Don't have one of those? Get one.

There was a time, when “Master” meant something. In kitchen terms it meant you’d spent three years as an apprentice under an old Master, five years as a Journeyman working your way through kitchens, starting from the bottom every time, advancing not in status but – if you were lucky – in your kitchen’s status. From family restaurant to one-star dig, from there to a few two-stars, maybe a three-star if you played your cards right and didn’t suck.

Nine years in the grinder earned you the right to try for admission to a Master test. Six even more grueling months followed, talking, presenting, cooking, planning, studying. Nothing you’d done until that day could come close to the pressure and demands of the Master test, yet without those years you’d be ground to dust, inhaled, chewed up, and spat out. You still were, but you’d get up after, asking for seconds.

One of the tests involved a menu, its planning, and its execution. In painstaking detail, locked into a room for two hours, you had to create your meals. Write shopping lists, write a recipe, write a mise plan.

Six weeks later, you’d do the menu. Forgot anything on the mise plan? The recipe? The shopping list? Tough cookies, only what’s written can be done. Forgot to mention to season to taste in step 3? No seasoning for you, buddy. Called it “slicing” instead of “chopping”? Guess what? You’ll be slicing those vegs.

Today, “Master” means a lot of things. It means you’ve spent six weeks on TV, being taught some basic cooking maneuvers.  It means having a show. Or writing a book. It means giving the ACF a few dollars and sitting for an exam that is but a shadow of what a Master’s exam truly is.

Master Chef does not approve of your actions and will have to go Careme on your arse if you do not cease and desist calling yourself a chef.

I guess it’s par for the course. What with “Chef” having taken on all  those new meanings in the past few years. Karine Bakhoum, a former fashion promoter whose parlay and representation of some of the “Iron Chefs” got her a job sitting on a judges panel, judging the very people whose successes make her money, and who never, not one day, worked in a kitchen or had any kind of culinary training? She’s now a chef. Or a restaurant consultant. Depending on whom you ask.

If that’s what it takes, I’ve been watching Full Metal Jacket sixteen times, I think I am ready to call myself a Master Sergeant. Oh, wait, that doesn’t work. Because, alas, there’s the Stolen Valor Act of 2005. A good thing.

“Chef” is not an honorific. It’s not something that comes with an apron. “Chef” doesn’t mean “good cook” or “looks great on telly”. “Chef” doesn’t tell us anything about those properties. “Chef” is a job title. The title giving to anyone standing in a kitchen, commanding a brigade. That’s a chef.

There’s an exception. A “grandfather” clause of sorts. If you spent thirty years of your life inside the steamy, hot, crowded room behind a restaurant. Sweating, cursing, commandeering, advising, evaluating, tasting, wielding the mighty trifecta of fire, steel, and blood on your hands, you’re a chef. Retire. Write books. Judge competitions. Show young chefs and cooks the ropes. You have earned that title in perpetuam.

But else, if looking back to last week, you didn’t do a cheffy thing, if you didn’t spend long days expediting, training, hiring, firing, tasting, and plating, you’re not a chef. Deal with it.