. . is like compiling a program and then throwing away the source code. Next time you want to do it, you're starting over. Also, adjustments will suggest themselves as you taste the product, and you need somewhere to record those.

A talented chef running a restaurant can probably handle 50 to 100 recipes by guess and by golly and get them right becaus he's doing the same things over and over - particularly if he sticks to the traditional French cuisine which was originally a fast food system**.

If you make something once and want to do it again 6 months later, without a record you're going to forget stuff. Of course if you just grill slabs of beef and boil potatos every day, you can probably remember.

** The clasic French cuisine is a fast food system? Yes. After the French Revolution there were a lot of newly unemployed chefs, and no royalty with the financial resources to provide them job security. There was also a rising pool of middle class that wanted to feel like royalty. The solution found was to invent the modern restaurant.

This still left the chefs with problems. They now served not one family, but hundreds, all with different opinions on what they wanted to eat this evening. Also, the dishes for royalty were based on long cooking and veeeeeery expensive reductions.

The solution was development of flour thickened sauces which could be made very quickly and in bulk from cheap ingredients (these had already been invented to serve nobles who was a little on the rocks financially).

More important, you only needed three sauces which you could make up in bulk - brown, whit and fish. When an order for some dish with a fancy name came in from the floor, you ladeled the appropriate sauce into a pan and "doped" it with the additional flavorings called for by the name. When the main ingredient was done, you applied the sauce and sent it on out.

There was still a major problem though - the service. The European Service (now known as "family style") was designed for large tables set so people could only reach the dishes appropriate to their social standing. This didn't work well for restaurants.

The problem was solved with the introduction of the "Russian Service", where items were cut into individual portions and arranged on plates in the kitchen, then sent out and placed before the diners.

So that's how we got "Classic French Cusine" - and the restaurant.