F
or decades, the typical restaurant kitchen in the United States op-
erated on faulty logic:
Women can’t cook.
Baking isn’t real cooking.
The conclusion? Women can bake.
The savory side, the hot line, was considered the “real thing,”
said restaurateur Nancy Silverton, the only chef to win James
Beard awards for both outstanding pastry chef and outstanding chef. Baking
meant following rigid recipes, which was women’s work — at least to the men
who did the hiring.
Butfemale bakers, exiled to the pink ghetto of the pastry kitchen, built an al-
ternate kitchen culture as different from the savory side as its inhabitants were.
It has become a land of opportunity for women, not a dead end but a first step
toward better restaurant jobs or their own bakeries, cafe-retail hybrids, food
trucks and stalls — whatever a young entrepreneur might come up with.
While it happened around the country, the spine of the story runs through
California. “It could only have happened here,” said Michael McCarty, who
opened Michael’s in Santa Monica in 1979 and gave Silverton her first pastry job.
“Anyone can reinvent themselves here; it’s fundamental to the place. And early
on, you had chefs who said, ‘Hey, I live in California. I can do whatever I want.’ ”
Baking is no longer women’s fate. “The bakers who work for me are all where
they want to be,” Silverton said. “These people like the dessert world. It’s defi-
nitely a choice.”On a recent Wednesday, the morning bakers at the Manufactory in down-
town Los Angeles, all of them women, came to work before the sun was up
to get the morning’s pastries into the oven, the first of three shifts that
ran until 8 that night. The big kitchen was an airy, quiet place, popu-
lated by cooks who spoke in low tones if they spoke at all.
They share a skill set with their predecessors — an attention
to detail, a mastery of precise techniques, a talent for the min-
ute adjustment that makes all the difference. But these
days, sous chef Anna St. John said, female bakers come
to work with “momentum” — an eye on a promotion or
a place of their own — and a dessert-without-bor-
ders approach to the future.
“The pastry kitchen used to be very polite,”
St. John said. “Now it’s just badass.”
The unlikely revolutionary who
started it all was the first pastry chef at
Berkeley’s Chez Panisse in 1971.
Lindsey Shere, now 84, started
baking when she was 9 and ne-
ver considered whether it
was less challenging than
cooking. SheLindsey Shere, bottom left, kicked things off at Chez Panisse. More bakers would follow, such as Zoe Nathan, clockwise from top left, Liz Prueitt and Nancy Silverton.
Photographs by Mariah TaugerL.A. Times, top left, bottom right; Mel MelconL.A. Times, top right, bottom leftCalifornia women have dessert-without-borders attitude
By Karen StabinerPastry
chefs are
real chefs
Come explore the birria-verse
PAGES F4-5THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 2019
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[SeePastry,F6]