Give a Girl a Knife

by Amy Thielen

  “I’m just so sick of this crap!”

  Either she was taking the nearly empty vegetable boxes way too personally or she was choosing this moment to reveal something to me—but I shouldn’t have been surprised, because we were in the walk-in. Displays of emotion had no place in the kitchen, but the minute the walk-in cooler’s massive vault door sucked shut, the coast was clear. It was the private inner sanctum of the kitchen, equal to a therapist’s couch. Like wolves howling into the arctic night, cooks stood in the purifying freezing air and expressed themselves, snatching a moment to slowly grab herbs and share their grievances, to disgorge some burning kitchen gossip, or, like Julie, to angrily smash every nearly empty box to the floor and unleash her hot fury, which steamed off her in waves in the cold fan-powered wind.

  When she found a metal six-pan of white beans soaking, the wrinkly top beans rising up above the waterline, she started railing—not at me, but at some nonpresent incorrigible someone.

  “These beans are improperly soaked!” She could have just said that someone didn’t use enough water to cover them, but for her the incompetence went deeper than that. The amount of water wasn’t just insufficient, it was improper. It offended her kitchen ethic.

  “Not mine!” I backed up.

  “Shut up, I know they’re not yours. Do you cook beans?” she taunted, shaking the six-pan. We both knew I did not.

  Julie threw her head back in the air and spun for the exit. “Thirty-one years old and I’m still doing this fucking veg shit!” she said, punching the button to open the door. The air pressure gasped, releasing her to the outside.

  I made a quick deduction that she hadn’t been promoted to the meat station, recently vacated by the giant I-forget-his-name-now guy, the sweaty one who kept the tip of his rolled-up tongue pressed to his top lip during service in a state of pure concentration. For some reason, you rarely saw chefs assign women to cook the main protein, even if that woman was a sous chef. Sometimes the fish, but never the meat.

  Honestly, it didn’t make sense to me, though. It seemed that Chef Jean-François trusted Julie. We all liked him. He was a fair guy. I looked around the kitchen at all the cooks’ moving, bumping, swirling shapes and thought, It wasn’t that Jean-François, or most of the male chefs, meant to be sexist. What was going on here was actually worse. It was a failure of the imagination. Promoting a cook to a position of greater responsibility involved squinting at that cook to see if you could imagine him (or her), as they said, “stepping up” into the harder job. It was the lazy side of cowardice: when the chefs looked back in time to their own line-cooking youths, they fondly remembered their own chefs squinting at them and gauging them sufficiently ready to step up, so they promoted the guy. Pleased with themselves to close this circle, they failed to see that it was an unfair eternal cycle.

  Or maybe I was being too generous. They also knew the girls would take the sideways promotions to fill the stations that needed filling, good strong girls that they were. So capable and uncomplaining, just like a mother.

  When I walked out, Julie was heatedly discussing this issue with Faye, our thirty-something “junior” sous chef. They broke the huddle when they saw me. The last thing they wanted was an all-witch bitchfest. They were too smart to dilute their power by embracing their lessers.

  By the end of my seven years in Manhattan kitchens, I’d come to feel their pain. Like them, I nearly always worked the vegetable station and never the roast. Always a bridesmaid, never a groom. Only later did I realize that the vegetable station—the entremet—which I thought of as my gender-specific bondage, would be my revelation.

  —

  Soon after, Julie left to be the head chef of a restaurant in Brooklyn—I cheered both her success and her evacuation—and I took over her entremet position on the line.

  This was classic French food reimagined by Daniel Boulud, inarguably one of the great chefs in New York City. But due to the amount of covers we were doing, the multitude of people we were serving, it was the classics on speed. Escargots with garlic and parsley puree took three minutes. Chicken Grand-mère took two. There were two guys to my left, the Scot cooking fish, a new towering guy cooking meat—so much meat that he sliced the duck breasts and steaks with an electric knife, a tool I hadn’t seen used since my mom buzzed through the Thanksgiving turkey back home. To my right was the burger guy, responsible for about a quarter of the main courses that flew out the door. His fries were as crispy and light as balsa wood, and exquisite. I ate many, many, many of them. I was cooking all of the garnish for the meat and fish plates, and when we got slammed, Jean-François hopped onto the line to help dig me out.

  The first rush was over and I was replenishing the garnish for the chicken, which had experienced an uncharacteristic run in the first quarter of service. I was cooking fat blocks of bacon lardons in a sauté pan, starting them in a shallow bath of water, as the morning entremet had instructed me to do. Jean-François asked incredulously, “What tha hell are you dew-ing? Is this how you cook lard-ohns? In water?”

  He was right. Why was I cooking them in water? With a chill I thought: Because the morning entremet guy had told me to. How could I screw up bacon, the ingredient that defined my childhood, the thing I watched my mom cook with such devotion? She’d drilled me on the bacon. Don’t crowd the pan, she’d said. Don’t cook it so fast, or it sticks to the bottom and its juices boil away. Don’t cook it too slow or too much fat renders and it’ll taste dry. You want to tease out the fat. The bacon should swizzle steadily away in its own juices until its edges constrict like a shrunken wool sweater and turn coconut-brown. These visuals were hardwired into me.

  If I was screwing up the bacon, something was seriously out of whack. And at that moment I reached the very peak of my information-gathering phase; the stage of absorbing the lessons of others like an indiscriminate sponge had ended. Going forward, I’d follow my instincts.

  —

  Meat got all the glory, but the roast position seemed to me the most straightforward one in the kitchen. The protein had to be cooked to the correct temperature, no question; that was easy to see. And not that hard to do once you got in the groove, cooking identically sized portions of the same things night after night. Once it was sliced, it was truth time. The color told you whether to cook it harder the next time or ease up.

  The garnish, though—the starch and the vegetables and the sauces—were all more subtly make or break. Oversalted or undercooked yellow wax beans? Those are invisible mistakes. Lack of soulful cooking, also invisible. And, crucially, in order to sing on the plate, the starches and the vegetables need to contain some soul. Undercooked fish came right back to the kitchen for refiring and was grudgingly reaccepted a few minutes later, but if a diner bit on the tough core of a carrot they registered it the way a carpenter does a nail found in the center of a board: with supreme annoyance, but silently.

  Everyone, even the big bulky guys, referred to cooking the garnish well as cooking “with love,” a phrase rarely applied to the protein. The first time I heard it, I was taken aback. A big lumbering guy, reminiscing about his days cooking at Alain Ducasse in Monaco, said: “The guy I trained with, he cooked the vegetables with so much love…” and shook his head, as if trying to dislodge a big, fat imaginary tear in his eye, a kaleidoscope that turned the sauté pan before us into twelve swirling gems of vegetable-garnish loveliness.

  At the time I saw the world in much the same way, in terms of colors, sounds, and shifting textures: silken scarves of hot squash puree, dunes of homemade bread crumbs as mottled and cool to the touch as beach sand. Fresh parsley puree of a stinging green, pure liquid chlorophyll. The cackle of thyme and garlic hitting brown butter, its reassuring scent rising up. I also admired the seared golden-crowned scallops and the sliced pink duck breasts and the dark lobes of venison split open to reveal their savage red interiors—but I fell in love with the garnishes. In fact, nearly every emotion I felt during that time was connected to the food; my relatio
nships with humans were secondary. (And I say this with deepest apologies to Aaron because he knows it’s true.) My egg-shaped silver plating spoon was an extension of my hand, the plates an extension of my thoughts. I was pie-eyed for the garnishes and knew nothing of current events. Even now, when someone mentions a major happening from my line-cooking tenure, I often look at them blankly. (Hanging chads from that contested 2000 election? No flipping idea.)

  At the end of the day I fell into bed and a color factory of sauces and purees washed over me: the bright yolk yellow of the corn sauce; the milk-green of creamed favas; the inner glow of beets in red wine.

  This is what happens to a cook when she spends so many hours gaping at the contents of the pan before her, waiting for doneness. It’s not unlike the way a gardener watches her tomatoes ripen. Both end points mark the moment at which a vegetable contains as much liquid sweetness as it ever will. When perfectly cooked, a wedge of white turnip will drip juices as if its light purple veins run with fat, and its tissue will soften and taste like butter. On the raw side of things, an utterly ripe tomato at the end of August swings low on its vine, opalescent and suntanned gold at the shoulders, its voluptuous flesh nearly falling out of its skin.

  To me, becoming a cook meant being able to spot that point and know when the time came to stop—to pull it, slice it, and put it on a plate. Raw or cooked, that is the vegetable finale. And to me and all my entremet sisterhood—both the women and the men—it looks pretty much like happiness itself.

  5

  HERRING DARES AND CHICKEN TURTLES

  In 2003, Fort Greene, our neighborhood in Brooklyn, seemed bipolar, rapid-cycling between decline and boom—a symptom better known as gentrifying. The dusty-shelved corner bodega, an obvious front for a numbers joint, soon gave way to a slick sushi place. When the first posh pet-accessories store opened, we worried that our rent would soon be increasing and we were right: Two years after we moved from the illegal sublet across the hall into a cavernous two-floored space big enough for both our living space and Aaron’s studio, the landlord nearly doubled our rent.

  I wasn’t deflated, just pissed. We’d re-created a mini-Minnesota in the building. Not long after Matt’s death, Aaron’s sister, Sarah, came home from the Peace Corps and moved into our second bedroom, and Sara Woster, our painter friend from Minneapolis, had moved into our vacated studio across the hall. (We called them Sister-Sarah and Woster, respectively.) Together with Rob, who came over to smoke cigars with Aaron in his studio a few times a week, we expat Minnesotans dropped into one another’s apartments with frequent, casual, sitcom ease. We all spent much of our free time going to art openings. Rob was doing well in the art world; he had a gallery in Chelsea, had made it into the Whitney Biennial, and was selling sculptures for big sums of money, but he and Aaron were still working carpentry day jobs together and working on artwork at night. On Thursday and Friday nights after openings, I’d meet up with all of them at the late-late after-party, pulling up with greasy hair, my heavy cook’s bag tilting me crooked, and try to catch up to their loose-jointed states by ordering a shot and a beer chaser, which I was usually too tired to finish.

  But when New York bore down its realities, the time came for us all to scatter and find new homes.

  Aaron and I found a new apartment one subway stop farther away from Manhattan, in Prospect Heights. It was a one-bedroom above a deli on Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn’s main thoroughfare, but the immediate neighborhood surrounding the building felt desolate and uneasy. The streets were occupied by scrappers pushing shopping carts full of cans and metal to the recycling center one block over. Outside the front door stood a thick cottonwood tree with a curious wet spot in the crevice of its first branch. Eventually we figured out why this spot was perpetually moist and named it “the piss tree”—for it provided all the neighborhood men on walkabout a shady place to relieve themselves. But the apartment came with a double-car garage at street level, big enough for Aaron’s studio, and a large private roof deck. The rent hovered just above our upper limit. I wasn’t sure. As we walked away from the building in the pounding rain, weighing our options, I saw something skittering to the side of my vision: a huge rat squeezing under the garage door.

  We’d been in New York for more than three years, so I wasn’t shocked by the rat. It just compounded the dimness of the moment, the blows of the giant raindrops on my boots. Where Aaron saw hope and a nice studio space, I saw a future shackled to high-rent digs on a dreary corner. My perspective could just as easily have been positive. We weren’t destitute. Aaron was working a steady carpentry job that paid well, even though making art was still his main gig; every night he whacked away at a new group of sculptures. He’d just begun to paint the surfaces of his carved bas-reliefs black and to rub the points with metallic graphite so that the wood looked like poured iron. They were growing into a serious collection, starting to look like deranged frescoes made by a mad hermit in a hideout. He’d been showing in gallery group shows, but still, art wasn’t paying the rent. My cooking job at db bistro sure didn’t pay much. In this neighborhood, I wouldn’t be able to ride the subway home after work and walk the three dark empty blocks from the subway alone; I’d have to blow money on nightly cabs.

  “The apartment is pretty nice,” I said. “But that garage is a shithole.”

  “I’ll clean up the garage,” Aaron said. “It would be a great studio.”

  “What if we can’t afford it?”

  “What does that mean? I’m making good money. You’re working.”

  “I mean, what if you don’t. What if you get a show and don’t work,” I said, not really questioning but dropping statements like bombs.

  “You mean what if I become a working artist with a gallery and don’t make any money? That doesn’t make any sense.” He looked at me with bewilderment. “That’s what a working artist is: working.”

  As we walked he let this sink in and then spun his head and groaned. I couldn’t believe I’d said it out loud, either. It was exactly as he had suspected, the buried tension that hummed between us. I wasn’t buying the dream. I would have argued that I was questioning the sustainability of the dream, but I knew that all he could hear was the sound of my heavy boots stomping on plan A.

  “No, no.” I backpedaled. “It’s not that I don’t believe in you, it’s that I don’t believe in the art world. I don’t know if I believe in…” I keeled through the puddles and the water flew up in protest. I shook my head quickly, to dislodge the thoughts that were rising up in my head: Maybe I just want a normal life. Boring and predictable. Salaries. Vacation time. Savings.

  “Listen, Amy,” he said. “This is what I am. I’m an artist. I don’t do anything else. I’m not really equipped to do anything else. This is what I went to school for, what I trained to be.”

  I stood there silently. I knew his work was really good, better than what was in a lot of the shows we saw. Aaron had spent all of these years deriding the notion of a backup plan—equating it to a dilution of one’s purpose—and I had always agreed in the abstract, but now we were living it, without any kind of meaningful or realistic plan B. He was a sculptor; I was a cook. We had no financial cushion.

  “I can’t believe you actually said you don’t believe in it,” he said, meaning our dreams, the reasons we had moved to New York in the first place.

  I was skeptical, but when he put it that way, I didn’t want to be the one who, twenty years from now, could be blamed for derailing our lives onto the secondary track. I wanted our first choices to work. “I do believe in it. I do. We should take the place.”

  He nodded, didn’t look at me, and briskly entered the subway stairs. He didn’t believe me.

  —

  We rented the apartment and, soon after, Aaron’s sister, Sarah, and her husband, Paul, moved into the apartment next door. Eventually Aaron would cut a swinging door into the fence between our adjoining roof decks, but first he cleaned up the garage. It was a serious project that involved s
crewing cement boards around its perimeter to block the rat superhighway leading into the deli next door. The rats, effectively priced out of their old neighborhood, quickly found new homes. Aaron whitewashed the floors and the walls, and one night we set up a table on which I laid a tablecloth and a landscape of fancy appetizers. He opened the garage door to the street. Just a month after that day in the rain, we were having a housewarming party and I was serving raw-milk cheeses in the rodents’ former abode. What a taunt.

  Upstairs on the vast garage-roof deck we erected a verdant ode to our rural life back home: We planted rows of peppers and tomatoes and cucumbers in empty Sheetrock buckets and constructed a raised bed for herbs, and in the center we dragged over an adolescent maple tree in a whiskey barrel in the hope that its canopy would someday shade our picnic table. Aaron installed a tightly wound screen door on the entrance from the kitchen and its quick slam behind us was like the punctuation to the rural language I knew.

  A horde of friends came to our housewarming party. Even with people divided among the apartment, the deck, and the studio, the place felt hopping. A West Indian timpani band started going through its jubilant set in the lot directly behind ours, having rented the space in preparation for the Flatbush West Indian parade. They practiced nightly at 10 P.M., but this night it seemed as if they were playing just for us.

  After midnight we heard this series of soft explosions, maybe fireworks, and through the open garage door we saw a group of teenagers running swiftly past. Ten soft pops, then more, almost too many to be a shooting—but it was. Aaron immediately slammed down the garage door, and instantaneously everyone began asking me for the number of our local car service. We were so new to the neighborhood, I didn’t even know it yet.

  When we opened the door a few minutes later to let people out to meet their cars, we saw that Matt, our friend from Minnesota, had been stuck outside when the garage door closed. He was still crouching behind the piss tree, all 6 feet and 4 inches of him not exactly hidden.