by Jean Ryan
I need to write a cook book, a friend has told me. By
this she does not mean recipes, she means secrets. The kind only cooks know.
We worked for the same catering company, this woman
and I, and she wants me to tell our story, to tell the story of all cooks. She wants me to lay bare the work
we did so that someone might acknowledge it.
I understand this. I spent sixteen years as a line
cook and four years as a caterer, and when I finally left the cooking
profession, scarred and exhausted, no one noticed. After two decades of hard
labor, I wanted to see some mention of it: a note in the local paper, a plaque
with my name newly etched. All those thousands of mouths I fed—didn’t they add
up to anything? They did not. Like a plate of food, I was there and gone.
Line cooking is a sort of magic act. Before you are
eight sauté pans, smoking and bubbling, and a grill loaded with meat and fish
in various stages of readiness, and somehow, amid the firing of orders, you are
delivering every one of these dishes in the right combination at the right
time. You have no idea how you’re doing this; you’re moving too fast for
thought. Suddenly a cowering server appears. He has dropped a plate and needs a
re-fire. For a second you look at him without comprehension, and then a
murderous rage floods your body. Your tickets have turned into a blizzard. You
will not find your way back.
I still have cooking nightmares, endless dreams in
which I can’t get my food from the stove to the warming lamps. There is a white
scar across my knuckles, a wound from the blade of a food processor. My
forearms are blemished with old burns, most of them from oven racks. I can
point to each one and tell you which kitchen it came from.
And then there were the other accidents. Walk-ins gone
warm. Hours lost replacing a ruined soup or looking for Band-Aids swallowed in
bread dough. Never a lax moment in the cooking arena. I recall the day I pulled
on one of those giant oven mitts and felt something fast and urgent streak down
my arm. I screamed and flung the mitt across the kitchen, and the mouse it had
harbored scurried under the sink. I couldn’t blame the little guy—it had been a
cold night.
While restaurants are riddled with trouble, catering
can be even more dicey: the terrain is unfamiliar and access can be difficult. Once
inside these grand homes, you have to figure out how all the high-tech kitchen
gadgets work; it’s no good asking the trophy wife—she’s never spent time in
that room. The most dreaded disaster is food shortage: one of your ten fruit
tarts gets crushed on the journey, or a waiter breaks a wine glass near your
mashed potatoes and destroys the entire dish. I don’t
think people appreciate the scope of catering: how you have to prepare the
food, then load it into a van, then unload and cook it and serve it, and then
wash all the dishes, all the pots and pans, all the forks and plates, every
water goblet, wine glass, coffee cup and brandy snifter. And god forbid you
should break anything.
While I was still working in restaurants, I often escaped
into the walk-in, the only place a cook can scream. Sometimes I went outside, sat
on an overturned bucket and just let my body tremble. One evening a rat emerged
from a dumpster a few feet away and paused to study me, his black eyes bright
and questioning. Comrade, I thought, looking back at him with tenderness.
Oh, there were high times, too—I wouldn’t have lasted
without them. Magnificent victories. Indulgence. Hilarity. Cooks play as hard
as they work. This is the bargain, the immutable law.
In the end, it wasn’t the cuts and burns that made me
hang up my apron. Nor was it the work—I figure my body could have lasted
another ten years at least. It was the incidentals that finally undid me, the
avocado under my fingernails, the veal stock that wafted from my clothes and
hair. I was sick of the whole soggy mess: the bloody bar towels, the greasy
stove vents, the mountains of innocent carcasses. That’s what began to bother
me most, the doomed innocent.
Very early one morning I was in a kitchen fileting
salmon when I heard the unmistakable cheeping of a mouse in distress. My heart
sinking, I went on a search and found the poor thing under the stove, stuck to
one of those horrible glue traps. I tried to pull him off, but it was no use.
Drowning, I thought, would be the least violent way to go, so I filled a bucket
with warm water—it seemed kinder than cold—and slid the creature in. I turned
away, unable to watch, and when I looked back a few seconds later, he was freed
of the trap and swimming circles at the surface—the warm water had dissolved
the glue! I cupped him in my hands and carried him out to the garden. Not long
after that, I freed myself.
I’m employed at a plant nursery now, a gentle job that
leaves no blood on my hands. Having traded my chef’s knife for a pair of bypass
pruners, I’m happy trimming shrubs instead of meat, deadheading flowers as
opposed to fish. Even if I wanted to return to those trenches, I no longer have
what it takes.
Before enlisting in a cooking career, one might first
consider the lexicon. Cooks work at stations “on the line” and orders are
“fired.” Microwaved foods are “nuked,” well-done dishes are “killed,” food
picked up late is “dead.” “Buried” is probably the most evocative term. This is
what happens when a cook loses track of her orders, when the long row of
tickets in front of her face no longer makes any sense. This affliction can
strike at any time and there is nothing a cook fears more. Response is swift.
The stunned soldier is shoved off the line and someone more fit for duty takes
over.
Last week I dined at a posh Napa valley restaurant with
an exhibition kitchen. I eyed the cooks with sympathy, remembering when this
trend began, how much we resented being on display. Watching my kin in their
natural habitat, their heads down, their arms in constant motion, I felt a
surge of solidarity. I wanted to make eye contact, to show my support, but I
knew they couldn’t risk it.
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