As editor of the New York Times’s dining section, Pete Wells knows the gourmet drill inside out. But all bets are off, he admits, when you’re a working parent trying to throw together dinner after a day at the office. Mise en place? You’ve got to be kidding.
I call home as I leave the office each weeknight, and that is Dexter’s cue to begin laying out the ramekins. When I kiss him goodbye in the morning, I hand him the recipes I’ll be cooking for dinner. Although he is only 6, by the time I get home he has minced the requisite number of shallots, blanched and peeled the tomatoes, seeded and julienned the peppers, soaked and blotted the salted capers and plucked all the tiny brown rocks out of the tiny brown lentils. Then he carefully transfers each ingredient to its own small white dish.
I throw open the front door and march to the kitchen. Dexter stands at attention. “The mise en place is done, Daddy,” he says. I lean down to inspect the neat rows of prepared vegetables, never smiling. If he has done well, I shake his hand. He tries not to show it, but I can tell from his eyes that he is proud. I reflect for a moment on how much easier life is now that I have two small children. And then I cook.
Or something along those lines.
Actually, nothing along those lines.
The whole idea of mise en place tortures me. It refers, as you already know if you have watched any cooking shows in recent years, to the practice of having all the ingredients and tools set to go before you even light the stove. Mise en place (meez on PLASS) comes from restaurant kitchens, where a brigade of helpers spends the day getting everything ready for the dinner rush. It comes from a French phrase meaning “make the new guy do it.” In my mind, it stands as an unattainable ideal, a receding mirage, a dream of an organized and contented kitchen life that everyone is enjoying except me.
Setting all my ingredients on the counter before cooking is no problem. I’ve learned my lesson from getting halfway through a recipe before realizing that the jar of roasted peppers in the refrigerator is covered in a downy white film of mold. But the next step in a proper mise en place—the knife work—trips me up. I run out of space on the cutting board. I run out of patience. I run out of time. I’m hungry and I want everything to move faster. So with only half the chopping done, I start to heat the pan. With that, the train has left the station, and I am swinging by one hand from the back of the caboose. Ultimately, I get where I’m going, but the trip isn’t pretty to watch.
This filled me with shame until I opened Sara Moulton’s latest book. Moulton knows her way around a kitchen. She has been the host of several cooking shows, the author of a number of cookbooks and the executive chef of Gourmet for 23 years. And she says, on the second page of Sara Moulton’s Everyday Family Dinners, that mise en place is “a waste of time.” She exempts Asian recipes, where the ingredients spin around in a smoking wok and are ready to eat two minutes later. But in general, she endorses my method of chopping the onion that will go into the pan first, and then doing the rest of the prep as I go along.
Moulton learned to cook at the Culinary Institute of America, which means she studied classic restaurant technique, mise en place included. Yet when she would make dinner for her family after coming home from work, she told me, she wasn’t readying her ingredients the way she had been taught.
“I had as little time as everybody else, and I realized I couldn’t wait to measure and slice and dice all that stuff,” she said by phone. “I just wasn’t doing it. I noticed I’d be mincing the garlic while I was cooking the onion. I’d be cooking the whole thing by taking advantage of what was already cooking.”
So there she was, deep into writing a cookbook about family dinners—structuring all the recipes to call for “3 cups thinly sliced celery” and “1 pound chicken breast, diced”—when she had what she calls a “head-slapping moment.” Why was she telling readers to cook in a way she herself abandoned years ago?
She started over, retooling the recipes to take advantage of downtime when onions are softening, meat is searing and so on. “It was a very, very hard thing to do, after all those years at Gourmet,” Moulton said. Mise en place has been codified in the recipe styles of countless publications, including this one. It’s so ingrained that when I gave Moulton’s recipe for succotash and grits to my superb recipe tester, Molly Rundberg, she returned it with all the prep work—which Moulton had woven into the steps—transposed back into the list of ingredients, because that’s how recipes are supposed to be written.
Even more blame for the tyranny of mise en place belongs to television. Those little glass bowls of slivered scallions are all over the cooking shows, and there are few things more combustible than Gordon Ramsay when he spots a “meez” that is not all it should be. Food television is often criticized for dumbing down cooking. It seems to me that a worse sin is teaching enthusiastic but tentative home cooks that they will never measure up unless they do things just like the chefs.
“That’s what we would say to the home cook: you have to have everything chopped, diced and sliced before you start,” Moulton said of her own time before the cameras. She was an early star on the Food Network, which drew its talent from the ranks of trained professionals. Restaurant values were compounded by television values: a chef peeling and slicing carrots for five minutes is just bad TV. Without the tidy glass bowls, who would watch? (Moulton may find out; she is working on an idea for a new show on which she would prep her ingredients as she went along.)
It’s time for the amateurs to take back the kitchen. We can start by redefining mise en place for what used to be called “the servantless household.” Simply put, nobody is going to pit olives for me, not even Dexter, so I’ll have to pit them whenever I can steal a few minutes in the midst of the ambient chaos. The recipe, one of the most strictly formulated genres of writing, has to open up a little to make room for real life.
The most striking anti-mise recipe I’ve ever seen comes from the last source I would have expected, Thomas Keller, one of the most disciplined chefs in the business. Right at the beginning of his “Ad Hoc at Home,” he gives a recipe for “Dinner for Dad.” Dad is Keller’s father, and the dinner was the last one he ate before he died: barbecued chicken, mashed potatoes, collard greens and strawberry shortcake. Keller has you brown the bacon and start chopping and cooking the long-braised collards, then boil the potatoes in their skins, stir sugar into the strawberries and put the chicken on the grill. While it’s cooking, you mash the potatoes and then whip heavy cream. Before you season the potatoes, Keller has you do this: “Open a bottle of pinot noir. If you have a back porch and it’s a perfect spring evening, serve your meal there.”
Sounds like a recipe for happiness.