Medieval Paris chartered its roasters, stewers (traiteurs) and pastry cooks as separate guilds, each legally forbidden from making the others' dishes — a rôtisseur selling a stew could be fined. The trades only merged when the French Revolution abolished the guild system in 1791, creating, for the first time, a cook licensed to do all of it: the modern restaurant chef.
Guild-bound rôtisseur no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
500 – 1450
Guilds and the Islamic world's kitchens
As Rome fell, professional cooking survived best where large households still needed feeding: monasteries, and the courts of an expanding Islamic world, whose 10th-century Baghdad produced Kitab al-Tabikh, one of the oldest surviving Arabic cookbooks, with techniques far more advanced than anything written in Latin Christendom at the time. In Europe, cooking reorganized into guilds — Paris's roasters chartered by 1268 — that legally separated one dish from another. Further east, the 1453 conquest of Constantinople gave the Ottoman sultans a palace kitchen that would grow into one of the largest catering operations in history.
What else was happening then
1268
Paris writes its kitchen trades into law
Provost Étienne Boileau's Livre des métiers recorded the customs of roughly a hundred Parisian trade guilds, including the city's roasters. Over the following centuries the boundary hardened: a rôtisseur who sold a stew, or a traiteur who roasted a bird, could be fined for practicing another guild's trade — a division that lasted until the Revolution.
1574
Topkapi's kitchens rebuilt at empire scale
Chief Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan gave Istanbul's Topkapi Palace kitchens the ten-domed form still standing today. Behind its walls, a kitchen staff that had numbered around a hundred under Mehmed II grew past a thousand under later sultans, cooking for the court, the harem and palace guards under a strict hierarchy of named ranks.
1651
La Varenne writes down the new French cooking
François Pierre La Varenne's Le Cuisinier françois broke from the heavily spiced medieval kitchen, favoring the roux, the bouquet garni and the natural taste of ingredients. It is generally considered the first cookbook aimed at professional cooks rather than noble households, and the founding text of what became French haute cuisine.
Where that work lives now
The professional who commands a kitchen brigade under nightly pressure, from Escoffier's Paris to Osaka's sushi counters and Lima's ceviche bars.
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