Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (MOF)
The Meilleurs Ouvriers de France is a nationwide competition held every three to four years to celebrate outstanding French workers in 100 different creative professions.
The Meilleurs Ouvriers de France was created nearly a century ago to help preserve the quality of French artisan trades and to affirm the importance of manual work in a society that has historically prized intellectuals. Participation in the competition is recognized throughout France as the official mark of the country's most accomplished artisans.
The first president of the MOF association, Georges Castelain, outlined the groups ethics and purpose in the following speech:
Our organization should be an extended family where we are brothers and sisters from the same father -- work -- and the same mother -- France. Just as real brothers and sisters would, we should help and protect one another always. Once a MOF, the story does not end here. The MOF must continue their search for perfection to show that they are worthy of their title, to avoid getting stuck in a rut and to learn new techniques. Sometimes a MOF becomes a teacher, transmitting his trade and his savoir-faire to those who, one day perhaps, will follow his...lead. They can train young talent, helping those they think capable of going a long way, search for possible candidates for future competitions, encouraging and advising them. Such is a MOF's role in society.
Today, the competition is held for people in more than 100 different creative trade professions in France, from florist to carpenter to butcher to jeweler to pastry chef. Competitions for the individual professions take place every three to four years, with the distinguished winners serving as ambassadors for their trade.
Kings of Pastry documents the MOF pâtissier, or pastry chef, competition in 2007. In this year of competition, finalists were chosen from 80 chefs who competed in semi-finals six months to a year before the final competition. The two-day semi-final round took place at culinary schools all around France and was similar to an audition, with a theme provided; 16 chefs were chosen to move forward. Often, semi-final and final themes are announced six months to a year before each round of competition, which means that a MOF candidate will have spent up to two years preparing and practicing for the final competition. There is no limit to how many of the 16 finalists can receive the MOF distinction.
For the 2007 pâtissier final, the theme was "marriage," and each competitor was tasked with creating a wedding buffet that included a wedding cake, a sweets table and a breakfast for the morning after. The required items, divided into taste and artistic components, included:
Taste components:
- Five types of miniature pâte à choux items (cream puffs, 12 pieces of each)
- One three-tiered wedding cake to serve 30 people
- Three types of chocolate candies (20 each)
- One "restaurant style" (plated) dessert (four portions)
- One brioche for two to be served with 1,500 grams of jam made with a summer fruit and associated with a flower
- Three types of miniature afternoon tea creations (12 each)
- One surprise item made from a specific basket of ingredients that would be unveiled to the candidates on the first day of the competition
Artistic components:
- One chocolate sculpture that would be used to display the chocolate candies
- One sugar showpiece that would serve as a centerpiece for the buffet
- One small masterpiece, called a bijou, or jewel, that would be presented in a display case
Everything except for the bijou and the base for the sugar sculpture had to be created from scratch, in front of the judges, in just 24 hours, spread out over only three days.
The pastry competition is regarded as one of the most rigorous of the MOF contests, and the few laureates chosen at the end join the ranks of elite artisans who proudly wear the blue, white and red collar. In awarding its laureates presidential recognition as well as academic diplomas, the MOF recognizes those whose artistry and technique ensure that the French artisan trades -- and pastry is arguably France's defining artisan trade -- adapt continuously and remain a vibrant force in French life.
The honor comes with no financial prize; competitors pay for their own travel, supplies and other expenses.
Sources:
» Kings of Pastry website
» Le Cordon Bleu. "MOF, or Best Craftsman of France."
» Pfeiffer, Jacquy. "The Kings of Pastry: Inside the Legendary Meilleur Ouvrier de France, Pâtissier Competition." The Huffington Post, September 13, 2010.
The preparation of traditional French pastries in the United States is informed by differences in both taste and ingredients.
In general, Americans prefer sweeter and richer desserts than the French do. In other words, sometimes strictly traditional French pastries may not taste sweet enough for the American palate.
Additionally, intrinsic differences in ingredients can complicate the delicate chemical and physical changes that occur during the baking process, meaning recipes may need to be adjusted. For example, in the film, Jacquy Pfeiffer notices that the egg yolks he is using in France are more yellow than the yolks that he used in the United States, and he spends time adjusting each of his recipes. French butter also tends to be higher in fat and lower in water content than American butter, causing it to behave differently in recipes (to compensate for this, American chefs sometimes spin American butter in a centrifuge before using it). The taste of dairy products in France also varies, because free-range farming practices yield products that vary based on what the cows eat. In contrast, the United States is dominated by industrial farming practices that are designed to develop products that are uniform and consistent.
Take a look at a glossary of pastry terms on the POV website to learn more about some of the sweets seen in Kings of Pastry.
Sources:
» Friedland, Dani. "Sweet Talk: Chicagoans Learn the Art and Science of French Pastry." Medill Reports Chicago, Februrary 3, 2009
» Rinsky, Glen and Laura Halpin Rinsky. The Pastry Chef's Companion: A Comprehensive Resource Guide for the Baking and Pastry Professional. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009.
Sculpting with sugar dates back to medieval times, when artists in Europe, Egypt and Turkey created elaborate renderings of buildings, trees, animals and other objects for feasts and big celebrations.
Sometimes, the sculptures would celebrate the event's host; other times they served mainly to entertain, or as a display of power and wealth. The fact that they were fragile and perishable added to their value.
As sugar became cheaper and more accessible, sculpting with it became more widespread, eventually giving rise to the 19th century practice of creating elaborate wedding cakes. In contemporary Western sugar sculpting, artisans typically combine sugar, water, corn syrup and cream of tartar into a mixture that becomes fluid when heated and can be pulled, molded, blown (like glass) or otherwise manipulated in a number of different ways as it cools.
Several age-old sugar-sculpting traditions also persist today, including the creation of traditional wagashi confections in Japan and Day of the Dead figures and skulls in Mexico. Both traditions date back more than five centuries.
Sources:
» The Fine Art of Confectionary. "Blowing and Sculpting Sugar." September 15, 2007.
» The School of Pastry Design. "Sugar Showpieces."
» Sugar Museum. "Triumphs, Tributes and Trickery: Sugar Sculpture: Past and Present."
Jacquy Pfeiffer and Sébastien Canonne, MOF, founded the French Pastry School in Chicago in 1985 in order to teach the methods they had learned apprenticing, studying and working in France and around the world.
Today, more than 1,000 students and professionals take courses at the school in one of four main programs: L'Art de la Pâtisserie, a full-time 24-week pastry and baking certificate program; L'Art du Gâteau, a 16-week professional cake baking and decorating program; L'Art du la Boulangerie, on baking bread; and Continuing Education, three- to five-day classes held year-round for professionals and enthusiasts.
The faculty boasts several renowned chefs, including master baker Jonathan Dendauw, World Pastry Champion Dimitri Fayard, Della Gossett, Scott Green, World Pastry Champion En-Ming Hsu, Joshua Johnson, master cake artist Nicholas Lodge, Kristen Ryan, master cake artist Mark Seaman and World Baking Champion Pierre Zimmermann.
Sources:
» The French Pastry School website
» Thomalla, Andie. "Chicago's French Pastry School: Redefining Vocational Education." Gapers Block, July 9, 2010.
The MOF system of rewarding excellence among elite craftspeople forces a return to the century-old American debate between liberal arts and vocational schooling.
Kings of Pastry showcases high level achievement in an area that American public education has typically neglected. Although the U.S. education system has been widely recognized as educating more people to a higher level than that of any other country in the world, public schooling focused on preparation for vocations (such as the artisan and manual trades), has historically been controversial in the United States.
Founded in the 19th century, the earliest U.S. public schools were designed to create free-thinking and independent citizens to sustain the fledgling democracy. As the country became more diverse, however, and as elementary and secondary education became more widely available -- even compulsory by the 1920s -- in some quarters belief in the value of so-called "liberal education" gave way to a belief in the value of education as preparation for work.
Nowhere have these clashing viewpoints on the goals of education been more prominent in public discourse than in the first decade of the 20th century, when two of the African-American community's greatest leaders, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, engaged in a heated and public debate on whether "liberal" or so-called "industrial" vocationally-oriented education would do the most to improve the prospects of former slaves. Washington, who had the ear of President Theodore Roosevelt, argued that vocational education would help former slaves achieve economic independence, which would, in turn, produce political independence. Du Bois contended that without the liberal education provided by the great centers of higher learning in the United States, former slaves would be acquiescing to permanent second-class status. Since the time of this debate, vocational education has largely been the third rail of American educational policy.
In recent decades, however, in part owing to dramatic high school and college drop-out rates, some political leaders and education reformers have begun to re-examine how best to balance the need to prepare youth for economic independence with the preservation of democratic values. Pointing to global competition, increasing dependence on information and technology and concern about educational equity, some have continued to focus on improving the likelihood that youth, disengaged from school and employment, will succeed in high school and move on to college.
A handful of prominent reformers and scholars, however, have begun to question whether educators have, in fact, over-emphasized the value of a college degree. The rhetoric of the Obama administration, while emphasizing the importance of post-secondary education for all, has also recognized that such education can take many forms and need not exclusively take the form of enrolling in college.
Indeed, many students now attend vocationally oriented schools. Growth in enrollment at community colleges has been especially marked; in some cases community colleges are uniquely able to provide career-oriented education after high school. Culinary education is on the rise, probably due to the popularity of televised cooking shows and the efforts of leading French chefs like Paul Bocuse to "bring the chef out of the kitchen" and make him/her a professional rather than a servant. In the past six years, applications to the Culinary Institute of America have increased by almost 50 percent.
Indeed, government estimates suggest that students at for-profit trade schools -- one group of institutions that has seen a business opportunity in meeting the growing demand for vocationally oriented education -- will receive more than $10 billion in Pell Grants in 2011 to 2012, a sizable increase from the $3.2 billion in Pell Grants students received just two years ago. Studies also show that community colleges, nonprofit institutions that provide a great deal of the country's post-secondary vocational education, are filled to capacity around the country.
For those in the United States concerned about youth leaving high school and failing to complete college and what impact this has on their prospects for the future, the MOF system's rewarding of excellence among elite craftspeople forces a return to the century-old debate about American education -- what French President Nicolas Sarkozy referred to as the French "tradition that excellence was academic" and that "the keeper of abstract knowledge was placed above the keeper of concrete knowledge."
Sources:
» Anderson, Jill. "Pathways to Prosperity Seeks to Redefine American Education System." Harvard Graduate School of Education, February 12, 2010.
» CTICareerSearch. "Enrollment at Cooking Schools Expanding."
» Goodman, Peter S. "In Hard Times, Lured Into Trade School and Debt." The New York Times, March 13, 2010.
» Lazar, Flora. "What Do Bob Dylan, Bill Clinton and French Cream Puffs Have in Common?" The Huffington Post, September 24, 2008.
» Lewin, Tamar. "Community Colleges Cutting Back on Open Access." The New York Times, June 24, 2010.
» Matysik, Mary Ann. "What to Expect as a Cooking or Culinary Arts Student." CookingSchools.com.
» Murray, Charles. "For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time." The Wall Street Journal, August 13,2008.
» PBS. "Booker T & W.E.B.: The Two Nations of Black America."
» Reese, Susan. "Career Focus: Culinary Arts -- Education for a Taste of Success," Techniques: Connecting Education and Careers 79 no. 4 (2004): 31-45.
» USLegal.com. "Compulsory Education Overview."
» VanLandingham, Paul G. "How Has Vocational Culinary Arts Changed as a Result of a Redesign of the Education System." College of Culinary Arts, Johnson and Wales University, 1995
» The White House. "Vice President Biden Issues Call to Action to Boost College Graduation Rates Nationwide," March 22, 2011.
» Wood, Daniel B. "Suddenly, Vocational Training Back in Vogue." The Christian Science Monitor, October 12, 2006.