Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

by Gabrielle Hamilton

  I am suddenly wondering what I’ve been so afraid of and what I’ve so diligently kept my distance from these past twenty years. A quiet internal frenzy starts in which I try to recall and to catalogue all of the reasons I might have ended my relationship with this perfectly nice woman who has roasted chickens, built a fire, and who is now casually fixing herself a disgusting wine cooler that would’ve been way beneath her when last I knew her. To be clear, all of our “differentness” when we were growing up was not merrily enjoyed in a live-and-let-live, à chaque’un son goût kind of benevolence. Something in our household was being arduously protected. Our shit was fiercely defended and prioritized. Everybody around us went to the Jersey Shore for vacation but my mother would never. All of our school friends lived in plain houses with a swing set in the backyard, but we lived in the burned-out ruins of a nineteenth-century silk mill with pigeons and bats, and said unkind things about the cookie-cutter developments called Sunset Drive and Village Two. Most people ate Mrs. Paul’s frozen fish sticks and Kraft macaroni and cheese and Oscar Mayer bologna, but we ate coq au vin, sesame bread sticks, and le puy lentils for less money than the store-bought stuff. Other people had rec rooms and television, but we were forced to entertain ourselves outdoors, even in the rain, from waking to bedtime. Other people threw all of their garbage into one big bin, but we composted, recycled, and separated, and drove it all to the center. Other kids got Partridge Family lunchboxes with Snack Pack puddings, but we got ratatouille sandwiches on homemade bread in oily brown paper lunch bags. And we were taught by her to see ourselves as infinitely better for our dedication to high culture.

  I’ve been trying for twenty years to rid myself of this Gallic snobbism. When I see my now seventy-something-year-old mom pour herself a tumbler of wine cooler, the oppressive heavy wet burden of snow slides off the roof of my soul in one giant thawing chunk and suddenly I feel clear, light, and permissive. Marco is asleep in the basket, but I risk waking him and get down and give him a long, soft kiss on the head. This fucking bitch, I think, but without any of the electric adrenaline I felt when I first thought this sentiment thirty years earlier. This is a bait and switch.

  I quietly understand. I have developed deep rigid grooves and stonelike calluses around these perfectionisms, elitisms, excellences, and impeccablenesses—these high standards of nothingness to which we were held—that she no longer even cares about or holds herself to. In the intervening years since I last knew this woman, she has softened and changed. Casually, idly, by happenstance, I discover that my mother now drinks blackberry schnapps mixed with jug wine and isn’t even embarrassed or apologetic, and suddenly I ache with a retrospective shame. I send one blanket megaton apology out into the universe, smoothing my lips against Marco’s forehead. I feel like I could have been so much kinder to so many people if I had just known this earlier about her.

  When Michele and Marco and I leave the following morning, there is thankfully no mention of the future. I don’t promise to return and she doesn’t ask me to. She holds my hand and tugs me outside behind her house and weepily shows me the tree she has planted for Todd, and I try to take my hand back because I still feel uncomfortable when she touches me. I hold Marco so close to my chest I can feel him swallow and breathe as I kiss my mother good-bye on both cheeks.

  15

  EVERY TIME I GET PREGNANT, AT FIRST, IT’S JUST FUN NEWS FOR THE staff of my restaurant to gossip about. There is no inkling of the reality attached to the announcement: “Hey guys, I’m pregnant.” And then as I grow and waddle, I’m just an amusement for the crew; an excuse for a betting pool—gender and birth date—and a great entertainment as I try to bend over to pick some vegetable peel off the floor when I can’t even touch my own toes. But when I started to really get close to the reality of my first son, Marco, and out to here with a belly, my sous chef at the time, Matt, a thirty-seven-year-old former Marine, fell apart in my arms with an anxiety attack so severe I had to rush him to the VA hospital. Hustling him to the ER entrance on Twenty-third Street as best as I was able in my condition—huge and breathless—we soon, fortunately, were reassured that his EKG was absolutely normal and his psychosomatic heart attack was all in his head. I left him on the hospital gurney to rest and recover, in the capable hands of the VA nurses, and walked back to work.

  It is true that he would soon be under a lot of pressure to keep the restaurant in order while I was away having my baby and nursing for the first few weeks, and it is also true that his much respected and loved mother had just died. Equally true is that within days of his mother’s passing, my own brother Todd died suddenly, of a rare and massive stroke, and it is true, as well, that I was just ten days away from giving birth for my first time. Either way, in the end, it was me who worked the egg station at brunch that weekend. When I found myself down on all fours after that pummeling brunch service, cleaning pancake batter off the reach-in fridge with a green scrubby while my belly grazed the mats and my staff seemed calm and assured that the ship still had a captain, I wondered, uneasily, about who I’d become.

  At the time, I was proud of my capableness, my strength, my dry-eyed and clinical receipt of the news of Todd, not to mention my handily earned boasting rights over Matt, which I later flaunted, kind of behind his back, with a studied nonchalance.

  Whatever. Matt went down. Fake heart attack. But I worked eggs at thirty-nine weeks pregnant. I shrugged, as if it were nothing to speak of. I sounded like one of those defensive eternal line cooks, with nowhere to ever go from there, who still pulls back his sleeves to proudly show off his burns, when all of us who have deepened our focus and pushed through to greater accomplishments know that a little experience and a finessed game could keep your arms relatively free of burns.

  In the week preceding the birth of my second child, Leone, twenty-one months later, a line cook responsible for five shifts a week quit unexpectedly. Connor, a kind of bland and amiable dude, came to the office and said, “Umm, listen, I’ve been made an offer I can’t refuse.”

  I had been fantasizing about a modest and crazily spontaneous three-day getaway to a beach place, just to get a tiny break before the onslaught of a new infant and the constant suckling that makes me feel cannibalized, and the unhinge-ing I experience from sleep deprivation when I never hit REM sleep for the better part of a year.

  In my mind, if I could book it online and find a maternity bathing suit fast enough, I would ignore the doctor’s no-air travel rule and score a lightning breakaway to one of those all-inclusive resorts in Turks & Caicos, with a swim-up bar where you don’t need to carry any money. I knew it was a fantasy but still, in it, my little Marco could have breakfast with Big Bird and make cookies in the afternoon with Cookie Monster while Mamma spent the afternoon at the maternal massage spa, the sun-soaked beach, and the virgin rum drink lounge.

  But with Connor standing in my basement office giving notice on this cold and rainy April afternoon, I knew, realistically, where my next three days would be spent.

  “Hmm,” I said, looking up from the schedule I was just finishing, which outlined the next six weeks and which had Connor featured in at five shifts a week, as we had just confirmed and talked about, at length, merely days before. “Tell me more.”

  “Well,”—he sighed—“it’s like hardly any hours and it’s like triple the pay.”

  This is exactly as much as I need to hear. He is dead to me. There are more words, about fifteen minutes’ worth, but I hear nothing. I loathe the way he offers this line of reasoning—triple the pay and hardly any work!—to me, to me who has thrived her whole life on triple the work for hardly any pay, obliviously expecting it to be the salient point that cements my opinion of him as a decent guy who—as if fatally—has an opportunity that cannot be resisted.

  “How can I turn that down?” he asks, holding out his hands palms up. “You know?”

  “You know” is that horrible interrogative at the end of a sentence that demands your complicity in the story. But I’m
staring at the guy, days away from my due date, thinking: Well, of course you can turn it down, bonehead. You say: I’m sorry, I am not available for that job at this time as I just made a commitment to my employer for another six months. Would you please consider me again in six months’ time?

  But I say nothing. I listen to his earnest and apologetic speech, which he has rehearsed on the subway, and feel his hot air blow over me as if it were the Caribbean breeze I am being deprived of.

  Without even flinching, I say, “Okay, so, can you give me two weeks? Is this a standard two weeks?”

  He looks down at his hands, “Um, well, I wanted to tell you last Monday but you seemed so busy so it’s almost two weeks but not totally. My last day will be not this but the coming Sunday.”

  I look back at the calendar. That leaves me eight days to have a baby and fill Connor’s shifts.

  While I can do kind of extraordinary things with my own body under some pretty intense pressure, even I can’t cover a line cook from a hospital bed with four stitches freshly sewn into my perineum.

  “Okay, Connor. Sunday, then. Thanks.”

  I can generally punt—pretty painlessly—with one man down, but in this case, it was supposed to be me who was the one man down. Connor put us at two down. That made me nervous. The weekend passed, and on Sunday night, I discussed this with my sous chef, Alexis. She said, about Connor, “Ugh. Good riddance to that tool.” Practically spitting on my clogs.

  “Okay, I agree with you philosophically, but pragmatically, that will mean seven days straight for you and six shifts in a row for one of the others. At least until I hear back from some of the calls I placed.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “We can handle it.”

  I am calmed somewhat by her reassurance that she can handle the seven-day week and wrangling the rest of the cooks into a six-day week and the lag until we find a replacement quickly. These things are harder in a small restaurant where we can’t carry any excess payroll; it’s not like a huge operation with unpaid cooking school externs all over the place and all you have to do is move them around and promote a few of the salad girls. It would be made a little easier, obviously, if I were just the male chef husband of a wife who was about to be having a baby and not the actual female chef about to be having the actual baby, because he could just take a few days or a week off and then get back into the game. And it would be better still if I had one of those rock-solid marriages where both working parents living in the same harmonious home take on the responsibilities of parenting equally, but we were still living apart and parenting alone, in a kind of pass-the-baton relay and thanking the stars for the full-time babysitter who was the true third parent in our little off-kilter arrangement.

  On Monday afternoon, possibly three days away from my due date but none of us knowing for sure, as it was just an educated guess on the obstetrician’s part, Annabel, a skilled line cook with a good palate, arrived for work, late and breathless. I was at my cutting board at the downstairs prep table, making a family meal for the evening shift. I was so profoundly out of breath with the baby’s foot so far up into my guts that there was no room for my lungs to expand to full capacity, and I was winded just standing still. My apron string was tied up under my breasts like an empire waistline but I walked to the sink and back like a mailed and mounted soldier who has just had a long tough match on the jousting field—and not like a maiden in the palace. I said, in three or four breaths, across the prep table, where Annabel had set up her board and put out her knives, “Hey, Annabel … did you … hear … Connor’s news?”

  And she said, across the prep table, as casually as we might say, “I’ll blanche the beans, guys,” she said, “Oh yes. And I’ve got news, too.”

  I looked up and stopped working on the birds I was deboning.

  I said, “You mean, news? Like, you’re-giving-notice news?”

  “Yup, that’s what I mean,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  “Do you mean, like, giving notice as in two weeks’ news, right here across the prep table, in front of everybody, like it’s nothing?” I managed in a miraculous single breath.

  And she said, “Yes.”

  The room came to a painful halt. I stood there with two other cooks and the pastry chef, and there was such a surge of stunned electricity in the room that the lightbulbs practically flashed. Before I could stop myself, I burst out laughing, and then said, as if it were just a mere fact, “You fucking suck so much.”

  In the throbbing silence, I put down my knife and walked out. I went to my office and with the door closed stared futilely at the schedule. Then I called my obstetrician and scheduled my labor for Leone.

  He may have naturally been born on the twenty-seventh or the twenty-fifth or the twenty-ninth—I was healthy and there were no complications, and Dr. Kalish was going to give me two weeks on either side of the estimated due date for Leone’s arrival. But I got so unraveled by the announcements of these two line cooks just days apart, coupled with so many other unknowns and things out of my control—like, for example, how I would chef a jammed, brimming restaurant and take care of a twenty-month-old and a nursing infant—that I felt, in the moment, like the only thing I could control was the birth of my second son. “Okay, come in at six a.m. and we’ll get you checked in and then we’ll start to induce. I’ll be there no later than eight-thirty.” My obstetrician was matter-of-fact; I felt like I was placing my meat order with the butcher, over the phone. I am often slow in catching up to the times, but even so, I still cannot even grip this idea: With nothing more than pitocin in your IV drip, you can sooner control the date and time of the birth of a human being—the gushing entry into the great blue world of a whole new person—than you can the scheduling of a few line cooks in your operation. Leone Tommaso Fuortes would be born on April twenty-fourth. By appointment. Like getting your hair cut or your dog groomed.

  I hung up the phone and sat at my desk a few seconds, staring at the schedule in front of me, realizing abruptly how passed-over Annabel felt when she didn’t get promoted to sous a few weeks before, and thinking about some of the tricks I have for these kinds of occasional, egregious cook shortages. I can limit the menu, run a two-person line, call in a freelance catering cook to punt for a week or two. I grabbed a black Sharpie and wrote myself a To-Do list for all of it. In twenty years of chronic, compulsive list making I had authored some that have been downright Beckettian in their sequencing, and it is exactly the anomaly in that sequencing—the non sequitur—that makes some of those To-Do lists earn a spot in your box of keepsakes. One of my recent favorites had been:

  Doctor aioli

  Find pH strips for dish machine

  Why is meringue weeping?

  Braise rabbit

  Tell Dad I’m pregnant

  Clean out shellfish tags

  Tweak gremolata ratio

  But this one, written in a calm and steady hand, surpassed and out-surrealed all other To-Do lists in my life thus far lived.

  Get w/AT and limit menu

  Train CR on a 2-man line

  Call Roode for fill-in?

  Have baby

  Tell brunch crew vinaigrette too acidic

  Pick up white platters

  Change filters in hoods

  Figure out pomegranate syrup

  And I did, in fact, do all of that, and the syrup got figured out and the platters got picked up and the hood filters got changed and the baby was born and the ship sailed, with a diminished crew and a severely handicapped captain. But most urgently, besides listing what to do and when to do it, alone in that office with the door closed, I sat trying to figure out how to leave my office and re-enter a room full of keenly watching cooks, and get back to my cutting board and family meal, without appearing devastated or even dented. The staff does not want to see you fall apart. It unnerves them. You can let it go in the privacy of your office, you can weep in the walk-in, but at the bench, you must pick up your knife and finish boning out those chickens.
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br />   It’s possible that working that brunch egg shift at thirty-nine weeks pregnant is badass. And also possible that biting the bullet and scheduling your own labor is badass. Keeping your shit together in front of your crew, no matter what, is badass. Maybe even driving out to IKEA to pick up thirty white china platters and get back by dinner service the day before you are going to give birth is badass. But badass is the last thing I am interested in being. Badass is a juvenile aspiration.

  At thirteen, when I was stealing cars and smoking cigarettes I wanted to be badass. I was cultivating badass. At sixteen, coked out of my head and slinging chili at the Lone Star Café, I was the understudy to badass, and I knew all her lines and cues. At twenty-five, blow-torching my way through warehouse catering kitchens, cranking out back-to-back doubles, and napping in between on the office floor with my head on a pile of aprons and checked pants, I was authentically badass. But at thirty-eight years old, hugely pregnant with my future tiny, pure, precious son, I don’t want anything to do with badass. I want to be J. Crew catalogue-clean. I don’t want to be that woman who can—and did—get down on all fours and scrape the pancake batter off the oven door after having just cooked three hundred eggs with a near-constant monologue of fucking fuck of a fuck issuing from her lips. That disgusts me. While I would never want or hope to be the type of pregnant woman who would doze languidly in the afternoons while playing Mozart tapes to her womb, being down on the mats with a soapy green scrubby and rattling my unborn fetus with a string of expletives to make a trucker blush … well, that is certainly not the woman I meant to grow up to be, either.

  When you are the one throwing the party every night, emptying the ashtrays, making sure the tonic is cold, the limes fresh, the shifts covered, the meat perfectly cooked and adequately rested, the customers carefree and the employees calm and confident, it will leave its marks. Someone has to stay in the kitchen and do the bones of the thing, to make sure it stands up, and if it’s you, so be it.