I have since found that almost everybody in the meat business is funny – just as almost everyone in the fish business is not.
Selling out is getting a job.
As well, there’s the age-old syndrome common to fans of musicians with passionate and discerning cult followings. When the objects of adulation are crass enough to become popular, they quickly become a case of “used to be good.
Cooking is a craft, I like to think, and a good cook is a craftsman – not an artist.
I remember it well, because it was such a slap in the face. It was a wake-up call that food could be important, a challenge to my natural belligerence. By being denied, a door opened.
My last semester at Vassar, I’d taken to wearing nunchakus in a strap-on holster and carrying around a samurai sword – that should tell you all you need to know.
The life of the cook was a life of adventure, looting, pillaging and rock-and-rolling through life with a carefree disregard for all conventional morality. It looked pretty damn good to me on the other side of the line.
The Ecuadorian, Mexican, Dominican and Salvadorian cooks I’ve worked with over the years make most CIA-educated white boys look like clumsy, sniveling little punks. In.
Too lazy to peel fresh? You don’t deserve to eat garlic.
I can’t imagine a better example of Things To Be Wary Of in the food department than bargain sushi.
For me, the cooking life has been a long love affair, with moments both sublime and ridiculous. But like a love affair, looking back you remember the happy times best –.
No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American. The Ecuadorian, Mexican, Dominican and Salvadorian cooks I’ve worked with over the years make most CIA-educated white boys look like clumsy, sniveling little punks.
Looking at these photographs, I know that I will never understand the world I live in or fully know the places I’ve been. I’ve learned for sure only what I don’t know – and how much I have to learn.
Food, it appeared, could be important. It could be an event. It had secrets.
Toast your goddamn muffins.
Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London is invaluable. As is Nicolas Freleng’s The Kitchen, David Blum’s Flash in the Pan, the Batterberrys’ fine account of American restaurant history, On the Town in New York, and Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel.
Good food and good eating are about risk. Every once in a while an oyster, for instance, will make you sick to your stomach. Does this mean you should stop eating oysters? No way.
Line cooking done well is a beautiful thing to watch. It’s a high-speed collaboration resembling, at its best, ballet or modern dance.
Shepherd’s pie’? ‘Chili special’? Sounds like leftovers to me. How about swordfish? I like it fine. But my seafood purveyor, when he goes out to dinner, won’t eat it. He’s seen too many of those 3-foot-long parasitic worms that riddle the fish’s flesh.
Fully feeling the effects of the sake, I was seriously considering burning my passport, trading my jeans and leather jacket for a dirty seersucker suit and disappearing into the exotic East.