Mise en place is a French culinary term meaning ‘Everything in Its Place’. It’s Parisian for ‘Getting Your Ducks in a Row’.
The idea in culinary terms is you must prepare, measure, cut, and gather ALL of the necessary ingredients, tools, and utensils BEFORE you turn on the oven, grease any pans, or start ANY cooking.
Have you ever looked at a restaurant’s menu and after turning the fourth or fifth page (Cheesecake Factory I’m looking at you) found yourself wondering ‘how the hell can they make ALL of these dishes?’ Mise en place.
What about a large banquet hall that’s cooking fresh and delicious meals for 3,500 people? Mise en place.
How about that local bakery that’s cranking out 18 types of bread and almost 1,000 loaves, all in one day? Mise en place.
In Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise en place to organize your life, work and mind Author and Chef Dan Charnas reveals how to apply mise en place outside the kitchen, in any kind of work.
Chef Dan spells out the ten major principles of mise en place:
- Planning is Prime
- Arranging Spaces and Perfecting Movements
- Cleaning as You Go
- Making First Moves
- Finishing Actions
- Slowing Down to Speed Up
- Call and Callback
- Open Ears and Eyes
- Inspect and Correct
- Total Utilization
Next Fall, I am starting a reading club on campus and we are going to go through Charnas’ book chapter by chapter: talk about it, eat some good food, and relax with some decent conversation. I’m looking forward to it immensely.
A study entitled Mise en place: Setting the stage for thought and action highlights the effect this philosophy has outside of the kitchen and in the mind.
“The John Paul Jones Middle School was infamous for being one of the most violent and chaotic schools in the Philadelphia system. Standard security measures, such as metal detectors, did nothing to help. When the school was taken over by American Paradigm Schools in 2012 this charter company chose not to tighten security, but to strip it away. With no metal detectors, no bars on the windows, and no security guards, the number of serious incidents reported at the school dropped – by 90%.
The changed physical environment of the school was not the only contributor to the drop in violence of course. However, cases like this, where small changes in context bring about large differences in behavior, present psychological puzzles. We propose a novel construct for explaining this and similar phenomena: mise en place…
A psychological, rather than a culinary, mise en place refers to how one’s stance towards a given environment places constraints on what one feels able to do within that environment, and how these assessments and predispositions impact the process of preparing to act. These contextual and dispositional factors unite to make a particular goal, or set of goals, easier to reach by emphasizing some choices and downplaying or eliminating others.
Mise en place provides a useful way to characterize and explain a variety of phenomena in psychology and education, and we believe that it has broad applicability throughout the cognitive sciences. Taking seriously the mise en place construct can make sense of otherwise puzzling behavior by encouraging a focus on the interplay among environmental settings, psychological attitudes, and behavior.”