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    Why do the chefs in restaurant wear a tall white cap?

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Here are some friends with simlar question as we.And I have this question for many days,anyone help us?
Kitty said: Yes.Why do the chefs in restaurant wear a tall white cap?-I try seach this on internet but no results found.Maybe this is a stupid question.
Mike said: oh,no,you are wrong.I have found as below for this question(Why do the chefs in restaurant wear a tall white cap?),it will help you,my kids.



Answer:
tradition
different chefs wear different caps
the traditional tall white cap was designed to chimney heat away from the head
There are as many legends surrounding the tall white hat that symbolizes culinary expertise as there are ways to bake a cake. One likely tale is that the head cooks in Assyrian households were allowed to wear high cloth headdresses patterned on the crowns of their royal masters.

This distinction was intended to encourage 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.

Today the chef's hat has one hundred pleats -- said to represent the one hundred ways that a good chef should be able to cook eggs. This legend probably originated in ancient Persia or in Rome, where mater culinarians were presented with bonnet-like caps studded with laurel leaves. Other sources say the story comes from France and is of fairly recent origin.

Yet another version, similar to the Assyrian one, ascribes the pattern of the modern-day toque to the headdress of Greek Orthodox priests. During the decline of the Byzantine Empire at the end of the sixth century, intellectuals and artists sought sanctuary in the monasteries from the invading Northern barbarians. Many of these mend were good cooks and became chefs in the monastery kitchens. Some imperial chefs from royal households may also have fled to the monasteries. As a disguise, these refugees adopted the habits and headgear of their hosts -- but, instead of the traditional black, they chose garments in white.

Sifting fact from fiction seems impossible. Many people believe that today's toque blanche is a more recent result of the gradual evolution of head coverings worn by cooks through the centuries.

Looking through illustrations of past headgear, one sees that the "toque" originally referred to a head covering worn by both men and women. It eventually assumed the shape of the small, round, close-fitting band or "crown" of cloth without a projecting brim but encompassing a gathering of material covering the top of the head. Sometimes of gatherings were pleated. By the end of the sixteenth century, the height, shape and stiffness of the gathered material varied from country to country. It ranged from the flattened beret style of the French to the formally pleated middle height of the Italians to the tall, softly-gathered style favored by the Germans. Illustrations in cookbooks of these periods show male cooks wearing a variety of headgear, including floppy berets, tall toques gathered in to topknots, skull caps and stocking caps resembling pointed nightcaps.

French cooks of the eighteenth 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 (l754-l838), 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 cooks, especially 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 eighteenth 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 wile persons with hair wore them in linen or netting.

The famous chef M. Antonin Careme, whose career spanned the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (l784-l833) is known to have worn the flattened, starched toque with a piece of round cardboard tucked inside. His book La Maitre d'Hotel (1822) has a frontis-piece illustration showing a chef in "costume anciene" wearing a stocking cap while a chef in "costume moderne" sports what may be either a whalebone or cardboard-braced toque.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, cooks still wore a variety of caps including the skull cap, beret, and short pleated pastry cook's cap, as well as the taller version reminiscent of the German toque of the fifteenth century.. Probably because of its comfort and imposing appearance the tall, stiffly starched and neatly pleated white hat, favored by the famous Auguste Escoffier (l846-l935), became more and more popular during the early part of the twentieth century. Today the tall "toque blanche" has become the standard headgear of professional cooks.

Whatever its true history, it is worn with pride and maintained with care as a vital part of the uniform or a working chef.
Some people believe it acts like a "crown" in the kitchen and denotes rank and authority - the taller the hat the higher ranking the chef. They were introduced in the 18th C and called "gros bonnet" to help differentiate between chefs and assistants. On a more practical level it works like a chimney and conducts heat directly off the head and straight up.
It is a symbol for not being cheap.

Some make very high salaries and the tall white cap tells you they are not very hands-on, mostly watch over running their big mouth yelling at the non-alpha chefs in the surrounding.




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