“Cooking is not an art,” says Peter Woolsey, “It’s a craft. Art is about expressing whatever you want; craft is about consistently re-creating what is expected.”

(Thank you! Finally, somebody gets this!)

“An artist works from his life experiences, his feelings, and he’s free to put those into his product.” Not so for the craftsman chef, whose personal life can’t have anything to do with the food. “You may be distraught because your beloved Poochie just died, or overjoyed because your girlfriend agreed to marry you—but none of that can go into your cooking.” A woodworker doesn’t make one chair different from the others, and a chef doesn’t change the carefully honed details of his sauce, just because he’s bummed about Poochie.

Peter Woolsey came to talk about French sauces — mostly. Yes, he mentioned the ‘mother sauces,’ and the unsavory acronym culinary students use to remember them (which involves an unfortunate young lady named Beth). He briefly discussed the derivative ‘small sauces,’ as you would expect. He mentioned Escoffier, as one usually must. He offered lots of practical sauce-making advice. But besides all of that, he also offered some more philosophical observations from his nearly 20 years in cooking.

While stirring a pot of béchamel, for example, Woolsey related the sad parable of Howard Johnson’s. If you’re old enough, you’ll remember the orange roofs and blue weathervanes that dotted our nation’s highways and byways throughout the 1960s and ‘70s. In 1961, Mr. Howard Johnson himself poached Jacques Pépin from New York’s famous Le Pavillon to oversee HoJo’s nationwide culinary production. Pépin had previously cooked for several French heads of state, so he certainly knew his craft, and he was perfect for giving the food a touch of French gastro-cred. He took his native culinary tradition and scaled it large—way large. Recipes for time-tested classics were now measured in truckloads of onions, pallets of beef, and barrels of sauce, prepped in bulk at a central commissary, and sent in sous-vide bags for perfect, consistent replication at HoJo’s around the country. It worked quite well, and HoJo’s food was pretty solid. Until, that is, the owners began cutting corners, for financial reasons — substituting onion powder for real onions, frozen carrots for fresh ones, and so on. After a while, the food just wasn’t that good anymore. People stopped coming. And HoJo’s is now mostly forgotten. Pépin went on to a successful career writing cookbooks and starring in television cooking shows.

“Sauce-work, and good cooking generally,” said Woolsey, finally getting to the point, “is a series of decisions. It’s about all the fine details that bring you closer to the results you want.” HoJo’s management had undermined perfectly solid French technique with dozens of small but poor decisions about details. They had deviated from the craft. “Every restaurant makes those decisions,” says Woolsey, “and in fact every decision a chef makes has a financial aspect. It’s business, after all. The key is to pick the right battles, to make your money while still staying true to your cuisine.”

Some French sauces take a long time to make properly; others come together pretty quickly. In either case, god (or the devil) is still in the details—and lots of them. Woolsey spent nearly an hour just talking about the finer points of stock-making, stocks being the basis of many great sauces. “Bones from already-roasted chickens make the best chicken stock. Roast your veal bones golden brown, but not too dark! You must blanch your veal and beef bones first, to remove impurities. Watch out for ducks, which are insanely fatty. Start with cold water and bring it up slooowly. Don’t add the mirepoix too soon. Skim constantly. De-fat. Don’t let it boil! Do this, don’t do that, eat your vegetables, sit up straight!”….

There’s a lot to know. None of this particularly new, and you can learn most of it from books and/or on the job from a good mentor; but anyone who’s cooked professionally knows that a good chef will routinely kick your ass if you don’t give these details the attention and respect they deserve.

As he whisked chunks of Plugrá into a quick beurre blanc in one pan and carefully sprinkled sugar into a slowly caramelizing gastrique in another, Woolsey observed that the “nouvelle cuisine” movement of the 1960s had profoundly affected French sauces. The end result was a new set of decisions about how to treat the craft. Heavy sauces were avoided in favor of ones flavored more simply with fresh herbs, good butter, citrus, and vinegars. “Reduction” became a favorite technique for thickening sauces and intensifying flavors. Before that, chefs might simply make a good stock, embellish it with additional flavorings, and then thicken it with roux. This explains their obsession with making perfect stocks, because in many cases the stock literally was the sauce.

The new guard had a new set of goals: lighten; intensify; let fresh, local ingredients speak for themselves. The flavorful reductions, light beurre blancs, and sweetly piquant gastriques were more luscious or intense than ever; but because they offered more bang for the buck (or the franc), less sauce was needed on the plate. Sauces now elegantly highlighted food instead of covering it. This movement and its attention to new essential details affected Western cuisine everywhere, and its influence is taken for granted on almost every plate today.

The “modernist cooking” movement now underway hones the craft with an even pickier set of goals and decisions. You’ve heard of these chefs, the ones with the airy foams, spherified juice pearls, deep-fried hollandaise, exotic food glues like transglutimase, and eggs cooked at precisely 62.5° Celsius for exactly 50 minutes. Escoffier may have been picky about his details, but he was nothing compared to these guys. One of them recently published 2,438 pages in six volumes on the new fundamentals (which COOK has on its shelves if you want to see it).

The spirit, though, is the same: No matter what you’re cooking, be true to your goals, pay precise attention to how you go about reaching them, and you’ll achieve good results. And because it’s a craft, not an art, please keep poor Poochie out of it.