Lunch Earns Place in History

With a little help from about 500 fishwives, Adams House cooks Patricia A. Murphy and Gabriela M. Pucci fried their way into Harvard history.

According to senior Dining Services officials, last Friday's lunch at Adams House was the first meal cooked entirely by women in a Harvard dining hall.

"As far as I know, and I've been here 38 years, this is the first time two female cooks have put a meal on the table at Harvard," said Ronald A. Cockroft, assistant manager of the Adams House Dining Hall.

Director of Dining Services Michael P. Berry said Monday that 11 of the 74 cooks at Harvard are women.

And Murphy said this may be one reason for the success of their award-winning cuisine.

"All your life your mother cooked your food. Now we have a motherly instinct in the kitchen," said Murphy. "Psychologically the food tastes better."

Murphy, a general cook, and Pucci, a chef's helper, have seven years experience between them in Harvard's dining halls, in jobs ranging from kitchen laundry to custom catering.

"But I want to see more women in the kitchens," said Murphy. "It's not a man's job anymore."

Female cooks often prepared meals unassisted by men at Radcliffe before the college merged with Harvard.

But while female cooks have participated in preparing meals for Harvard Dining Services in the past, at least one male cook had always been on hand.

"[Cooks] typically are male due to the sheer volume of the cooking," Berry said. "We do what's called production cooking."

Berry also attributed some of the gender imbalance among Harvard's dining hall cooks to the University's hiring policies during the last 20 to 30 years.

"Maybe some bias has come out of the old way of [hiring]," Berry said about predominance of male chefs.

And the milestone seems even more triumphant considering the conditions under which the cooks must work.

The Adams House kitchen is smaller than some of the other kitchens on campus, and so Murphy and Pucci must also work in the stock room lifting heavy boxes and containers.

"There is a lot of work involved and women may be afraid to try it out," said Murphy. "There is a lot of lifting involved."

The Adams House dining hall staff, which refers to itself as the "A-Team," last year won the Director's Cup for the best dining hall in the College.