Blood, Bones & Butter

by Gabrielle Hamilton

  I had tried smoking filterless cigarettes, swearing like a sailor, pissing in bottles, and banging out twice as much as my male cohorts. And I’d also given lipstick and giggling a try, even claiming to not be able to lift a stockpot so that the guys would help me. Neither strategy is better than the other.

  It was not until I opened my own place that I realized how present and ongoing the struggle to be female in a professional kitchen had been. It’s like the hood during service. Everybody talks about the heat in a kitchen, and the heat, without doubt, is formidable. It’s a powerful opponent. But for me the real punisher is the exhaust hood, with the suction so powerful that it sucks up all the metal bound filters from their spots and bangs them against the lip of the hood. The big mechanic kick of the fan belt starting up, the unified clank of the filters rising—like a Rockettes kick, all in unison—then followed by eighteen draining hours of heavy-duty vacuum hum, over which orders are barked, dishes are clanked, pots are slammed around, and the stereo blasts. Then finally at midnight or one, after the disher has turned off the fryer, someone turns off the hood and a profound silence descends. I never realize how much space the noise of the hood takes up in my mind and head—that heavy vacuum sound—until I shut it off, and total bliss and relief set in.

  In the same way, when I opened my own restaurant, I enjoyed such an absence of boy-girl jostling that I only then understood that, all through my entire work life, I had been working a double shift. I had been working the same shift as my peers, with all of its heat and heft and long hours on your feet. But I had been doing a second job all along, as well—that of constantly, vigilantly figuring out and calibrating my place in that kitchen with those guys to make a space for myself that was bearable and viable. Should I wear pink clogs or black steel-toe work shoes? Lipstick or Chapstick? Work double hard, double fast, double strong, or keep pace with the average Joe? Swear like a line cook or giggle like a girl?

  Meanwhile, the parsley needs to be chopped, and the veal chops seared off. There is, still, the work itself to do.

  Someone on the panel to my right said, out loud into the microphone, “Women are more clever than men.”

  And then, as if inspired, the woman to my left said, “Women are smarter than men.”

  I was feeling hot and insecure about the oatmeal on my sweater to begin with, and was still reeling and deep in thought about the crying question, so I had said only a few words so far into the microphone, and I felt like while I had withdrawn for those few minutes, this group of women, my sister panelists, had set up camp and staked out the territory in a very different place than I wanted to be. This was not double-skim half-decaf vanilla latte embarrassing, but a different kind of bothersome.

  Ann said, “Women don’t like to come out from behind the stove and be a presence on the floor of their restaurants.”

  Helene said, “Women have better palates than men.”

  Odessa said, “Women are more nurturing than men.”

  Nora said, “Women are not competitive. They shy away from the limelight.”

  I slumped in my chair, dying.

  We attract and hire a lot of female cooks at Prune because word got out in the industry that if you wanted a nice place to work without the feel of hostile male colleagues, you should come here—Prune likes women. That is not technically true—we like anybody who gets the job done—and that happens to be the profile of many hardworking and qualified women who have passed through my kitchen over the years. And it is sure that if you work at Prune, you will be handling the meat and the fish as much as the guy next to you; you will not be shoved into the pastry or the salad station in perpetuity. And you will probably enjoy the way that being in the company of many women renders your own femaleness almost inconsequential, such a non-issue that it is never a distraction from the work itself. But I could never truthfully, or proudly, utter the sentences these women were letting fly out of their mouths. If anything, I have come to love the men who also feel that the kitchen is a better place when women are allowed to work in it, the men who feel that if any part of society is abused, that it demeans the rest of the society. Those are the men and women I want to spend eighteen hours a day with over a hot stove under a relentless humming hood.

  Identity politics never ends up going the distance for me. The categories tend to fall apart on me when I rely on them too heavily—gay people, women, whatever. Every time I think I can rely on a group or a category—like my sister women in the industry or my sister lesbians or whatever—Ruth Reichl frosts me at an event, for the seventh time, or the women on my panel say ridiculous things about women’s superiority or the lesbians go out and start voting Republican—and the whole thing caves in for me, and I start to mistrust my own kind. Especially when they start saying things like “Women are better than men.”

  I had really checked out of the panel. I was so caught up in a livid confusion deep in my own mind that I wasn’t even listening to the panel anymore. I get adrenaline rushes sometimes that are so thick I feel as if I’ve blacked out. When I could hear again, I heard a young woman ask, “How do you manage family and career? I want to get married and have kids but I am afraid I won’t be hired as a chef if I say that to an employer, and I’m worried I won’t even have a boyfriend anymore if I have to work the hours I’ve heard about.”

  To her question, my sister panelists gave peppy, cheerful “You can do it!!” kind of crap answers—completely generic, unspecific answers—

  And before I knew it, I had reversed my own allegiances and was now in love with all of the CIA students and totally dismayed by almost half of my peers on the panel. I wanted to hang out with the students and gripe about women panelists. I now wanted to answer all of their good, valid questions and I suddenly felt that the conference was highly pertinent and overdue!

  I really started itching when this sixty-year-old woman droned on into the mic to her twenty-year-old audience about the joys of building relationships with local, sustainable farmers, as if these young cooks were about to enter jobs that would put them anywhere near to the sourcing of the restaurant’s ingredients. I was thinking about the pleasure, the sheer pleasure of killing the line on a busy night, setting those tickets up and knocking them down, of the knives laid out neatly on the magnet, the worn wooden cutting boards, the feel of the cool, silky flour every time you dip in with the measuring cup, of sitting down with everybody after work and drinking cocktails telling grossly distorted tales of your own heroics on the line that night. I felt I had to testify to this pleasure, to speak about the total satisfaction of killing the line, the way scrubbing down your station afterward puts your mind right, about “the third shift,” the drinks after work. I wanted to say that we are all not sitting around in our naturally woven fibers eating our organic quinoa salads and thinking up our next sustainable charity project. Some of us are actually cooking. And enjoying cooking. But I had shut down and couldn’t muster for this part of the panel, where my supposed peers were gassing on about themselves, giving these young women the impression that each day in a kitchen is like going to some priggish church.

  They were speaking as women who were thirty years into an industry, and the young women we were meant to address had yet to experience even their first day of it.

  Why didn’t a single one of us mention cooking? Why didn’t we say, If you want your cooking career to be recognized, be a good cook! Cook, ladies, cook.

  Defeated, I thought about what I had had to do to arrange getting to the conference that day in the first place. If I had just told them about that small journey, from my apartment with two sleeping children to their campus, as the chef and owner of a restaurant and the mother of two little kids, wouldn’t just that answer all of their questions about family and career and motherhood?

  If I told them about the pan-pipe player and the full day in which I would never see my boys awake. If I told them how I joke that I now pity the women who start families who have not been chefs. How I wonder earnestly, ho
w does the office worker woman who is so accustomed to her forty-hour workweek, her daily lunch hour, her inbox, and her out-box, handle all the pain and the physical contortions, and the mayhem of suckling, crying, ear infections, and working if she has never had to skin a live eel, placate the angry patron at Table 7 who finds his rabbit a bit stringy, and carry an epileptic line cook off the mats who has suffered a grand mal seizure during service? How will the woman who is accustomed to great personal and bodily integrity suffer the cannibalizing feeling that nursing constantly can leave you with, as if you were being eaten alive, not in huge monster-gore chunks, but like a legion of soft, benign caterpillars makes lace of a leaf?

  I thought of telling them how changing a diaper reminds me, every time, of trussing a chicken. How sleepless nights and long grueling hours under intense physical discomfort were already part of my daily routine long before I had children. How labeling every school lunch bag, granola bar, juice box, extra sweater, and nap blanket with permanent Sharpie is like what we’ve been doing every day for thirty years, labeling the foods in our walk-ins. How being the chef and owner of a restaurant means you have already, by definition, mastered the idea of “systems,” “routines,” and “protocols” so that everyone who works for you can work smart-hard rather than work stupid-hard. So that by the time you are setting up your household and preparing yourself for adding children, you have a tendency toward this kind of order, logic, and efficiency.

  Multitasking—answering questions on the phone, cooking something, and trying to monitor a line cook, while hearing your name repeated possibly six or seven hundred times in less than eight hours—is exactly like trying to run a family and a business. A choking patron, a grease fire, a badly cut employee—once you have been through that, figuring out how you will get your injured child to the emergency room of a hospital in the nearest Italian town where you are alone on vacation should come a little easier to you.

  Not to give the impression that if you’ve been a chef, then adding parenthood to your day is just as easy as running a lamb shank special on your menu. Days go very badly and there is never balance. Everybody gets shorted, everybody gets hurt, and you, the mom, not the least. But it does give you a leg up, I often think, because the restaurant family is a perfect starter family. It’s such an accurate in-flight simulator that I have grown to feel sorry for anybody who enters parenthood and a domestic project without having first run a restaurant. From the earliest stages of family life when you are pregnant and uncomfortable and not sleeping well at night, the parallels to running a restaurant are almost over-obvious and all of that work you’ve done on your feet all day, with back problems from lifting so much heavy stuff or standing in one place for so long, with sometimes no time to eat or even to pee, and not sleeping much at all because of your commitment to your restaurant will all feel incredibly familiar and doable. And then when the suckling critter arrives, you will just fold that into your day like you have all the other leaking, sticky, oozy fluids you’ve been handling for the past decade. Every time you have to change the diaper of a noncompliant kid you will be reminded of every chicken you’ve ever trussed and every eel you’ve ever had to wrangle. Petulant adolescents who just want to borrow money, raid the refrigerator, and talk on the phone with their friends about what a bitch you are? That will be a piece of cake once you have managed a front-of-house staff, denied the bartender her vacation request, and uneasily loaned the new line cook her first and last months rent deposit on her new West Village apartment, knowing well you will never see that money again.

  I wanted to interrupt my fellow panelists now going on about how women cook better than men, and how they’re faster and cleaner and smarter, and just tell this story to the young woman in the fifteenth row. But their essentialist drone drove me to silence. And I saved my tears for the train ride home.

  Butter

  17

  CARMELUCCIA CAME ONE AFTERNOON TO PAY A VISIT. WE HAD ARrived in Leuca just a few days before, Michele and I and our two kids; the new one, Leone, while only a couple of months old, lavishly adored. We were just settling in, like butter on toast, to our annual July vacation. I unpacked our suitcases and stored them under the antique iron bed; Michele walked into town to get il giornale and i cornetti. Carmeluccia arrived with eight of her own eggs, biscotti she had made, a little hooded bath towel for Leone, and about a kilo of homemade orecchiette, “little ears,” and minchiareddhi, “little penises,” still damp and warm from her hands. Carmeluccia, in Michele’s family’s history of “help,” came before Rosaria and after Pasqualina. There has always been The Woman. The Woman who comes each day and helps with the cooking and the cleaning and the ironing. I have known only Rosaria in the years that I’ve been coming here, but I met Pasqualina, now in her seventies, one year when Michele took us all to pay a visit. She was, even in the depth of summer, all in widow’s black with heavy stockings and a woolen cardigan, and she showed us a couple of her own rabbits in her freezer, killed and skinned with her own hands.

  I vowed to start my long arduous application for Italian citizenship by marriage as soon as I got back to the States when I saw those rabbits. In my vision of my own old age, I too, want to be shelling fava beans and skinning rabbits and having the people I have cared for stop by for a glass of cold tea. I want to grow old in Italy.

  Carmeluccia, in her sixties now, the woman between Pasqualina and Rosaria, arrived to pay us a visit in the late afternoon.

  She is stout and red in the face with good meaty hands and round hips and ankles so sturdy that they looked kind of wrong in the dressy heeled shoe that she was wearing. She was in a clean simple dress without earrings or makeup and wore only a gold chain that had a cross and a saint’s medallion and her wedding band. There was much kissing and hugging when she arrived and great koochy koo-ing with Leone and an extravagant display of amazement at how big Marco had grown since we were here last year. Every single Italian woman I have ever met is perfect with children, and Carmeluccia is more perfect than them all.

  We all sat in the parlor, on the good chairs, kind of pleasantly staring at each other. Michele disappeared to the kitchen to spoon out pink and white ice cream into four glass bowls, place them on a tray with the real silver spoons, and as if he were again the thirteen-year-old boy in short pants that Carmeluccia cleaned up after, who was forced to comb his hair and kiss the ladies’ hands and to serve the visiting guests, he came around to each of us and politely served us the ice cream from a tray.

  And there we sat, three women accustomed to work from the moment we wake until the moment we lay down our heads, not quite seamlessly transformed into gentle ladies by a tray, a cushioned chair, and the polite sharing of a hot afternoon’s bowl of ice cream with silver spoons. Marco splashed around on the terrace in his little blow-up swimming pool, Leone snoozed in the linen basket, and Alda and I sat with Carmeluccia and they made conversation while I just listened and tried to decipher the Italian. I couldn’t understand but a few words of it and I wondered if they were speaking to each other in local dialect, but even so, or especially so without language, I could see that we were all kind of stiff and uncomfortable, with not that much to say once children and various family members had been asked about. During a pretty significant lull, I admired Carmeluccia’s orecchiette, and asked her a few questions about how she made them, while we finished up the last bites of our ice cream.

  “Do you want me to show you? I can show you! It’s nothing, Signora, flour and water! Come, let me show you!”

  And within a few minutes we have escaped the parlor and are all back in the kitchen where we are all most comfortable, rolling up our sleeves, forming a little circle around her while she prepares to make pasta at the kitchen table.

  “Donna Alda,” she said, “where are you keeping your flour now? Where is the flour? We need the durum flour, only the durum flour.”

  I smiled to think that she believed it possible that the location of the flour could possibly have changed
since she was with the family. The flour, as it had been for decades, was kept in The Cabinet, and I retrieved it for her.

  Without even removing her wedding band, she dumped a small pile of the flour directly onto the table, made a well in the center, and added water. There was nothing to measure. She began to knead the dough as familiarly as you or I might pet the family dog. The dough stuck to her fingers at first and she scraped it off and worked it back into the greater mass of dough. Alda found an apron, and from behind, like a tailor draping a client for a custom suit, tied it around Carmeluccia’s waist, barely disrupting the kneading. I don’t know what they are saying, but conversation has really picked up, and now Rosaria is with us, holding baby Leone and offering advice on texture and humidity of dough, and Alda, of course, has her own advice and opinions. Even Michele, who is so far removed from the time when he made pasta like an Italian, the fifty-two-year-old doctor who’s lived in America for the past nearly thirty years and who now shops exclusively and with great American enthusiasm for discounts and bargains at Home Depot, The Gap, and Costco, even he wants to weigh in. Through the great din of opinions, without oil or salt or eggs, Carmeluccia produces a soft, pliable, elastic dough. It is simply flour and water.

  I have never been able to identify or understand my class. I think we were raised as bourgeoisie but I am not even sure what the term means—shop owners?—and I remember it being spit out in the most derogatory way in the books that I loved most when I was in college. I think it’s considered loathsome. I’m comfortable upstairs and downstairs. I do low-paying manual labor and always have but I’m educated and came to own my own business when I was thirty-four years old. We owned our house growing up but tenuously, so tenuously that we jokingly referred to the bank man who carried my father through a lot of dark valleys as “Uncle” Bill. But we traveled in the summers and drank champagne at holidays. I know which fork to use with which course because I have set and cleared so many tables, not because I have sat at so many. I employ a full-time babysitter in New York but I’m so awkward about it, it’s so new for me, that I get the skillet onto the stovetop and cook the chicken nuggets, and finish all the dinner dishes and clean out the bathtub of tubby toys and soap scum and sweep the floors, so that she can spend the day watching cartoons with the kids. I have even done all of those things one-handed while using my other hand to hold my nursing infant like a football. Cooking dinner, sweeping the floor, and nursing an infant simultaneously? I have done it. A lot. So that when the babysitter arrives, I have erased any inconvenience for the woman because I’m so uncomfortable with the whole scenario. Americans are raised to be uncomfortable with the scenario and we do it all wrong—we confuse the whole thing with class and status and money, and we pay shitty wages, under the table, without insurance or job security and way too frequently with disrespect for the people who do this work. Or we go the opposite direction and act our noblesse oblige, and when we empty our closets we offer our hand-me-downs, and we inquire after the health and well-being of the nanny’s own children, who are usually back in Honduras and being raised by their grandmothers.