The FXBG

CHEFS REMAKE OLD FAVORITES ALL THE TIME. ONE WRITER DECIDES TO USE THEIR TECHNIQUES AND ADVICE ON ONE OF HER FAVORITE MEALS.

By Jordan Schultz

My family’s famous French toast recipe has been around for 35 years. My grandma was the one who started making the dish, the instructions for which was on the packaging for an electric skillet that she got one Christmas. She made some adjustments though. The original recipe was rather simple, but hers was dressed up with nutmeg and vanilla. My aunt still makes the dish exactly that same way. My mother however found a few ways to improve the classic family dish. She doubles the vanilla.

I’ve always enjoyed spending time in kitchens. I’ve made the famous French toast alongside my mother and Grandmother many times. But I’d never really attempted it on my own. I hoped to create a unique version, a personal stamp the way my grandmother and mother did.

Professional chefs have a way of taking ordinary dishes – shrimp and grits, fried chicken, spaghetti – and making them their own. I decided that, in an attempt to make my own French toast, I’d take their approach. Like a professional chef, I’d give the classic recipe my own personal spin. I hoped it would elevate this important culinary experience I grew up with.

While anyone can follow a recipe and make food, it takes a true artist to re-imagine a dish and make it a unique creation. According to an interview found on YouTube done with Massimo Bottura, an internationally renowned Chef with his own restaurant in Modena, a chef’s inspiration can include anything from family recipes to cultural influences to art and or literature. Bottura also advises against messing too much with grandmothers’ recipes but acknowledges that dishes do tend to evolve and change over time.

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I decided to go out and ask some local chefs how they approached adding a spin to long-time favorite menu items. The most popular dish at the Eight-Oh-Six Bistro in Fredericksburg, Virginia is the fish and chips, according to the owner Roberta Pacheco. Eight-Oh-Six Bistro, a Spanish-American restaurant downtown, says the recipe for that item is about 30 years old. She doesn’t try to mess with it; what makes it special is its authenticity. She also attributes the use of good quality fish.

A farm to fork restaurant, Bistro Bethem is also located in downtown Fredericksburg. The manager says that their most popular entrée is their free range chicken, appearing on the menu as FRC. The chickens are organic and are also cage free, as the name would suggest. But what makes it stand out is a secret mixture of herbs that it spends 24 hours in, which adds to its flavor. The side pairings are just as important, according to the manager. One of the more popular is their macaroni and cheese.

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The process of creating my own version of French toast began when I compared my grandmother’s French toast recipe with my mother’s. I decided upon using my mother’s version because I love her secret with the vanilla. One catch is that I don’t have an electric skillet in my tiny apartment, which I share with two roommates. I had to make do with the stovetop and a frying pan. The recipe also calls for nutmeg, but as I looked though my cabinets all I could find was cinnamon. I decided that would be my first change, an improvisation born from necessity.

I still wanted to take my French toast a step further though, so I did some research on Pinterest to figure out how other people had dressed up the classic French toast. I found ideas ranging from French toast breakfast sandwiches to pumpkin spice French toast to a French toast topped with spiced apples. Seeing the hundreds of ways that people had already reinvented French toast was intimidating. How would I create something that was uniquely my own?

I sat around with my roommates as I tried to brainstorm what I might do. They weren’t much help though; all they wanted to do was eat whatever I made. I thought about adding fruit to my dish. My favorite fruit, pineapple. Then my mind started racing. Would I add it to the batter? That wouldn’t work. I guess it was going on top. I thought about the times I’d gone on vacation with my family to the beach and sipped on a virgin pina colada with a chunk of pineapple on the rim. That was it. I’d make pina colada French toast.

I decided to make Sunday brunch for my two roommates and a couple of friends. I went to Giant Food and Pharmacies in Fredericksburg to get my ingredients as well as a few extra items, in case I burned something. I woke up early the morning of my get-together and set to work making my mother’s version of French toast, with my small substitution - cinnamon. After each of my friends tried the “plain” version with syrup, I then served them another that was topped with whipped cream, pineapple chunks, and sprinkled with coconut.

When I bit into the first version, I was surprised by how little adding cinnamon changed the overall flavor. It didn’t seem to matter that much how much or what kind of spice was incorporated into the batter. Then, when I tried the version with the special toppings, my eyes lit up. I hadn’t been sure how the flavors would go together, but I was shocked and pleased how well the freshness of the pineapple mixed with the savory French toast.

Here is the final product of pina colada french toast. Photo taken by Jordan Schultz

My friends deemed the experiment a success. Two of them preferred the plain version while two preferred the Pina colada. Some of them thought the pineapple was an interesting addition that made the dish more unique. I enjoyed both.

The process of re-imagining such a revered family recipe such as French toast was a daunting thought, but I was happy that I took the chance. In regards to my kitchen experiences in the future, I will most likely stick with the recipe. However I definitely am no longer afraid to get a little creative when necessary. Who knows what you can create when you put on your own chef’s hat.

ONE SERVER ASKS: "AS A FEMALE WORKER, IS IT MORE IMPORTANT TO BE LIKED OR TO BE HEARD?"

By Della Hethcox

It was a rampageous Friday evening full of late reservations and a multitude of walk-ins. Diners were ordering time-sensitive dishes, and it was a challenge delivering the food to their tables on schedule. I was stressed out and so was the rest of the staff at the Asian fusion restaurant in downtown Fredericksburg, where I am a part-time weekend hostess. Tempers erupted over slight misunderstandings. The servers were bickering.

During a typical five-hour shift, I usually felt shut down a number of times by male servers. There were times I told a coworker that a table he was covering needed more water. Or perhaps another had a VIP guest who was waiting for his food. Typically, my male colleagues stared at me blankly and brushed off my suggestions. On this particular night, I had run out of tables for hungry, impatient patrons. I asked one of the servers whose workload seemed slightly lighter to take care of a table on the patio, outside of his assigned zone in an upstairs room. Even though I knew it wasn’t the best solution, I felt it was my only option.

A few minutes later my boss found me and began what I fondly call a “mansplanation.” He told me that I shouldn’t place that server outside of his section. Of course, it wasn’t something that I would normally do, but I had my reasons. When I started to explain them, my boss said “you had better take it down a notch. It sounds like you’re challenging me.”

“No,” I said, “I’m trying to explain.”

“You don’t get to explain, you only get to say ‘okay,’” he said. As a young woman who works as a hostess (one of the lesser roles in a “fine dining” restaurant), I quickly learned that the male servers and my male boss expected me to never question them, or in this case, to even explain myself. Being refused the right to share my voice was infuriating. I was fuming for hours afterward.

In a linguistics class at the University of Mary Washington in 2013, I’d learned about what Robin Tolmach Lakoff, an American linguist, called “linguistic sexism.” I realized I was experiencing it. “[Women’s language] submerges a woman’s personal identity, by denying her the means of expressing herself strongly, on the one hand, and encouraging expressions that suggest triviality in subject matter and uncertainty about it,” Lakoff wrote in a 1975 research paper. So I set out to discover how my voice was being silenced at work and how I could use linguistic choices to make sure I was heard in the future.

* * *

I’ve held several jobs in retail, a largely female-run industry. By working at a restaurant, I had entered a boys’ club. Swedish researchers at Öbrebo University came out with a 2005 study describing how male owners try to employ “nice, gentle, respectful young women” as service employees. So male owners might not expect a female employee to disrupt that image of femininity.

In her research, Lakoff describes a “politics of nice.” Essentially, women talk different from men. According to Lakoff’s essay “Language and Woman’s Place,” that’s how we’re taught it should be from a young age, since “Women are the preservers of morality and civility; and we speak around women in an especially polite way in return, eschewing the coarseness of men’s language: no slang, no swear words…”

I thought about how conversations with my boss were often structured, usually with him sitting down or leaning over me. The male servers, cooks and my boss use imperatives almost exclusively, whereas my female compatriots will tack on a “please” or “thank-you.” When talking to my male boss, rarely am I able to complete a thought or sentence before he interrupts me. However, if I did the same, the results would be vastly different. This double standard exists not only in conversations between equals, but even more so in a boss-to-employee relationship. I realized that if I’d used more polite and ladylike language, his response would have been very different. If I’d used verbal hedging (such as “I believe” or “I think”) or so-called tag questions that imply I was asking for his approval (“Don’t you agree?”), he may not have felt like I was attacking or threatening him.

Since the 1990s, the language standard between men and women has shifted, Lakoff wrote in a 2005 study. Luckily, no longer are women and men using completely separate types of the same language. Instead, they are heading toward a more unisex language. Lakoff concludes that the state of language for women is in flux. However, she adds, in order for women to advance professionally, they still have to appear “nice,” and that means abiding by the old-fashioned linguistic standards. Having read Lokoff’s research, I came to understand that these days, we do have the power to use any type of language we choose. But among my older coworkers who hadn’t yet caught up to the times, was it worth it for me to speak up?

* * *

Lakoff contrasts the linguistic examples of Martha Stewart and Nancy Pelosi. Stewart’s highly publicized trials hinged on her non-niceness, such as her brusque personality, in her personal life as well as her career. For Lakoff, Stewart’s court trials were based on the fact that she was a woman who had disrupted the traditional idea of linguistic femininity and was consequently “not nice.” However, Pelosi was frequently described in terms of her niceness, such as how much time she spent with her grandkids and her love for chocolate.

Lakoff writes “For women, the move to non-niceness is always risky and often fatal. Women in power often experience jokes about their place in the world. For example, they might hear taunts about whom in their family has the balls. Their husbands might be known, for example, as “Mr. Margaret Thatcher,” a demeaning phrase. “This discrepancy makes it very difficult for women to rise to the top, and stay there, whether in politics or business, or even in academia,” she writes.

I decided to speak with women who grew up in a generation that expected women to hold up feminine ideals of language, women who were contemporaries of Stewart and Pelosi to see if it was true. I told my mother about my altercation with my boss. While my mother supports my efforts to stand up for myself, she cannot help but remind me that I would “catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” I maintained to her that I should not be expected to use different language from men.

As Lakoff’s research shows, my mom holds the view that men and women are different, and that women should try to be the ones to preserve civility and morality. Funnily enough, she picked up Lakoff’s research while in my room and remarked that she would be interested in reading about women’s language, since she has noticed a distinct difference in the language that her five daughters use, versus the language that she and her sisters use. She explained that her generation didn’t use words, like “crap,” which I use rather bluntly. Clearly, I’ve grown up in a different environment than my mom. My mother, I had to remember, hasn’t worked outside the home in over 30 years, so she hasn’t dealt with frustrations like the ones I had at work.

So, I decided to speak to another woman at work, my female boss. She lamented the fact that the restaurant was a boy’s club. But she also said there was nothing she could do to change that fact, at least until our male boss leaves his current position. My female boss has also struggled with linguistic sexism. She described many of the same things I have noticed or experienced during my shifts. “I am spoken to differently than my male counterpart, even if we're saying the exact same sentence,” she said. “I am seen as emotional, but loyal and caring, and he is seen as direct, precise, efficient. I have been tirelessly berated to change my wording, my delivery, my tone, to be more like my counterpart.”

But those changes haven’t come, perhaps because she still answers to our male boss and also struggles to be taken seriously in this boy’s club. And maybe they’re asking from her something they don’t truly want. Though she explained to me that she would help out if a server was ever rude to me, I’ve been reluctant to ask for her help. I’ve seen other coworkers who have, and the male employees’ good behavior doesn’t last that long. Besides, there’s also the overarching message: This is a boys’ club, and we have to learn to work within that environment.

* * *

What intrigued me even more after this altercation was how people responded to my use of language, not the fact that my male boss had told me I wasn’t allowed to explain myself and that my only role was to say “yes.” Even more surprising were the reactions from the women in my life. For me, the issue of not using those linguistic elements and not being “nice” while conversing with men gives my voice value. Employing verbal hedging or other feminine linguistic devices cheapens what I’m trying to say. If I’m stating a fact, why should I try to soften it or bury it under and “I think” or “Well, I believe…”

My self worth and the privilege of expressing myself is something I value infinitely more than a weekend job as a hostess. So, I’ve decided that I’m going to forget about what’s proper and fight linguistic sexism. My voice is worth more than $7.50 an hour.