This book is about street-level cooking and its practitioners. Line cooks are the heroes.
How do you instruct a woman who’s already survived incredible hardship, who’s worked hard all her life, on how to live ‘properly’, when your life is, by contrast, a carefree wonderland of excess, sloth and caprice?
The new trash who’d suddenly come into money and liked to rub your nose into it? They didn’t care. They didn’t notice. Until one of their own goes ill. Then it’s a sodding emergency. Some privileged prat starts feeling poorly and then it’s call out the Marines, start looking for someone to blame.
When I was in Bulgarian paratroopers – we like this plane very much,’ he said. ‘Of course, we were all wearing parachutes.
It’s not like the idea of washing your hands after visiting the bathroom was some goofy new theory.
Imagine your Aunt Minnie bringing you a plate of cookies as you sat in front of the TV, a string of human molars strung casually, like pearls, around her neck.
You want to see emotional? Watch a table of ten’s order come back for a refire in a busy all-male kitchen in the middle of the rush. You’ve never seen such weeping and rending of garments and tantrum throwing since you smacked your little brother and took away his favorite stuffed toy.
Line cooking done well is a beautiful thing to watch.
Las Vegas no less – the Ugly Shorts Heart of Darkness.
Like I said before, your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride. Sure, it’s a ‘play you pay’ sort of an adventure, but you knew that already, every time you ever ordered a taco or a dirty-water hot dog.
Most jobs, you don’t work, you don’t get paid. You wake up with a sniffle and a runny nose, a sore throat? You soldier on. You put in your hours. You wrap a towel around your neck and you do your best to get through. It’s a point of pride, working through pain and illness.
Who can really describe why they fell in love?
One finds oneself being defined by one’s job. The job expiates us from sin; it excuses us our excesses and our lapses. That we are tired, or ill, or in extremis and yet persevere is all we have, sometimes, to sustain our image of ourselves.
When outside forces corrupt the desire to do a job well and take pleasure in the doing. It’s an awful thing to watch. It’s awful when it happens to you.
It feels good knowing you are part of a long and glorious tradition of suffering, insanity, and excess.
Be a fool. For love. For yourself. What you think MIGHT possibly make you happy – even for a little while – whatever the cost or good sense might dictate.
If you need instruction on how to handle a knife without lopping off a finger, I recommend Jacques Pepin’s La Technique.
I make two cook like you in the toilette each morning! You are deezgusting!
Screwups are good. Screwups – and bouncing back from screwups – help you conquer fear.
How did the age-old equation that poor equals thin and rich equals fat change so that now our working poor are huge and slow-moving and only the wealthy can afford the personal trainers, liposuction, and extended spa treatments required, it seems, to be thin?
And when you buy a non-stick, treat it nice. Never wash it. Simply wipe it clean after each use, and don’t use metal in it, use a wooden spoon or ceramic or non-metallic spatula to flip or toss whatever you’re cooking in it. You don’t want to scratch the surface.