Professional Culinary Education In Russia

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the development of educational activities in the sphere of public catering in Russia. The authors consider the historical experience of professional training of food industry specialists for the last 130 years. The article lists the names of outstanding scientists of the late XIX and XX centuries, which contributed to rational nutrition in Russia, in particular, in St. Petersburg. The authors give a brief description of the main book of the entire scientific life of the physiologist Dmitry Kanshin (1829-1904) - Encyclopedia of Nutrition. This book has no analogues among the literature on nutrition, published before and after that. It has become the basis for the creation of scientific foundations of food technology, the organization of mass nutrition of the population, the economy of nutrition, the culture of food consumption, etc. Particular attention is paid to the role of mentoring in the development of the complex of the profession of the catering technologist, which requires not only the acquisition of special knowledge and skills in food technology, but also in the field of nutrition science, as well as in the field of art and design. The authors pay attention to the importance of the personal and professional individuality of the mentor, his willingness to transfer knowledge and experience to students. A striking example of instructor-mentor is Nikolay Kovalev, one of the founders of the educational platform “Technology of public catering products”.

Keywords: Cookingtechnology of public cateringvocational education

Introduction

The priority direction of development of any country is the growth of its population and the increase in life expectancy. Realization of this direction is connected with the organization of healthy nutrition of all social groups of the population. The solution of this task requires the training of specialists in the field of mass nutrition with new competences formulated by employers according with professional standards (Rasinkina et al., 2018). In accordance with the provisions of the Federal Law “On Education in the Russian Federation” (Federal Law No. 122, 2015), the main principle of the actualization of Federal State Educational Standards for vocational education is its orientation to Professional Standards (Professional Standards “Cook”, Professional Standards “Manager of the catering company”, 2015).

Problem Statement

Among the many problems in the modern Russian vocational education system, low practical orientation of students occupies an important place. Unfortunately, educational institutions are focused on the production of young specialists with a theoretical base, and the ability to acquire the skills required at catering companies is very low. This problem of vocational education in Russia leads to weak adaptation of graduates in the conditions of production activity, a lack of ability to navigate the market of professions and services and to forecast the demand for specific worker skills.

Research Questions

The main research question is considering to according with the cultural and historical context the role of the professional community, scientists and the state in the formation of standards of higher professional education in the direction of preparation “Technology of production and organization of public catering”.

Purpose of the Study

To study the main stages of the formation of domestic professional education in the field of public catering, depending on the level of economic development, the needs of society and the state.

Research Methods

The work uses a historical method to study the origin and formation of culinary vocational education.

Findings

Until 1917 the culinary education for the training of qualified personnel in Russia was developing very slowly. The main obstacles were the owners of the restaurants themselves, who wanted to keep the «secrets of the art of cooking» and avoid competition. Traditionally over the centuries, boys from eight to twelve years old were taught to supplement the cook staff. Practically this system of training of cooks did not have any changes until 1917.

In 1913 at the IV Congress of Trade Workers there was a report on the organization of culinary training presented. In eighty-six enterprises, more than three hundred boys were interviewed and more than a third of them were under the age of fifteen. All of them were working along with adults, but without any payment; almost for everyone the working day lasted more than twelve hours, and for many of them─more than fifteen hours; more than half of the employees did not have a day off. The training lasted not least eight years and was limited to the development of base professional skills of practical cooking.

At that time there were no large canteens, as we know them today. In 1916 St. Petersburg ─ the capital of Russian Imperia had one hundred and seventy-six restaurants (including nineteen of the highest category), about five hundred restaurants and taverns, as well as buffets, baker’s shops and drinking establishments. There was not any canteen in educational institutions, not counting few poorly equipped private kitchens for students, port workers, porters, etc. Naturally, the search for personnel was possible either among particular culinary masters who got practical skills from prominent domestic and foreign professionals, or among low-skilled cooks, working in taverns.

In this regard, a group of progressive figures of the Russian Society for the Protection of Public Health raised the issue of organizing the first school of cooks and confectioners in Russia. After long preparations, the first culinary educational institution in Russia was opened on September 22, 1888.

In the beginning of the activity of the school Dmitry Kanshin was in charge of the school and gave lectures. In the program of theoretical training of the school there had been giving lectures on hygienic bases of nutrition, meats, basis of storing, bookkeeping, theoretical foundations of culinary art. It was a paid training. The training lasted sixty-four days, including thirty-six days of practice. However, the Minister of the Interior gave his agreement to the opening of the school on the condition that only females were to be accepted as students (Ulyanova et al., 2017). At that time, exclusively men could work as cooks in restaurants, canteens and taverns. This contributed to the fact that the school was practically preparing cooks for private houses.

Kanshin dreamed eventually to turn the school into an “Academy for Nutrition”, a Research Center for the problems of rational nutrition, dietology and the theory of culinary processes. In 1885, he published his extensive work “Encyclopedia of Nutrition” (Kanshin, 1885). This book has no analogues among the literature on nutrition, published before and after that time. In fact, it was the foundation for the creation of scientific bases for cooking, organizing mass nutrition for the population, the economy of nutrition, and the culture of food consumption. It is difficult even to enumerate all the directions in the field of the science of nutrition, which Kanshin touched upon in his remarkable work.

In the last chapter of the Encyclopedia of Nutrition Kanshin (1885) raised the issue of the need to train professional nutrition specialists. He wrote: “We need not an academy of gastronomes, but an academy of scientists, a collection of scientists who would rather have weak gastronomic knowledge, but would be strong in their specialization, have strong knowledge that they would apply to our nutrition and through this would lead the human race from that ignorance in which it finds itself in its most important organic and economic mission”. And further: “To prescribe the medicine the doctor is given a diploma, although the doctor prescribes strong remedies, but in microscopic doses, and the question is whether the recipe of cooks, according to which we inject into the body not a microgram, but many pounds, has more serious effect... By ignorance, not only an ordinary man obeys the cook, but the princes of science, the most famous doctors are also as ignorant as we are: even they obey an illiterate cook”.

In fact, in his book Kanshin (1885) described in detail the main directions of the activity of the Institute of Nutrition of the Academy of Medical Sciences, later established in the USSR. “I hope that in the future”, Kanshin further wrote: “Academy of Nutrition will include special departments and committees for each of the subjects we touch, we list them as briefly as possible: food calendar; mechanics of nutrition; nutrition statistics; religious concepts of nutrition; philosophy of nutrition; history of nutrition; art and nutrition; military, prison and public catering (this is the first time that the term “public catering” is used — auth.); literature, terminology and bibliography; geography of nutrition”.

A special role in the history of culinary education in Russia played by the First Practical School of Home Economics under the head of Vera Gunst. She set much more modest goal: to give the students professional culinary knowledge and skills. The training in this school conducted in the following way: the theoretical training program included lectures on the topics like knowing about meat, bases of chemistry, cookware and equipment, furnaces and fuel, composing of menu, table setting, storage, bookkeeping and procurement. The famous specialists of nutrition analyzed in detail the recipes of all the dishes, their preparation and serving, each lesson consisted of analyzing the lunch menu of 3 to 4 dishes. Then all the dishes had been cooking in the canteen and after that it’s were tasted by the students.

The French Сuisine was taught by the famous St. Petersburg culinary specialist, a member of the Parisian Culinary Academy Fedor Zeest (Zeest, 1897). Zeest had a great record as a cheif cook: he served the Duke George of Leuchtenberg, the Grand Dukes, and also worked in the Imperial Yacht Club. His father was known as “The Uncle Zeest”, a well-known St. Petersburg restaurateur of the second half of the XIX century. His cafe-restaurant located in front of the Alexandrinsky Theater and was a famous place of meeting for actors, artists and writers. In his book “Slums of St. Petersburg” Vsevolod Krestovsky glorified that place as he wrote: “There is no place of the best than with uncle Zeest” (Krestovsky, 1990). In the culinary school a course of Russian Cuisine was taught by a professional cook, the owner of a pate shop, L. Astafiev.

Practical training was supervised by the author of the first culinary tutorial in Russia─Pelageya Alexandrova (Alexandrova, 1895). She was born on 6 (19).08.1872 in a bourgeois family in St. Petersburg. Her parents died when she was eight old and after that, she was brought up in a shelter of Prince Peter G. Oldenburg. In the shelter, Pelageya got bases of the practical culinary training. Finishing her training in the shelter Alexandrova worked in the best pate shops. Since 1893, she had been giving all her knowledge, professional experience and energy for working at the First Practical School of Home Economics, founded by Vera Gunst. Alexandrova had worked in the school until 1917 (Alexandrova-Ignatieva, 1914).

The husband of P. Alexandrova, Master of Veterinary Sciences M. Ignatiev, famous participant of the Balkan military campaign, was one of the founders of the Russian Science of Meat. He gave a lot of energy to work in cooking courses, held on great lectures on meat studies, prepared a section of culinary textbook and created a unique meat museum.

P. Alexandrova-Ignatieva created the first Russian textbook on cooking «Practical Guide to Study of the Basics of Culinary Arts» with the addition of the «Course on Meat Science» written by M. Ignatiev. The textbook was published in Odessa in 1897 and withstood more than ten editions (Alexandrova-Ignatieva, 2013). The textbook consists of ten sections (broths, soups, different ways of cooking meat, birds, fish, etc.). Each section contains descriptions of the methods for preparing individual dishes and starts with a theoretical part of a program designed for twenty lessons, brief methodological instructions, general rules for cooking meat, fish, a description of possible errors and ways of correcting them.

The director of the Odessa school wrote in the foreword to this textbook that only practical teaching did not give the most important, namely the systematic knowledge of general rules for cooking of food, kinds of tableware and cooking equipment, the properties of products, of «the meaning and rational reason of each action that make up the foundations of culinary art». Based on that, the authors of the textbook made the first attempt to develop a methodology for teaching culinary skills, classifying dishes, general methods for preparing individual groups of dishes, etc. This part of the first Russian textbook on cooking is of great interest even today.

This first culinary textbook by P. Alexandrova-Ignatieva and M. Ignatiev still takes an honorary place in the library of professional chefs, teachers of cooking technology and culinary enthusiasts (Alexandrova-Ignatieva, 2013).

P. Alexandrova-Ignatieva also had a number of other works, among them the books “Milk and vegetable dishes, the technique of preparing in public catering conditions” & “Practical fundamentals of vegetarian nutrition: a guide for culinary schools and for self-study” (Alexandrova-Ignatieva, 1914), etc.

Alexandrova-Ignatieva took part in the organization of mass nutrition in Russia; worked as a keeper of the Museum of Meat and Communal Hygiene (1921), had taught at rebuilt courses of food science and home economics since 1927, was a scientific consultant.

It should be paid special attention to the library of the First Practical School, which included a rare collection of culinary books practically in all languages of the world, which can only be compared with the library of the First St. Petersburg Society of Cooks and Confectioners with more than three thousand cookbooks.

The first Russian culinary museum organized at the school had the great wax figures imitating ready-made dishes, these were made by culinary specialists under the guidance of Zeest. These models were repeatedly demonstrated at exhibitions in Russia and abroad.

There were the culinary schools in Moscow, Warsaw, Tiflis, Saratov, Ekaterinoslav, and Tomsk opened in 1896.

The development of any economic activity is dependent on the level of professional training of personnel. Only in the 1920s, after creating a new department “public catering” in the USSR, there was an opportunity and necessity to organize a wide network of culinary educational institutions — schools, craft and technical schools, technological faculties in higher educational institutions.

In 1919 at Sverdlov Food Institute there were classes begun. Upon an initiative of the Department of the Union of Public Service Workers in Petrograd, the short-term public catering courses were organized with the aim of training staff for working in canteens, food centers, etc. The course participants got the basic information on bacteriology, hygiene and sanitation, the foundation of nutrition, etc. In 1923 there were cooking courses with a training period of three and a half years organized. The program included several sections: storage, dough and sweet dishes with period of study of nine months; soups ─ five months; roasts and sauces — seven months and specialization for six months at the choice of student.

The emergence and development of large public catering establishments, factory-kitchens and canteens in industrial enterprises required the organization of culinary schools of a new type with a two- and three-year period of study. They were organized in the late 20-s. The curriculum and textbooks for them, were compiled by the largest culinary specialists of Russia: P. Alexandrov, N. Kurbatov, V. Nikashin, P. Grishin (Grishin & Kovalev, 1957) and others.

For working at large enterprises, equipped with mechanical, thermal, refrigeration facilities there were needed specialists with secondary and higher technical education. Therefore, in 1930, a network of technical schools for public catering (primarily in Moscow and Leningrad) and universities of the same profile (in Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov and other cities) was organized.

A great role in the history of culinary education in the USSR was played by the First Leningrad Culinary College, opened on the basis of an educational restaurant, which in different years was named “Empire”, “Severny”, “Baku”. Such great culinary specialists as Alexandrov, Zuev, Kurbatov, Pakhnyov and others were invited as practical masters and lectures. All of them had already received first-class practical culinary training in the best metropolitan pre-revolutionary restaurants, and later they put a lot of work for organization of the first in the country public catering enterprises. In the training restaurant of this school, there were practically no full-time employees, so the students were fulfilling all the kinds of work.

The culinary education in the USSR became particularly widespread after the historic resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of the Bolsheviks from August 19, 1931, “On Measures to Improve Public Catering”. On the state level it was decided to radically change the system of training of personnel for the catering.

It was necessary to prepare cooks, directors of enterprises, accountants and other specialists of catering through a network of factory schools and short-term courses, as well as to organize special technical schools and institutes for the training of secondary and higher professional education of workers. The enterprises of catering were obliged to give 1% from the turnover of production to training and research organizations in the field of catering.

In the USSR the great attention was given to the preparation of skilled workers, including cooks, through the system of vocational schools. In the course of studying general and technical disciplines, students were getting acquainted with the scientists who contributed to the development of science of nutrition, such as M. Lomonosov, D. Mendeleev, I. Pavlov and others.

As for the cooking course, it usually appears faceless to the students, freed from the human factor (Klochkova, Volgina, Dementyev & Klochkov, 2016). They are do not known the names of the cooks, confectioners and scientists, who played a role in the formation of the profession. The teacher is obliged to say a few words about people who made Russian cuisine world-famous, who turned it into a technical discipline, who laid the theoretical foundations of this branch of knowledge (Kutkina & Eliseeva, 2018).

In the formation of specialists, a huge contribution was made by such scientists as Professor D. Lobanov ─ the author of the textbook “Technology of production for public catering” for higher educational institutions (Lobanov, 1960), Professor N. Kovalev ─ the author of the repeatedly re-published textbook “Technology of cooking” (Kovalev, Kutkina, & Kravtsova, 2008). N. Kovalev wrote a numerous monograph on Russian cuisine and he is a creator of his own scientific school and prepared more than thirty PhD. N. Kovalev one of the first scientists who proposed computer simulation of food products of increased biological value (Kovalev et al., 1989).

There is known very little about many excellent Russian cooks unfortunately. The names of the students of Antoine Karem have been preserved, these are Stepanov, Ivanov and others. The name of one of the greatest cooks of the late 19th and early 20th century Fedor Zeest is also not forgotten. Interestingly, the chefs of most of the French and Italian restaurants of pre-revolutionary Moscow and Petrograd were Russian culinary specialists.

A major role in the creation of catering in the USSR was played by the greatest cooks: P. Alexandrov, F. Nikashin, N. Kurbatov and others. Pavel Alexandrov, the chief-cook of the restaurant “Villa Rode” was a wonderful cook-artist. In 1912, at the World Exhibition in Paris, he won the Grand Prix — a Gold Medal on the Moire Tape with cooked pates, kulebyaka and roast goose. Later P. Alexandrov became a master of training in one of the first Soviet culinary school, opened on September 15, 1926.

It would be interesting for the students of the culinary vocational schools to learn the names of cooks and confectioners who are outstanding in their district, city, who were awarded for their valorous work.

Not only cooks but also non-professionals were dealing with the problems of cooking. By the way, the authors of the first Russian culinary books were also not cooks (Yatsenkov, 2011; Osipov, 2012; Levshin, 2016). Just like the author of the immortal epic about the three musketeers, Alexander Dumas, who created a great culinary book (Dumas, 2006), composer Gioacchino Rossini was also engaged in cooking.

One of the creators of colloid chemistry, Ostvald (Ostvald, 1930), in 1913 – 1914 wrote that the public knows “…about the fate of food in the body, but scientific research of food before introduction into the body, in the very process of preparation, does not seem serious. There is a lot of literature about the secretions of the body and almost no data on the products introduced”. Ostwald wrote that the widest field of colloid chemistry is the doctrine of cooking food.

Conclusion

A study of the history of the formation of professional education in the field of food technology in Russia has shown that it has always been oriented towards meeting the needs of society and corresponding to the level of economic development. The technological breakthrough in the sphere of mass nutrition is connected with the use of the latest achievements in the field of physiology and hygiene of nutrition, the technology of cooking, the organization of its production and sale, commissioning of modern public catering enterprises with using of high-tech equipment.

In solving these problems, a highly qualified specialist who has mastered advanced technology and new technology, capable of providing his own professional knowledge and skills to ensure the safety and stable quality of the products, the competitiveness and efficiency of the catering enterprises, has a big role to play.

Not only the history of the profession, but also the history of culinary education in Russia gives the richest material for educating students about their profession and patriotism. Materials about the best people in the profession of the past and our contemporaries will help teachers to revitalize classes, show students a cultural and historical role of their work, a strong professional connection between the past, the present and the future.

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