Too Many Cooks

I learned to cook in phases throughout my life. Home economics class in middle school taught me how to make a mean grilled cheese sandwich, and working in restaurants for around 15 years took care of the rest of my fundamental education.

The thing about commercial kitchens is that everyone has their own station, where the cook resides during their shift. If you’re on the sauté station, you might be responsible for a stove top with 8 eyes, so you can toss food around in the pans quickly and efficiently, but you might also have a little oven behind you where they keep the prime rib.

Every kitchen in the world is a kludge like this, at least to some degree. There’s a carefully dedicated space just for one thing, but there are usually more tasks to be done by that same cook. I dug deep into the recesses of my trauma to remember what it was like to be in the weeds, so you can get something of a sense of the sort of pressure a line cook is under:

Suffice it to say, there is a lot of pressure, and you have a very confined space to work in. Not only is there a carefully crafted work flow, but there’s also a ton of potential for injury, even when things are going right.

BrianAlfred1983

and I shared some of these memories in a piece we wrote together called Slicing and Dicing Ourselves. If you’ve ever worked on a line in a restaurant, you will feel our pain.

Now, there are some times when you simply have to have another person working with you in one of these tiny stations. Sometimes you have to train a new worker, and while it might sound pretty cool to have someone there to do all the work for you, that’s not really what happens when you’re training someone on a station.

Instead, things are harder, not easier. The trainee doesn’t understand your carefully crafted work flow, and besides, they make a big mess and just get in your way, especially at first.

At the moment as I type this, I am surrounded by Dink-Dink on one side, and our new foster dog, Marley, on the other side. I’m sandwiched in here, typing on my laptop as best I can. I think I’m getting carpal tunnel since I can’t really put my elbows where they’re supposed to be. There are too many cooks in this claustrophobic kitchen at the moment.

Crowding your space is only one terrible outcome from having too many cooks in one workstation. You can also really easily end up with the same work being done twice, with recipes getting mangled and mixed up.

It’s no wonder, then, that the phrase too many cooks has become an instantly recognizable phrase. It describes any situation where you have too many people trying to make a decision.

The origins of the phrase seem to go way, way back. By the end of the 1500s, an English historian named John Hooker referenced an old proverb: “the more cooks the worse potage.” Mmmmm, potage.

Potage (or pottage) is basically stew. It’s not too difficult to envision how we got to too many cooks spoil the broth, and that phrase is still in use today. The shortened version I chose for today’s title is the way I’m most familiar with the phrase, or maybe too many cooks in the kitchen.

Clearly, this ancient wisdom applies in other domains besides the culinary realm. There’s a substantial argument to be made that there were too many cooks in the Roman Senate during the last days of the Republic. The bureaucratic process meant that decisions often took weeks or months, and political gridlock made the republic seem inefficient, ready to be overturned by something new.

Was this the problem with New Coke? Was it just a case of listening to advice from too many departments that cased the creation of the most loathed beverage in human history? How about the Edsel, where Henry Ford II and his colleagues said yes to every feature that seemed like a good idea?

In all of these cases, there were too many people making decisions. Sometimes you really do need to have a lot of decision-makers, though. Projects can be complicated, and having lots of cooks can be incredibly useful, but only if the cooks stay in their own dedicated stations.

Can you think of any of these sorts of conundrums from your own life, where there are just too many cooks? How did you get out of the mess?

Also: if you’re a huge fan of potage (the word or the stew), let me know in the comments.