Finisher
The Finisher or Refiner or Appointer (善者, dan-ta) is one or more officers in charge of food at the royal court of Themiclesia found in historical and epigraphic record after the 3rd century CE. The role has become an important part in commercial kitchens and elite households in the modern period.
Historic position
The role of the Finisher evolved as the food-related apparatus of the royal court elaborated during late Antiquity and the early Empire. Unlike modern kitchens or restaurants, the royal court possessed many sources of food across the realm and directly obtained its supplies from them. From their sources, the food supply entered storage and a pre-preparation process that transformed raw materials into fresh and preserved ingredients as recipes required, by means of butchering, drying, pressing, pickling, brining, fermenting, and curing. The products of these processes were specified by the royal court's menus. When food was required, ingredients would be sent to one or more kitchens that specialized in (hot) cooking techniques. It appears that already-prepared foods would be used as ingredients in a second stage of cooking under a Finisher-cook.
It is usually assumed, on the basis of kitchen equipment and known ingredients, that earlier Themiclesian kitchens used roasting, boiling, steaming, and smoking as their primary cooking techniques. As these techniques required different skills, equipment, and routines, it is reflected in paymaster's records that they were done by different groups of cooks organized into their own departments, each with a head cook. But at some point the results of these processes were regarded as too ordinary or simple, since these cooking techniques were not used together on the same ingredients. So the finished foods were treated as ingredients and then prepared a second time, seemingly as an echo to the exalted status of the high royalty who would have enjoyed the twice-prepared food by a Finisher-cook.
The status of the Finisher at the royal court is high in most periods and came to ecclipse the Grand Kitchen (大官), who controlled the primary cooking of meats for the entire palace. There came to be a difference in status associated with those who enjoyed once-prepared foods and who enjoyed twice-prepared foods. Individuals like leading royalty, the Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, and the Principal Counsels had Finisher-cooks attached to them personally, and so enjoyed twice-prepared foods. This carried the added convenience of being able to have meals at request, rather than at the same time as the Grand Kitchen finishes its daily preparations. Royal retainers, on the other hand, had once-prepared foods, except when they were especially invited to the royal table. Lesser individuals physically present at the palace, such as soldiers of the Royal Guards, had to contend with meat and grain rations prepared at their own camps.
Modern usage
It is clear at the royal court that the Finisher had his own sous-chefs and line cooks who elaborated on foods that were already cooked, and this remained a current arrangement at the royal court until the Pan-Septentrion War, which forced the closures of multiple kitchen departments in the interest of war-time economy. When the practice of having "refined" foods spread to smaller, ambitious households, the Finisher's private kitchen usually merged with the grand kitchen, because there were no longer any tables to be served foods that were not "refined". In this arrangement items may undergo a monolithic cooking process that correlates techniques traditionally considered independently as "primary" and "secondary" ones.