Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

I firmly believe that, like the title of president or general or convict, the title of chef is granted for life. No matter what you do or where you go, it follows you, because being there, in the heat and fire and madness of the moment, changes you forever. You are never the same person again. And this book was written with that in mind. Even if nothing else comes of this, I am just happy to have been a cook and a chef of no renown in the dawning of the age of the celebrity chef, to have been a fuckup able to stand proud among an army of fuckups and call them my friends.

  ENDNOTES

  1. The winner was falling naked from a plane or tall building onto the president, a local politician or a group of schoolchildren larger than six.

  2. Not the real name of the place I’m talking about, but close enough.

  3. In that picture I’m wearing a slightly dazed and vacant look because, on the good advice of a friend, I’d gotten halfway shitfaced on most of a warm bottle of Wild Irish Rose before going to the studio. Mom has always claimed that I looked contemplative, as if caught thinking of something else the moment the shutter snapped or perhaps considering the gleam on the arc of the bright future stretching out before me. Truth is, I was just trying not to throw up.

  4. Like any chef—current or former—I have a creepy fascination with knives, and like all chefs I came upon this infatuation early. Getting to spend my days playing with knives was a big part of what kept me going through the first years of my career, and until my late twenties my knives were the most valuable things I owned—worth, on average, triple what my car was at any given time.

  5. He was a mechanic and a traveling repairman for Sears—hence the beat-up hands. I was always in awe of his hands when I was a kid, always wanted a pair of my own someday just like his.

  6. For a brief time my mom had a serious hard-on for me becoming an orthodontist, because she knew an orthodontist through work. And do you know what that orthodontist had? All my parents’ money and a really big motherfucking boat.

  7. This, I’ve since discovered, was not entirely true. My dad reminded me recently that there was always Country Sweet Chicken & Ribs downtown—a place that made a name for itself (near as I can recall) by dipping all of its meats in a sauce made of honey and crushed red pepper flakes. Terrifying, right? But it was an honest regional barbecue derivative, native (like white hots and Schaller’s burgers with hot sauce) only to the greater Rochester area.

  8. At the time, I didn’t recognize hotel pans—the multisize baking and holding vessels cut for use in steam tables—as actual pans, only skillets, sautés and the like.

  9. Which wasn’t actually Benzedrine, but probably just some no-name trucker crank. Though at the time, I had very little basis for comparison.

  10. A trick I performed twice while in their employ, though not ever the full flight or when anything more than mildly buzzed. These stories tend to grow in the telling.

  11. Those wobbly little machines with the slanted metal base and exposed cutting die that cooks use for making all those nice julienne veggies, gaufrette potatoes, paper-thin slices for chips, or maybe a delicious lyonnaise. Essentially, you take the vegetable of your choice, hold it tightly in your bare hand, then rub it back and forth over a bare razor until it has been reduced to a pile of artistic slices. There’s not a cook out there who hasn’t given up some skin and blood to the damn thing.

  12. There are many ways to offend a cook and inspire him to violence. We are, as a rule, a passionate and fiery people prone to the expeditious use of fists to settle our disputes. Mostly it’s done in high spirits and good humor. I’ve been punched by more good friends than I can count and rarely held a grudge. But if there’s one thing you do not want to do in front of a cook, it’s hit a waitress. For that, we’ll just fucking kill you.

  13. The words wheel and wheelman both refer to the old-fashioned contraption still seen in some original diner kitchens: the spinning wheel mounted in the center of the pass from which servers would hang their handwritten checks. Flo would pin a dupe to the wheel on her side of the pass, the wheel would be spun until the order was facing Mel, then Mel—the wheelman—would pull the check off the wheel and shout out the order to his cooks working the line. With point-of-sale systems now installed in virtually every professional kitchen in America, the wheel is mostly an object lost to history. The phrase, though—like so much other great cook slang—persists.

  14. Night shift.

  15. A bain, or bain-marie, being any vessel capable of both holding water and having another pan set on top of it or into it.

  16. Seventy, total. Forty-eight regular-sized, twelve small, ten regular-sized and studded with chocolate chips.

  17. These being books like Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, some stuff by Patricia Wells, Payard, Pépin and Julia Child, sauce-stained and ragged English translations of Larousse Gastronomique or even the original French, some of the Dornenburg-Page books (for inspiration), a surprising amount of old Betty Crocker cookbooks broken at the spine to whatever recipe gave the chef the most trouble or the most joy, and The French Laundry Cookbook, which was probably one of the first gastroporn cookbooks written for chefs.

  18. The way the story goes, baklava was what Adam and Eve were fed in the Garden of Eden—honey and nuts—and that an imperfect knowledge of it was what they brought out into the world with them when they left.

  19. Probably twelve or thirteen bucks an hour, which, for a line cook, was about as big as it got then upstate.

  20. I could cook, sure. I could’ve cooked the Clare’s menu standing on my head. I even had some experience with running a crew. But executing a menu and riding herd on a bunch of line cooks is a very different thing from running an entire kitchen. There was ordering to be done, schedules to be written, three meals a day to be coordinated and stocked for, and massive amounts of management and oversight, none of which I’d ever had to concern myself with before.

  21. In The United States of Arugula, David Kamp tells a simple, throwaway story that, to my mind, establishes Buffalo, New York, not Manhattan, as the American city where the French-American culinary revolution truly began, linking the 1939 World’s Fair, the repealing of the Volstead Act, the Nazi occupation of Paris, and Buffalo all together into the moment that American cuisine was born. How is this possible? Simple. See, in 1939, the United States was just beginning to recover from the deleterious effects that the Volstead Act (better known as Prohibition, enacted in 1919, repealed in 1933) had had on the nascent fine-dining restaurant scene—which was in those years, limited primarily to the big industrial cities of the Northeast. This was also the year that the World’s Fair came to NYC (Queens, actually), and as a part of the festivities France set up the French Pavilion and, within it, the Restaurant Français—essentially denuding some of that country’s best restaurants of second-rank kitchen staff (sous-chefs and such) to staff just one foreign outpost that, in the course of its two-year run, served over one hundred thousand visitors $1.60 plates of coq au vin de Bordeaux and $5.50 bottles of 1929 Cheval Blanc.

  Enter the Nazis. In June 1940, Hitler and his armies took Paris and the French promptly surrendered, leaving everything in the hands of the Vichy puppet government. In the United States, though, the World’s Fair had not yet come to an end, and all those French cooks and chefs (including Henri Soulé, Pierre Franey, and Jean Drouant, to name just a few) were still laboring away in Queens for the rapidly diminishing crowds of fairgoers. When the fair did finally wrap up in 1941, they were screwed. They couldn’t go home (didn’t really want to go home, I’d guess), but neither were they legally allowed to stay.

  That is, until the U.S. government decided that, owing to the situation in France, all French refugees would be allowed to get permanent American work visas and stay in the States provided they had jobs lined up here and were willing to ritually reenter the United States—which is exactly what all the Restaurant Français staff did in the middle of 1941, traveling across the border into Ontario and reentering the United State
s by walking across the Peace Bridge into . . . where else? Buffalo, New York.

  22. Borrowed from an article I’d read once on Ed LaDou, crown prince of the California gourmet-pizza revolution and Wolfgang Puck’s first chef at Spago.

  23. Barely remembered from when my mom and dad would throw the occasional cocktail party at the house and serve this unbelievably delicious port-wine jelly sauce with chunks of Hickory Farms beef stick speared on toothpicks. I would always eat the leftovers the next day.

  24. Stolen, more or less completely, from Alfred Portale’s menu at Gotham.

  25. Which, now that I think about it, was probably inspired by that hotel restaurant meal in New York when I was a kid.

  26. Not really stolen because it’s a classic preparation, but taken straight from my experiences at the Clare and a killer bestseller everywhere I used it.

  27. Not the time-machine thing, but you know what I mean.

  28. There would actually come a night later when, at the apex of some sort of penny-pinching fit, this guy would come bursting into our kitchen at the end of a long night waving the linen bill in our faces. “Look at this,” he’d say to Matty and me. “Look how many aprons and chef coats you guys go through in a week! You know, I was watching Big Night a couple days ago, and in that kitchen? Those guys never got a spot on their aprons. Why can’t you do that?” Matty and I would look at each other, each of us daring the other not to laugh, not to even smile.

  29. I know we said we wouldn’t wear chef’s coats, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t. The things are handy—heavy canvas, pockets in all the right places—and they just look cool. We actually each kept two: one for working in and then another, hung out of harm’s way, kept perfectly white and clean, which we would shrug into if ever circumstances required us to walk the room during service.

  30. I didn’t have many friends outside the industry, but I had a couple—people I’d known since I was a kid, civilians I’d gotten to know later. David was one of these. We’d known each other since grade school, had been in Boy Scouts together, school together, and even spent a night in lockup together. We’d even lived together for a short time in Buffalo, and when work had me staying away from home for longer and longer hours, I was happy that David and Sam got along so well. That my best friend was there to look out for her when I couldn’t be. seen in the mirror some mornings, almost made sense to me. I’d done okay, I thought. Now I had the girl, the job, the white jacket and a bank account. Matty and I had been running the kitchen at La Cité for about a year. I was a good cook working in a healthy, happy house with a crew I loved like brothers. Everything was working out. Right up until the moment it all came to an end.

  31. And increasingly, these days, a little Russian, a little Vietnamese, a little Hindi—everything helps. French is still a good fallback. Most Latinos working high-end kitchen gigs learn gutter French before they learn passable English anyhow.

  32. And when all else fails, try singing.

  33. Later that night, I would realize that he was doing his stocking not according to any rule, law or safety regulation beyond the principle of easy access: placing that which would be needed most quickly or most often in positions where they could be gotten at by cooks in a rush. More, he was putting the heavy stuff—the fish cases and freezer boxes—at waist level to spare the knees and backs of his cooks from the constant strain of lifting. It was completely against the rules, but was done, like so many things in this kitchen, for the sake of expediency and speed, and for making it to the other side of the rush in one piece.

  34. Again, not the real name, but it may as well have been. If you’re a cook, you’ve probably worked in a place just like it. If you’re not, you’ve no doubt eaten in one. And in either case, God’s mercy be with you.

  35. As I would later learn, she’d sounded funny because she was half in the bag when she’d called, drinking tequila from the bottle and drunk-dialing my mom, reaching out for me and getting Cindy on the blower instead.

  36. It’s maybe more important to know that her virginity was not a moral one. She hadn’t retained it willfully or been saving it for anyone in particular. As she would be the first to admit, it was simply a matter of having grown up in a nice neighborhood, attending a nice school, and being the kind of nice neighborhood girl who chooses Fishbone, Metallica, fast cars and college preparatory classes over dick. Though she was more than willing, no one had ever asked. Until I did.

  37. Which hurts like fuck, by the way, and is an unwise thing to do for many reasons.

  38. Dad has phenomenally bizarre taste in literature, leaning heavily in the direction of swords and spaceships and stories of wilderness survival. He will read anything, but makes his choices almost exclusively based on the subject matter portrayed on the front cover. Forget abstraction, pretty colors, a famous name—none of that matters to him. After careful study of his nightstand over the years, I’ve determined that if a book doesn’t have a flaming spaceship, a busty woman, a brooding knight or someone locked in mortal combat with something on the cover, he’s not even going to pick it up. As a result, he has read some of the best and almost all of the worst fantasy and science fiction novels published in the last fifty years, always telling me about the good ones and almost always finding something worthwhile in even the most awful. The downside of all this is that he’s probably never going to read this book unless my agent can convince its publisher to take my advice on a cover: me, dressed in a chef’s coat and holding a butcher’s saber, riding on the wing of a flaming spaceship, clutching a busty woman in one arm while fighting off a half-alligator/half-lion with the other.

  39. A well-worn and rambling bar just off the highway, visible from any direction and impossible to miss. Laura had chosen it because it would be easy for me to find and because decades’ worth of college students had met and made bad choices there. True, we weren’t in college anymore and we weren’t meeting for the first time, but trust me: it’s never too late to make a bad choice you should’ve made long ago.

  40. Though not before borrowing a blanket, a hammer and sixty dollars from Laura, none of which she ever got back—a point she brings up whenever she feels the need to remind me of what an untrustworthy little prick and shameless hustler I’ve been for most of my life.

  41. You know, the freaks. Contortionists and geeks, guys who hammered nails into their faces and hung car batteries from their genital piercings. Good, honest showbiz folk.

  42. I know I said earlier that I never spoke to him again. You’ll see why that’s still basically accurate in a moment.

  43. It didn’t say this in the ad, of course, but it was implied.

  44. Their quackery and befuddlement ran the gamut from a small panic over my low blood pressure, which resulted in the novel (and delicious) treatment of prescribing me a pound of bacon a day, to some kind of stomach medication given to me by a doc more concerned with my nausea than my fucking unconsciousness, which had the unpleasant side effects of massive weight gain (eleven pounds in a week before I stopped taking it) and truly extraordinary flatulence. I was given some kind of pharmaceutical superspeed that jacked my heart rate up into the two hundreds while I was strapped upside down to a steel table, and something else that made me sleep about twenty-three and a half hours a day—getting up only to piss and wonder why it was always dark outside. Other than the bacon prescription, none of these did me any good at all.

  45. Those of you still reading can no doubt see where this notion has gotten me.

  46. Which isn’t to say she stopped trying to dump me or anything. In fact, she threatened to divorce me the first time she read those last couple paragraphs, claiming that it didn’t happen that way at all. I asked her what the problem was—did she remember there being tea cakes and unicorns and circling cherubs? Something I forgot? And she said that, yeah, I fucking forgot something. I forgot that there actually were rings. A matched set of silver six-dollar Celtic knotwork rings that she’d bought for us and brought with her to
the bar that night. I asked her if that meant she’d been planning on asking me to marry her, and she got all defensive, saying, no, she’d just bought the ring for me to replace one that my ex had given me, then bought one for herself because she thought it looked nice. Of course, I knew she was lying because whenever she lies, one of her ears turns bright red. But I let it go because that’s just the kind of sweet, sensitive motherfucker that I am. Which I told her, of course, saying, “I’ll let that go because that’s just the kind of sweet, sensitive motherfucker I am.”

  At which point she threatened to divorce me just as soon as she could find a decent lawyer, pounded upstairs and locked herself in the bedroom. So really, not that much has changed in our relationship since the beginning.

  But I have been wearing that six-dollar wedding ring every day since that night. I always wondered where it came from . . .

  47. I didn’t see this as a standard text or anything, just recognized the name, knew it was French and saw it had a lot of pretty pictures. And even though it all turned out badly in the end, I still have the book—a fantastic resource for would-be pâtissiers.

  48. Christmas is Southwestern cook’s slang for any plate getting both red and green chile together. The first time I saw it, I thought it was a leftover holiday special off some menu I’d never seen and was laughed at for twenty minutes after asking where the Christmas was, how it was cooked and why everyone was laughing at me like that.

  49. The byline was at the top of a feature story on organic foods, ironically enough, and the new definition of the word organic, which had taken the federal government years to decide on. I can remember reporting and writing the story in a complete terror—having no idea what I was doing, what, exactly, I was supposed to be doing, and afraid throughout that sooner or later someone would just come out and ask me what made me think I was some kind of journalist. I mean, shouldn’t a person have to have at least some kind of training before being loosed on the world with a micro recorder and a deadline? A degree, maybe, or some basic notion of how the job is done? Apparently not. The learning, in this case, was in the doing, and the only preparation I’d made was renting Absence of Malice from Blockbuster and falling asleep halfway through.