At this Bette giggled and she mussed Tina’s damp hair.  “You just want to be in overalls all the time, don’t you, wearing your red bandana and no shoes.  But you do understand that a chef wears a special jacket that buttons across,” Bette said demonstrating how a double-breasted jacket might close.  “And you have to button it all the way up to your neck and then you have to wear a tall white paper hat that comes like two feet off your head.”  Bette made a motion over her own head.

“What?  That’s silly,” Tina frowned.  “All’s I got to wear when I’m helping old Sandy is an apron, shoes, and a hair net.”

“Ah, but that’s because you’re the sous-chef.  When you’re the master chef, you’ll have to wear the right jacket and hat so everyone else in the kitchen knows you’re in charge,” Bette explained.

Tina cocked her head.  She wasn’t afraid anymore to show her ignorance of words and their meaning around Bette, but she had gained a lot of confidence from their work together on her reading, so she often tried to figure out words before she asked.  But this word – ‘sue’ as she heard it made no sense. 

Bette could see the little girl’s confusion so she added, “A sous-chef is like second in command behind the master chef.”

“Ah, okay,” Tina said.  Then she pointed out, “Well Sandy don’t wear nothin’ but an apron and a hair net too.  Maybe he don’t know about being a proper chef and all.”

“Well, probably he doesn’t consider himself one,” Bette noted.  And then she added, “Usually a cook doesn’t consider him or herself a chef unless they’ve had some sort of formal training from a place like Le Cordon Bleu, or the Ecole Hôtelière Thonon-les-Bains.”

“Huh?”

“They’re chef schools in France, the oldest and most respected.  Of course there are others like the Culinary Institute in New York,” Bette explained.

“I gotta go to school to be a chef?” Tina asked a little dismayed.

Bette quickly reassured her.  “Oh no, not really.  I mean, to use the title you would, but if you just want to be a cook like Sandy, you don’t need to go to school.”