Ezgulian is a well-respected figure in professional culinary circles who judges exclusive culinary competitions such as the Bocuse d’Or and champions women’s contributions to French cuisine. But she also maintains what we think of as housewife sensibilities, and has become one of France’s key figures in the “zero waste” cooking movement. “I believe in showing people how they can reinvent their leftovers or use ingredients they usually throw away,” she tells me as she moves around the kitchen.

And that’s when it hits me: What draws me to Sonia Ezgulian is how perfectly she reflects and subverts the tensions that exist in France between domestic and professional cooking. Women have always worked in French professional kitchens. But we hear about them and see them less often than men—in part, my research suggests, because women’s traditional ties to unpaid care work have sidelined them. Ezgulian manages to celebrate domestic cookery while creating a strong connection to professional culinary arts. She telegraphs the notion that women’s culinary accomplishments are equally important in restaurants and at home.

Ezgulian’s biography straddled the two spheres from the get-go. She never went to culinary school, deciding to become a professional cook after working for many years as a successful journalist in Paris. She and her husband Emmanuel moved to Lyon, Ezgulian’s hometown, and opened a small restaurant called Oxalis in 1999. The restaurant showcased Ezgulian’s creativity and playfulness in the kitchen, bringing new life to Lyonnais cuisine, which had a reputation for being stodgy and bourgeois. The local papers quickly touted Ezgulian as a new mère lyonnaise, a particular sort of domestic-turned-professional female cook.

Lyon, the third-largest city in France, has a long history of women cooking professionally. At the turn of the 20th century, many women worked as cooks in bourgeois homes there, but as the economy in France entered a downturn, many of them lost their jobs as domestic laborers and went to work in restaurants where they perfected dishes such as poularde en demi-deuil (truffled braised chicken) and fonds d’artichauts au foie gras (artichoke hearts with foie gras). These were simple, hearty dishes that exalted prestigious ingredients, the hallmarks of bourgeois cuisine. The women’s reputation for excellent cooking grew, and gastronomes such as Curnonsky, an early restaurant critic, began to call these women les mères lyonnaises (“Mothers of Lyon”). These cooks did not recognize each other as a unified group, but the growing genre of gastronomic literature about their food created a movement of sorts.

Sonia was befuddled by the mère label, because she did not see her cooking as part of the tradition of stodgy cuisine that had come to define Lyon. She was a woman in a restaurant kitchen. Was that all it took to be a mère?

The quintessential mère lyonnaise was Eugénie Brazier. Born in the countryside near Lyon, Brazier worked in a bourgeois home before apprenticing under the renowned mère Fillioux. Fillioux was as famous for her terse attitude toward her customers and staff as she was for her tableside service of whole chickens, which would fall apart at the tiniest cut from her dainty knife. Brazier went on to run two three-starred Michelin restaurants of her own in the 1930s, an accomplishment no other woman has yet replicated.

Eugénie Brazier died in 1977, and while she is an important cultural figure in Lyon, her memory largely remains relegated to the dusty annals of local gastronomic history. The rest of France and the world associates Lyon’s food with the recently deceased, homegrown, super-star chef Paul Bocuse, whose image graces the city’s murals.

French society charges women with being the central caregivers at home. Women who choose to pursue careers instead—as well as those who shoulder the double weight of professional careers and motherhood—face a robust glass ceiling in many professions. The culinary arts are no exception: The professionalization of cooking in France has largely focused on keeping women out of kitchens. The figure of the chef in popular culture is almost always represented as male. Starting in culinary school, women encounter structural barriers, gender stereotypes, and sometimes even sexual harassment. Many women report having their culinary instructors pass them over for top apprenticeship positions in favor of their male peers. Others are channeled into areas such as pastry, often referred to as the pink ghetto of the kitchen, which are seen as more creative and feminine. These problems are not uniquely French. But given the centrality of the culinary arts in French culture, the problem of gender inequality in the kitchen should be of national concern.

Ezgulian recalled her own feelings of exclusion during her apprenticeship at Michelin-starred Les Terrasses de Lyon at the Villa Florentine hotel. Everyone in the kitchen referred to her as “madame,” a sign of respect for her age but a dismissal of her place in the kitchen. “It’s definitely a boys club, and I knew I did not fit,” she said. At Les Terrasses, Ezgulian learned the ins-and-outs of haute cuisine. She also decided there that she would do things differently when she opened her own restaurant—the patriarchal hierarchies of the existing system were counterproductive to the creative work of cooking.

But discrimination continued even when she was in charge. When trying to hire male cooks, “there was one man who I interviewed and he kept asking me when he would get to meet the chef. I guess I did not fit his idea of a chef,” she said. Another male cook “quit one day right after the dinner service. He threw his apron on the floor and exclaimed, ‘I can’t work like this. You just don’t yell enough!’” Ultimately, Ezgulian decided she wanted to work alone. She simplified dishes so they required less labor and did away with heavy kitchen equipment like unwieldy oversized stockpots.

In her writing and media appearances today, Ezgulian gives women their due. While male chefs often nod to their mothers and grandmothers as the progenitors of their cuisine, they rarely give women’s domestic cookery credit for being foundational. Further erasures abound, particularly at the upper echelons. Currently, only one woman in France, Anne-Sophie Pic, heads a kitchen with three Michelin stars, and just two women, Andrée Rosier and Virginie Baselot, have ever been awarded the top accolade of Meilleur Ouvrier de France. Although more women than men enter culinary school, they are underrepresented in all areas of the culinary arts.

Ezgulian is working alongside Eugénie Brazier’s granddaughter, Jacotte Brazier, to promote women’s contributions to French cuisine. In 2007, Brazier started the nonprofit organization Les Amis d’Eugénie Brazier, which grants scholarships to young women attending culinary school; Ezgulian also worked with Brazier to create a series of literary prizes to promote women’s food writing. Every year Les Amis holds a ceremony at the lavish Lyon town hall to honor annual scholarship and literary winners. For many of the young scholarship winners, it is the first time they have been validated publicly. Most importantly, Les Amis d’Eugénie Brazier creates a much-needed support network for women in the culinary arts—the connections and opportunities to learn from people at the top of their field that can make or break a career.

Equality is possible in France’s kitchens. But first the nation must recognize that the professional and domestic settings are complementary. Sonia Ezgulian is not an outlier—but the exclusion she faced belongs in the past.

The post The Female Cooks Who Shaped French Cuisine appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One such story involves a cultured Parisian family that found its way to Kentucky.

The story starts in 1790. Though France was not a leading source of immigration to the young United States, that year some 500 French citizens managed to found the town of Gallipolis in southeast Ohio, then the Northwest Territory.

These settlers were not aristocrats fleeing for their lives but merchants and craftsmen whose clientele had emigrated at the outbreak of the French Revolution. They were surprised by what they found: America was not the Eden that smooth-talking salesmen had told them about, nor did they hold the land titles they thought they had paid for.

Young Waldemar Mantelle was a late arrival among these Ohio Frenchmen. He had no claim to land but found work as a scout, hiking through the woods every day to look for signs of Indian presence.

Mentelle left France because of the Revolution, but his was a reluctant departure. In late 1789, before the Terror, his father worried his son might be conscripted and so bought his passage to America. He also thought that Waldemar, who showed no interest in pursuing a profession, had no prospects for making a living in France. In the New World, land was cheap and abundant and Waldemar could take up farming, his father decided.

Mentelle spent a year in New York and Philadelphia looking for work before hitching a ride with General St. Clair’s flatboats carrying troops down the Ohio en route to the Battle of the Wabash. The battle turned out to be the largest victory ever won by American Indians, and the worst defeat in U.S. military history.

Fortunately for Mentelle, he disembarked at Gallipolis. There, he pined for the woman he left behind in France: Charlotte LeClerc, the daughter of an army doctor who raised her to withstand any hardship, making her swim the Seine before breakfast, locking her in a closet with the corpse of an acquaintance, and teaching her to ride and shoot.

But LeClerc set sail to find Mantelle by herself. In April 1794, she arrived in Gallipolis, armed with the blunderbuss her father had given her. She may have needed it to ward off capture by the sans-culottes, for by then leaving France was a crime punishable by death.

Mentelle and LeClerc married immediately and began producing a family of eight children. In addition, they produced many vivid letters, which have only recently come to light.

Gallipolis was not to Charlotte’s taste, and they left for Kentucky as soon as Waldemar could complete his scouting assignment. Years later, however, they looked back on those frontier days as the best time of their lives, she because of deep friendships formed, he because of the free living “with only the bare necessities, no ambition and no concern for the future.”

In Kentucky, they settled in the village of Washington, where they raised and sold produce for a couple of years, before relocating south to Lexington in 1798. Lexington was a larger and more cultured place where they hoped to make a living as teachers of French and dancing. When that did not succeed, they returned to farming on rented land just outside the city.

A historic marker showing Mentelle Park. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Runyon.

As the years went by, Waldemar plied many trades, including house painter, horse veterinarian, potter, silhouette artist, land agent for Pierre Samuel du Pont, and commission merchant, selling such “curious, elegant, and useful articles” as linen, china, brandy, whiskey, figs, raisins, almonds, oysters, mackerel, patent medicines, snuff, jewelry, mirrors, fiddles, and toys.

In 1817 their friend and neighbor Henry Clay found him a job at the local branch of the Second United States Bank, relieving him of the ups and downs of commercial life.

In 1820 Charlotte began the teaching career for which she would be most remembered. She founded Mentelle’s for Young Ladies, an intellectually rigorous and fashionable school with classes taught in French.

Her most famous student, a star actress in the school’s theatrical productions, was Mary Todd. The future Mrs. Abraham Lincoln lived with the Mentelles from 1832 to 1836, preferring Madame Mentelle to her disagreeable stepmother. “My early home was truly at a boarding school,” she later told her White House seamstress.

Despite these outward signs of success, the Mentelles were never financially secure. “We always have the devil by the tail,” Charlotte wrote a friend in 1827, “and we’re just grateful when it doesn’t break off in our hand. The French do not strike it rich in this country. Though that was never my ambition, I do not like always having to be on the point of becoming poor.”

She also complained that there were all too many woods, and that the local people lacked the sophistication needed to connect with a “sensitive Frenchman.” The place was primitive, she wrote in April 1804: “There is no society. The nature of the people and their mores are against it. They have crude vices and no attractive virtues.”

Waldemar held similar views, telling du Pont de Nemours that a pleasant existence can be had if one has the money to buy enslaved persons, but only on condition of being “willing to forget that there is no society here at all, no opening of the heart, that our children will maybe turn into unhappy savages and learn to despise their parents.”

Charlotte brought up that topic as well, writing that although the American form of government “can be taken as a model,. this Constitution that speaks only of liberty; these men who seem to think nobly—if you compare all that with slavery and their tyranny over the blacks,” it is “ridiculous and absurd.” She continued that if you should happen to mention this inconsistency to the people here, “they become disturbed, and you would think you were listening to madmen who believe they are speaking rationally.”

Being French in America, in Waldemar’s estimation, meant being at a distinct disadvantage in any commercial transaction. “Not one of our compatriots has prospered. He is cheated without mercy,” he wrote. He told du Pont de Nemours of a French Kentuckian who had paid for the same property four or five times and after 10 years of trying still could not prove ownership. Another was continually “vexed and tormented . . . . ”

Waldemar lamented that, “Here one has to be a charlatan or a Presbyterian—more or less the same thing—to succeed.”

He described the typical Kentuckian as “Adroit, cunning, and a knave, whose god is money. He knows no other except when he goes to a church to exchange this passion during an hour or two for the most stupid fanaticism.”

Products of the French Enlightenment, the Mentelles shocked their neighbors by their lack of religiosity. Amos Kendall wrote in his journal in 1814, “I was obliged to listen to a long talk in ridicule of religion and religious men. The parties concerned were Mr. and Mrs. Mentelle, professed deists.”

Yet the Mentelles found their nationality was an advantage in certain social situations. Lexington’s elite thought having the Mentelles in their midst gave them a touch of class. The French couple was invited to mingle with the rich and prominent without being expected to return the favor, which they did not have the money to do. Charlotte saw that they were too poor to incite envy yet were perceived as better educated than their hosts, eliciting from the latter “a bit of the esteem that they normally only have for gold.”

Charlotte was a feminist before her time—a woman of strong opinions who saw through the pretenses of slave-owning Christians and corrupt politicians. In translating a pamphlet about the French Revolution in 1799 she inserted her own comments about the injustices women have suffered through the ages and the power they nevertheless wield behind the scenes. She cut her hair short and dressed like a man, and scandalized her neighbors by walking miles a day through the streets of Lexington all while reading a book.

The Mentelles became Americans on their own terms, unrepentantly French to the end. Now they are memoralized as iconic Kentuckians; Lexington has a street and a new historical marker to remember them by.

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