), is credited with introducing white as the standard color when he insisted for sanitary reasons that his cooks wear white caps. During this period, Spanish cooks wore berets of white wool or ticking; Germans wore pointed Napoleonic hats with a decorative tassel; the British wore starched Scotch caps and black skull caps sometimes referred to as librarians' caps. In addition to stocking caps, French pastry cooks wore a bank of linen or ticking with a central mound of the same fabric pleated on the edge. By the end of the 18th century, it was full, heavily starched and held in the middle with a circular whalebone, producing the effect of a halo. Under Napoleon III (1808-1833), the Greek bonnet ornamented with a tassel was in vogue. Bald cooks purportedly wore caps in velour or heavy cloth while persons with hair wore them in linen or netting.
It's kind of gross that surgeons wear green and blue and chefs wear white, right? Shouldn't we all be washing our clothes of stains all the time, no matter how much food or blood is on them?
Source: Wikipedia, Chef Harvey
The More You Know: There are so, so many types of hats. I really don't like any of them, especially when they're purely ornamental. I hate hats, everyone.