That's a very romantic view of the life of a chef but I'm afraid that by an overwhelmingly enormous margin the output of a chef is servings of food not century-spanning recipes.
The comparison between developer and chef is kind of a stretch but there is a similarity of sorts. It could be argued that the recipes are analogous to the algorithms or patterns that we use day-to-day in software development, and that the servings of dinner are analogous to the applications we build. The algorithms/patterns and recipes might persist for a while, the apps and food have a shorter lifetime.
I'm not advocating for throwaway or disposable code (though I'm not above implementing a quick hack, personally) but I don't think we need to think less of ourselves or our profession because we're producing things which currently have a shelf-life of years or decades at most.
The Youtuber Max Miller's channel "Tasting History with Max Miller" has a number of good examples of old recipes for now-familiar foods. His Semlor episode[1] compares a recipe from 1755 and one from more modern times, and there are substantial changes.
The comparison between developer and chef is kind of a stretch but there is a similarity of sorts. It could be argued that the recipes are analogous to the algorithms or patterns that we use day-to-day in software development, and that the servings of dinner are analogous to the applications we build. The algorithms/patterns and recipes might persist for a while, the apps and food have a shorter lifetime.
I'm not advocating for throwaway or disposable code (though I'm not above implementing a quick hack, personally) but I don't think we need to think less of ourselves or our profession because we're producing things which currently have a shelf-life of years or decades at most.