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

  “Gab,” he said quietly. “We put them in the walk-in and I went to bed. I don’t know what happened here.”

  But by now, of course, I did. I could imagine the whole thing. A vanful of blotto, stoned kids returned to camp and stayed up all night drinking and smoking and hugging long meaningful hugs with their camp soulmates whom they might not be seeing again for a whole year.

  In between bong hits, one of them, maybe the guy with the hackey sack says, “Dude, like, how cool are these crazy lobsters?”

  Somebody coughs and exhales smoke at the same time.

  “But aren’t they like, gonna die, without any water?” wonders aloud the guy in the Greenpeace T-shirt.

  “Hmm. Oh man, dude, you’re totally right.”

  But Laurel, shaking her waist-long curly hair, says, “Gabrielle said just to, like, put them in the walk-in.”

  “Hmm.”

  Choke. Cough. Exhale.

  “This is some harsh bud, dude.”

  “We should put them in some water, I think.”

  “Definitely.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Def.”

  So instead of leaving the perfectly packed, sleeping, vital lobsters in the walk-in as I’d asked them, they started to worry. And worry, wrapped up in the gauze of a marijuana high, turned into crystal clear paranoia about animal cruelty. And just behind that paranoia came soft, waxy thoughts about animal rescue that drove them to fill the kitchen sinks with cold water, pull the Styrofoam boxes out of the walk-in, drop each sleeping lobster into the makeshift tank, and inadvertently suffocate all of them to death.

  Proud and relieved, they snapped off the kitchen lights and went and passed out in their stinking bunks, while the lobsters, panicking, now thrashed and clawed up and over each other to get out of their death pool.

  After burying the thirty dead lobsters in a little grave I dug between the arts barn and the soccer field, I shut down the kitchen for the season and let the screen door slam behind me. I drove north to Pittsfield and I bought ten boxes of Kentucky Fried Chicken, left it at the fire pit, and then I drove off campus for good. Heading down 91, making my way back to the city, to the West Side warehouse kitchens, to what I was starting to think would be another twenty years of everyday life, I hoped the bear would find the KFC and the counselors and eat them both.

  7

  I HAD, WITHOUT EVER DECIDING OR DESIRING TO, RACKED UP NEARLY twenty years of kitchen work—if we start with my dishwashing stint at the Canal House that adolescent summer. And now I was good at it. In college, I had met the Southern writer Jo Carson and she said, “Be careful what you get good at doin’ ’cause you’ll be doin’ it for the rest of your life.” And that had forever stuck with me. I thought it would be useful, as my thirtieth birthday neared, to discover if I had any talent other than churning out the twenty-hour shifts without complaint, smoking filterless cigarettes, and out-cussing my male colleagues. I had always imagined I would end up as a writer, but I’d never made the time for it or discovered a way—sapped and depleted after those long shifts—to dedicate myself to it. All I had were boxes and boxes of notebooks accumulated over the years—grown-up versions of that silly, cherished red leather lock-and-key diary I’d kept as a kid—the pages filled with, well, nothing remotely disciplined. For the genuine effort of real writing I was never able to find the time. Yet I was the girl who put on her coat over her chef’s whites and spent an extra hour cleaning out the cruddy walk-in refrigerator. Aside from an iron-clad work ethic born of an early understanding of self-reliance, I was wondering if I had anything else to offer. I was wondering if there was still time for a life of my own choosing.

  What had started as a quick and urgent necessity—that nearly empty shampoo bottle and even emptier house driving me into town to look for a job—had become a lifetime, a life style, and a life lived gazing over at the greener pasture. I had wanted to do so much more, somehow, than spend my days with my hands thrust into a bowl of micro-greens lightly dressed with aged balsamic and garnished with toasted pumpkin seeds and roasted apricots. I had always wanted to contribute in some way. Leave a little more than I took.

  The ironic and disaffected stance toward life had not yet closed its full suffocating grip on the throat of the world, and at the time I remember, it did not feel embarrassing or over earnest to say that you hoped to make a difference. It did not feel hopeless—or even futile—to declare your deep and total admiration for the million-man marchers with their sons and fathers walking together or the radical ACT UP kids who were lying their own fragile bodies down on the freezing pavement of Times Square at rush hour, stopping traffic with their die-ins, or the brilliant visionaries who were unfurling that ever-expanding quilted acre of bottomless sorrow and getting arrested for trespassing on Bush’s White House lawn in the doing. My heart caved in a little further every month when the popular food magazines hit the stands and in them were articles entitled “What to Wear to Your Favorite Expensive Restaurant,” or “Chef’s Favorite Kitchen Tools,” or this urgent topic, “French Chef Doesn’t Use Butter at Home.”

  This may sound like badly written parody, but I am quoting actual food magazines. It’s hard to work in an industry where these are the headlines. Or at least I was finding it kind of demoralizing to feel like my most significant contribution to the world each day was that I made enough baby artichoke ragout for that night’s wedding rehearsal dinner. People who were thinking of ways to guide me when I would describe to them my jam—I’m not interested in my industry but I’m locked into my industry—I don’t know how to do anything else—tried to talk me out of my pessimistic and cynical place by pointing out how important food is in our lives, how important it is to sit around the dinner table with friends and family. I argued back that people who sat around dinner tables these days were discussing nothing more than the food that was placed in front of them and marveling at its spiral of pin dots of pistachio oil administered with a squeeze bottle around the rim of a fourteen-inch plate. When I described what I felt was so achingly missing from my line of work, namely Meaning and Purpose, they would encourage me to go cook in a soup kitchen or a hospice, or to get a job cooking for an agency that delivered meals to the homebound elderly. But there was not one molecule in my body that was engineered to ladle out low-sodium, low-fat, compartmentalized meals designed and overseen by a nutritionist and an officer from the Department of Health and Human Services. I felt less than useful doing it but, nonetheless, I loved the baby artichokes and the vivid green pistachio oil I was handling. Large-scale high-end cooking—with all of its imperfections and corner-cutting—at least put me in contact with ceviche and Israeli couscous and mushroom duxelle and robbiola cheese and was still preferable to just plain institutional cooking—in a hairnet and latex gloves—no matter how empty of meaning and purpose.

  But what began as a nagging discontent in that green forest of western Massachusetts had become a dark preoccupation back in New York City and finally turned into a full-blown crisis as I was wheeling a proofing cabinet of two hundred boxed lunches—goat cheese and arugula pesto roll-ups—up the service entrance ramp to the building where, if I recall correctly, the National Book Foundation’s fall conference was taking place. Trying to quietly roll this metal cabinet filled to the top with the neatly packaged sandwiches and cookies, I squeaked down the hallway just outside the auditorium toward the lobby, where I was instructed to set out the self-serve lunches and then depart. The auditorium doors kept opening and closing as attendees came and went, and every time they opened, the voices of the panelists and their gorgeous words—Grace Paley? Galway Kinnell? Jamaica Kincaid? I thought I recognized so many of them but couldn’t be certain—floated out into the hallway. It felt almost cruel, to be schlepping this metal box on wheels down the corridor in my chef whites and black clogs, while inside that auditorium was a roomful of people I wanted to be. A roomful of people who did just the kind of work I wished I could do. For the first time in my twenty years in a
kitchen I felt a real sting to be feeding, and not mingling with, the roomful of people.

  Dave, the driver, was waiting in the idling van with the radio fixed to Hot 97 and blasting so loud that the windows vibrated. I banged on the side of the van, and he popped out and helped me load the empty proofing cabinet into the back. Shaggy blasted out of the cargo van’s speakers, “I’m Mr. Boombastic, say me fantastic.…” Over which Dave yelled, “Back to the shop?”

  “I’m done, Dave. This lunch gig was my only booking for the day. Can you clock me out when you go back? I’m done.”

  I had no ties to anyone or anything—“outta sight outta mind”—so I was not conflicted, in elapsed time sequence, to clock out on my last freelancer shift at one of those warehouse kitchens, sublet the East Village tenement one-bedroom, kiss the girlfriend good-bye, pack the matte black Volvo, and head out to grad school. I had applied for a spot at Iowa—which everyone I asked advised me was the best and most famous writer’s program in the country—but instead had gotten a spot at the University of Michigan in the master’s program for fiction writing. That September, I rolled into Ann Arbor to start a whole new clean and kitchen-free life.

  The very first thing I did when I got there was land a kitchen job. Because I can’t sleep at night—let alone aspire to write National Book Award–worthy prose—if I don’t have a job. Misty, when I met her, was grilling boneless chicken breasts for U of M tailgate parties wearing a stained, faded V-neck T-shirt and a dirty apron. I didn’t see anything in her but the tired, slightly beaten chef of a perfectly decent catering company in downtown Ann Arbor. While I had a ten-pound knife kit brimming with tweezers and Q-tips, fish spatulas and needle-nose pliers, she was assembling rigid, odorless cheese platters for university functions. I had cooked for the king of Thailand. She was, I thought, simply the source of my future paychecks and nothing more.

  The next day I went to register for school, and when I walked on Michigan’s campus for the first time, strolling the Diag with its pristine landscaping and swiping my student ID at the library, which looked like one of those buildings in Thomas Jefferson’s America, I was ebullient. I had not visited any campus during the application process. I had just cast my net and hauled in the best offer and then followed it to Michigan, for whatever awaited me. When I saw the one-hundred-year-old columns of Angell Hall, I skipped up all twenty-five of its granite stairs. I sat in every single leather chair on all four floors of the Rackham Graduate School. I stared at all the oil portraits. If I entered a room with a Persian carpet, I took off my shoes and socks and walked barefoot on it. If there were cheese cubes in the writer’s room, I ate them with delight. Alternative high school and alternative college, housed in old barns or in prefab modular units of click-together plywood, were a necessary and important part of my development, but had trashed my own sense of validity. But this—this highly polished marble floor, this leather chair, these brass banisters, these chandeliers—this was Total Legitimacy. Everybody I met referred to the school as the Harvard of the Midwest and it took me only two-and-a-half minutes to follow suit. Check me out! A dishwasher matriculated at the Harvard of the Midwest! Entered through the front door by invitation!

  And I picked up my first fellowship check—one thousand dollars!—and walked around like someone whose lottery ticket is called on the evening news. I could not get over my luck. They were paying me to read and write. I got a thousand dollars a month just to sit around the grad writing room eating cheese and discussing metaphor, to gaze out from a big leather chair thinking, to read as many books as they assigned, and to teach freshmen how to write a tight five-paragraph college essay. An academic workday was only six hours long. As if that weren’t lavish enough, for a certain stretch of my commute to and from school each day, the speed limit on the Michigan highway, unlike anywhere else in the United States that I had lived, was seventy-five miles an hour!

  There were a few signs of weirdness but I shrugged them off. My fellow program mates seemed unaccountably anguished when I met them at our first orientation. Also, this was my first time in a university football town. I thought it was bizarre that grown men wore Maize and Blue parkas, hats, and golf socks, often all at once. I had never seen this before and it spooked me, the way that seeing too many civilian children in scout uniforms also made me nervous. Misty sent me out to chef a few parties in my first weeks there, and when the guests asked me where I was from or how I had come to Michigan or when I had gotten my tongue pierced, they smiled emptily and said, “Oh, that’s nice,” without meaning it, and the conversations stopped before they even started. But there’s weirdness in New York, too, so I shook it off.

  My route to rehabilitation—starting anew, not as a dishwasher but as a writer—seemed to be a straight shot.

  Except that I had never heard of the second person static point of view. And had completely forgotten the meaning of indirect interior discourse. My sullen new friends had read so many books that I hadn’t and had already, by twenty-three years old, become fluent with so many terms, ideas, and words that I had never heard of. And they could put sentences together in class using so many of them that I was sure if I tried to contribute to the discussion, it would be instantly discovered that I had been accepted by accident, that someone had messed up and put my application in the wrong pile. In the world I had occupied before coming to this campus, I was the one with the words. In those kitchens filled with transient part-timers, it was an obvious testament to my potential for high intelligence that I completed the crossword puzzle each day of the week, including Sunday, in pen. That I could remember and recite a few stanzas of Chaucer. In this new world, where twenty-three-year-olds discussed Barthesian tropes and post-Hegelian moments with the same ease with which I boiled water for pasta, I smarted with the realization of my own amateurism. While I had taken the part-time catering job with Misty just to pay my rent, I noticed as the semester progressed that I started to depend on it as a buffer from the sting I often felt on campus during class discussions of narrative strategy and diction. These people were not fucking around.

  It was like a salve to have a few hours each day where I understood the terms, like sauté and roast and sweat to translucent. And to hang out with thirty-five-year-old cooks who hustled past with sheet pans hot out of the oven yelling, “Hot Behind,” as we all sniggered cheerfully at the sexual connotation. There was no sexual connotation among academics and when I, out of habit, tried to throw some around, it just fell on the marble floor untouched.

  I was having a hard time embracing my new tribe on campus. They kindly pretended to admire my experiences with hot ovens and lobsters and they over-generously allowed me to get around whatever intellectual blocks I faced—I will never confidently understand a post-Hegelian moment—by allowing me to dismiss it as elitist and esoteric. They even paused to agree with me, and then went right back to their work. But there remained, and I was somehow committed to, a cleavage between “me” and “them.” I was friendly with a fiction writer named Elwood, who had hunted, fished, bartended, and played U of M football—not as a walk-on but as a recruit—and I think once had stapled dollar bills to his own bare chest at a frat party. And I was getting to know Geoff, a poet who played in a band and drank all the amber liquors without getting sloppy when most of the guys in the program called it quits after two beers. He also, to my eternal gratitude, unequivocally confirmed what I had always intuited about sex scenes in novels written by older men.

  “Yeah, that stuff is creepy,” Geoff said. “It’s just plain wrong.”

  Whenever our director, a famous-ish and prolific writer, would publish a new book—like, every three months it seemed—Geoff would roll his eyes and smile during wine and cheese hour, and point to the page where, in all twenty-three novels, our blue-blazered director would write a sex scene and describe the woman’s nipple.

  I was also relieved to meet Kate, who had as much frustration with grading the freshman papers as I did. The freshmen were poorer writer
s than I remember being when I was a freshman and yet expected much higher grades than they had earned—but maybe all people feel like the generations after them are depraved. Kate, who was also teaching Intro to Comp sections, held office hours across from me in the afternoons. We kept our doors open when waiting for students and chatted in between appointments.

  But these new acquaintances were a year ahead of me or busy otherwise, and I didn’t see them as much as I needed to.

  Meanwhile, Misty and I were working away together under the fluorescent lights, with cold smoked chicken in apricot glaze and sirloin tips in molasses black pepper sauce. The Midwestern requirement of well-done meat and well-done fish was certainly not the lowest place in catering I’d been. I’d already known the lowest and the dullest: oyster knives jammed through the webbing of your hand between thumb and forefinger, steam burns, twenty-three-and-a-half-hour days with just a thirty-minute nap on the office floor with my head on a pile of folded aprons, pack a day cigarettes, ring molds, braziers, propane torches, roulades in Saran Wrap, and shelled lobster claws dramatically crowning the seven hundred fifty martini glasses of ceviche. Misty’s catering was organized and calm, and the food was, under the circumstances, totally respectable; she smartly navigated the terrain while hewing to the decidedly unadventurous popular taste.

  I wouldn’t go so far as to say I missed, but I did feel lucky to have already known some of the killer highs of catering as well as the catering brilliance that had come up in my past twenty years, because even the most extravagant events that we now catered, at the art museum or the dean’s house, were dull and unambitious. There was tremendous wealth in Ann Arbor but the charity balls and even the private wine dinners we were doing resembled tailgates, in a way, with miniature ham-on-cheddar-biscuits hors d’oeuvres and a driveway parked bumper to bumper with the most giant cars that have ever been made on earth—SUVs manufactured by the Ford Motor Company. I had been exposed to some of the most amazing things that catering presidential inaugurations, the weddings of the daughters of the uber-wealthy, and the ultra-rare concert of Barbra Streisand at Carnegie Hall can yield: edible gold leaf floating in the champagne flutes, pale green sugar glass blown into the shape of apples under a heat lamp and later filled with apple mousse, and Russian Imperial Service, in which the entire dining room is surrounded suddenly by two hundred fifty waiters—exactly one waiter per guest, each bearing one silver-domed plate—and at the signal of the captain, all two hundred fifty waiters step forward, in stunning synchronicity lift the domes high into the air to release the steam trapped by the cloche, and place the hot magret entrée perfectly in front of the guest.