There is always the smell. I still catch it sometimes while walking by an alleyway on a warm night. The garbage produced by a busy restaurant has a distinctive, unforgettable aroma, and my first experience on my first day on the job was to walk to the back door past a great gaggle of barrels of that garbage, right through that smell. The pungency comes from its many component parts: smoky bacon grease, acrid burnt bread, cigarette butts, coagulating blood, the mellow bite of coffee grounds, and the quick decay of fish parts, all carried directly to the nose on sweet vapors of spilled liquor and stale beer. Naturally, air temperature determines the intensity of the stench, and of course, July 12, 1966, was my first day at the Ambassador.
Unaware of what I was in for, I walked into the kitchen and reported to the harried steward, who had made me fill out a perfunctory application and told me when to show up. He looked at his watch. I was fifteen minutes early. “Go work with Simon until the head dishwasher shows up,” he ordered me. “Simon is the potwasher.” When the steward saw me looking around in total confusion, he added, “in … the … potroom,” slowly enough so that even a sixteen-year-old kid from the suburbs could understand, and pointed toward an alcove off the main kitchen. From the potroom I could hear clanging, scraping, and not a little cursing.
When I got to the doorway, I saw the back of a small man wearing suspenders and bending over one of the three compartment sinks. His hair was gray and curly, and suds and grease were smeared up his knotted forearms. He was swearing in a soft southern voice, cursing the cooks, the “furrin” chef, and white people in general. “Simon?” I interrupted. He turned to face me. Oh my God! Simon was black. And old. Really old. And I had never talked to a black man before.
My sole view of any minority group member had come through the rear window of my family’s station wagon as we lit out for the suburbs. Cheap GI mortgages and the fear of people of color had driven a whole generation of young, white World War II vets and their families out of the cities. They headed for the subdivided potato fields and filled-in swamps of suburbia—Eisenhower as Moses leading the Chosen into the desert along a path of interstate concrete.
We found out later we were the boomers, but in those days we were only kids, and there were lots of us. Apparently, killing various European and Asian fascists produced a flood of spermatozoa, which discharged American veterans liberally discharged around the outlands of the subdivisions in the 1950s. Kids were everywhere, and their swarms thickened as you moved closer to the Catholic church in my neighborhood. We all looked alike, wore uniforms to the parochial school, and learned not to question our dads about the war. Everybody just wanted to be normal.
And when one of us reached his teenage years, there was nothing more normal than getting a part-time job. Even if you had been consigned to an expensive all-boys Catholic high school run by the Christian Brothers—holy men who were not wholly men—it was normal to have a job. So when one of my normal white friends recruited me to fill a dishwasher opening at a local suburban motel, I accepted. After all, such temporary employment would provide me with the princely sum of $1.65 per hour, which, after taxes and union dues, would net me enough to contribute some gas money for cruising aimlessly around the suburbs with my friends while listening to the Beach Boys and wishing we knew some girls. Endless summer.
So it was with great shock that I was suddenly presented with a black man of indeterminate antiquity to be my first mentor in a restaurant kitchen. I stared at Simon and then remembered to ask him what I could do to help him. “Well, fust-off, you can tell them dog-ass cooks to stop burnin’ evry mother-fuckin’ thing they touches. Then you can git me a pint o’ good whiskey and a big-assed girl and we’ll have us a party!” Simon then shook my hand, without wiping his, and asked my name.
“Steve.”
“Okay, Gene, let’s wash these fuckers and then have us a smoke.” So we set to it, scraping and washing and stacking, with Simon giving me directions that barely punctuated the story of his life. His first potwashing job had been in prison in Mississippi where he had bribed a guard to get off the road gang and into the kitchen. What had he been in prison for? Well, just for making the finest moonshine whiskey in the South and also for shooting a G-man who found his still at his shack in the swamp. Seems the cop had seen Simon come to town with an alligator he had killed near the shack, a ’gator that was so big that, when it was slung lengthways on top of an old Ford, both the nose and the tail touched the road. So this revenuer wondered what old Simon was doing that far out in the swamp and came to have a look-see. Shot him in the ass but didn’t kill him. Still carried a gun but never killed a man with one. Just with a knife. And by the way, if Gene could find a secret place, Simon and he could set up a still and make some fine whiskey, like he did in the old days when people would come from all over the South to buy a couple of quarts and talk to old Simon!
Of course, now things were different. People didn’t know what good whiskey even tasted like. Simon’s girlfriend would bring home a bottle of Jim Beam or Old Crow and actually think it was good, but Simon only drank the stuff because he knew that, when she’d had a few drinks, she got mighty friendly, and pretty soon old Simon looked like a young boy riding a bicycle uphill and riding fast (brief demonstration against the pot sink).
When it came time to leave the potroom, I promised Simon I’d be back to help him any time I could. And I meant it. By this time the rest of the crew was arriving at work. There were black people and brown people, men and women of all ages. My direct supervisor, the person who would train me on the intricacies of the big Hobart dish machine, was a surly man in his thirties, the first person with Down’s syndrome I had ever met. My partner operating the machine was a kid my own age who had cerebral palsy and could somehow still outwork me and most of the others in the kitchen. My training lasted exactly ten minutes, and then I was submerged in a flood of dirty dishes coming up from the breakfast banquets. The machine hissed and roared, and for three solid hours we toiled away, spraying plates and ashtrays, racking glasses, and passing them into the yawning mouth of the Hobart. The newly washed dishes emerged amid clouds of steam, and each one, at 180 degrees, burned my unprotected hands. My only relief came when I was sent to pick up all the dirty coffee cups from a banquet across the parking lot. The cups were racked and stacked on a dolly, and I couldn’t see over the top. So when I hit a hole in the pavement, the whole stack tipped and a couple dozen cups were shattered.
It was then I learned how to sweep with a big push broom. I conducted the cup shards to a big barrel that was already filled with festering, odiferous garbage. Somehow I didn’t even notice the smell.
* * *
In the mid-twentieth century in Minnesota, a land speculator and developer named Oscar Husby had his eye on a four-and-one-half-acre parcel of vacant land halfway between downtown Minneapolis and Lake Minnetonka. The Minneapolis suburbs, fueled by cheap gas and cheap gi mortgages, were rapidly expanding, drawing more and more visitors to town for business or pleasure. The travelers needed a place to stay—a clean, safe place, unlike the decaying old hotels downtown or the tawdry cabins of roadside motels. If Husby could offer an alternative stopping place for the wayfarer, especially in the upscale, predominantly Jewish St. Louis Park, he knew the dollars would follow. As part of his vision, Husby insisted, such an establishment would have to be an outgrowth of his ingrained Norwegian Lutheranism, not to mention his shrewd business sense. First and foremost, his motor hotel (not quite a motel, not quite a hotel) would need to cater to families. No liquor or fleshier temptations would be allowed on the premises. Rather, a vast hemispheric plastic pleasure dome would be built over a kidney-shaped swimming pool, surrounded by guest rooms, real palms, and styrene philodendrons. He would defy the comfortless northern winter and make vacations in the tropics superfluous with his Island in the Sun. He would also need to serve food to his customers and not just the usual Spartan Minnesota fare. Husby insisted on nice but understandable food prepared by a European chef, whose presence in the kitchen would guarantee the pedigree of the attached restaurant, the exotic Kashmiri Room. (Husby had been a supply officer in the China-Burma theater during the war and liked the word “Kashmiri.”) Finally, he would treat all his employees with kindness and generosity, and they in turn would respond with loyalty and hard work. Husby needed a name for his creation, a name that bespoke elegance, old-world charm, and the kind of legitimacy that could rival the hoary downtown hostelries that he intended to outdo. He grandly christened his creation the Ambassador Motor Hotel. It was on Highway 12, but that roadway was always referred to as Wayzata Boulevard (for the benefit of those sensitive of place).
Oscar Husby actually built his vision, his motor hotel, after partnering with another local entrepreneur who could provide a bit of additional seed money to put the project over the top. The new partner already owned a suburban restaurant and entertainment complex modestly known as Diamond Jim’s. From his new partner, Husby learned that the idea of opening a hotel-based restaurant without providing alcohol to the patrons was utter lunacy. Husby relented and added the Shalimar Cocktail Lounge into the plans adjacent to the Kashmiri Dining Room. To class things up, when the Ambassador opened in 1963 he had a calligrapher inscribe a scroll, which he hung by the bar entrance. It featured the words to the Edwardian “Kashmiri Song.” Had anyone actually read the lyrics, they might have found them a bit incongruous:
Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar,
Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell?
Whom do you lead on Rapture’s roadway, far,
Before you agonise them in farewell?
Pale hands, pink tipped, like Lotus buds that float
On those cool waters where we used to dwell,
I would rather have felt them around my throat,
Crushing out life, than waving me farewell!
Rationalizing his purveying of alcoholic beverages, Husby reasoned that the resultant revenues would enhance the value of the Ambassador and therefore allow him to make a more valuable bequest to the Lutheran Church. He could someday rest easily knowing he had permitted only a single, tiny vice.
His new front desk manager soon saw things differently. Frolicking families filled Your Island in the Sun on weekends, but business travelers were a little sparse on that stretch of Highway 12 during the week. The manager’s solution to that dilemma consisted of installing several filles de joie in inconspicuous guest rooms at the rear of the property and adding an unadvertised hourly rate to the amenities offered. For his role as facilitator, he received a generous gratuity from the ladies in question and simultaneously solved his room vacancy problems. Only years later did it strike Oscar Husby that an occupancy rate of 130 percent was a bit too good to be true.
Though this chicanery was well known to the pampered management and staff of the Ambassador Motor Hotel, no one saw fit to report it to Mr. Husby, so strong was their loyalty—loyalty primarily to whatever scams and deceptions they themselves were running at Mr. Husby’s expense. In truth, the wildly popular motor hotel was a Kasbah of lawless behavior. All of Husby’s bartenders routinely overcharged their customers, while service employees helped themselves to televisions, janitorial equipment, and various hotel linens. The cooks openly “shopped” in the storeroom, reserving the choicest foodstuffs for themselves and their families or to trade for goods stolen outside their purview. Liquor flowed freely; drugs were dealt in every corner of the property; and more than one amorous staff couple was caught in flagrante delicto in guest rooms, storage rooms, or stairwells, while on duty, in or out of uniform. Such were the fringe benefits at Your Island in the Sun.
Selling food is surely the world’s second-oldest profession. The hungry customer has provided a livelihood to centuries of restaurateurs, beginning eons before that lofty term was invented. Since everybody has to eat and since the division of labor came to differentiate us from the marsupials, somebody has always been designated to provide the chow and present the bill.
For both the humble and the exalted, staying at home has always meant the consumption of victuals provided by local produce and local talent. But venturing outside the home—be it hovel or palace, the neighborhood, or the political boundaries—has necessitated seeking lunch away from one’s hearth. A short trip may have occasioned slinging a skin of wine or a bag of Doritos into the backpack, but journeys of any duration have required other arrangements. Thus, from the earliest times innkeepers and meal purveyors have set up shop alongside trade or invasion routes, eager to exchange carbohydrates for cash (the monotonous food franchises at airport food courts being their spiritual descendants).
The restaurant, as we know it, was a comparatively recent innovation, and of course, the source was French. For over five centuries, “France” and “cuisine” have been largely synonymous. This passion for gustatory excellence has emanated from France since at least the Renaissance, resulting in a highly structured and sophisticated understanding of the vital role that food has played in the country’s history and culture. The aristocracy of La Belle France, their fortunes made on enormous tracts of fecund countryside, spent enormous sums on the table’s pleasures. Fine food, fine wine, and fine tableside conversation became the identifiers of upper-class French culture. And as in any culture, creation myths abound.
Naturally, we turn to Paris, the epicenter of French life and dining. Lured to the capital and the nearby Palace of Versailles by Louis xiv, much of the French aristocracy spent the early part of the eighteenth century establishing their urban mansions, salons, and kitchen establishments close to the center of absolutism. Their swords seldom called upon to defend a dwindling empire, they instead waged a war of fêtes and entertainments, banquets and balls among themselves. Their household chefs de cuisine (executive chefs) marshaled culinary armies of kitchen workers and baggage trains of the finest, rarest wines, liqueurs, and foodstuffs in order to surpass the efforts of rival aristocrats. The great nobles and their great wives—and greater mistresses—paid no taxes, spared no expense, and answered to no one other than the king himself. And the Bourbon kings lived and played and dined more grandly than all the rest, not merely for pleasure but to demonstrate to all that they could.
While crowds flocked to the Tuileries to view the king at dinner, in the streets of Paris things were far different. The common people bought their bread, its price assiduously regulated, from bakers and their cooked meats and stews from licensed traiteurs, members in good standing of guilds that had existed since the Middle Ages. Coffee and pastries could be had at the cafés (where a government informant might monitor the caffeinated conversation), or for heartier fare, wine shops abounded. Here the patron would partake of a table d’hôte (a limited-choice, fixed-price menu) of dramatically variable quality. In most years foodstuffs were abundant, and the French emulated the aristocrat libertines of the gluttonous First Estate to whatever degree their purses allowed. That’s the legend.
The latter half of the eighteenth century brought the height of the Enlightenment. Sense and sensibility were put through a wringer of new ideas. Among the bourgeoisie and the less inbred members of the nobility, odd new thoughts and inclinations took hold, some of them, at least peripherally, involving the dining habits of the enlightened.
The latter half of the eighteenth century also brought the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), which was a disaster for France. Not only did she lose her American colonies, including Canada, but she also incurred crushing war debts, much of the contents of the French treasury being turned over to contractors and victuallers of the business class. Worse, the collision of national misfortune and enlightened sensibilities gave birth to a fashionable craze known as the Cult of Sensitivity. In contrast to the overblown display of the baroque, adherents to this mind-set saw the world through a teary veil of keen perception that doted on the tragic or, more particular, the maudlin side of life. A painting, an opera, or the death of a canary could bring floods of tears, as well as pathetic epigrams weepily memorializing each event. For men who habitually wore mascara, membership in the Cult of Sensitivity was a continual challenge.
These challenges extended to the dinner table. Naturally, the sensitive soul—pale, prone to swooning, and wracked by life’s sorrows—needed to show an abstemious countenance and a frail frame. For a member of the aspiring upper-middle classes or of any of the aristocracy’s convoluted ranks, this look would have been difficult to accomplish since endless rounds of dinners and parties meant a daily caloric overload—yet another sorrow to be borne. It wouldn’t have done to withdraw oneself from these activities, for after all, where was the sense in being a sensitive soul if no one was there to watch? This circumstance has been generally overlooked when the origins of restaurants have been discussed.
Many commentators have, however, repeated the legend that a bourgeois Parisian named Boulanger (various first names were recorded) became a skilled home cook, his specialty a hearty soup made of calf and sheep feet (various animals were recorded). The legend went something like this: Boulanger (or his friends) got the idea that this dish was sufficient to restore the diner’s health (or cure his hangover), and the idea of selling this concoction propelled him to open a shop with the word restaurante (restorative) on a sign above the door. The people flocked to Boulanger’s premises and freely consumed his soup in an atmosphere of liberté, equalité, and fraternité. But wait—the dark forces of the ancien régime (the old, prerevolutionary order), in the guise of the medieval guilds, reacted violently to the revolutionary soup-maker. He was dragged into court for violating the established monopoly of the traiteurs. The ponderous legal machinery chewed on the case for a full five years, but in the end the perplexed judges ruled that the creation of this prototypical restaurant was not, in fact, illegal. Boulanger returned to his shop, rehung his menu, and, pursuant to the Rights of Man, served his greasy potage to all comers. His customers, regardless of title or station, were treated exactly the same within the confines of his establishment, and counts and commoners slurped together. Soon others followed Boulanger’s lead, and a restaurant culture was formed. Vive le pot-au-feu!
A nice, functional legend. Unfortunately, modern investigators have been unable to find any mention of Boulanger or his restaurant in the annals of French judicial proceedings. It was also not remarked upon by the contemporary press or in the work of diarists of the time. Boulanger can take his place beside Gilgamesh in the dusty files of creation myth.
Sometime before Husby’s Ambassador Motor Hotel was getting up and running, a magistrate in London was handing down a judgment to a delinquent youth of Irish ancestry. The lad in question was barely seventeen but had already been jailed several times for offenses ranging from assault and battery to petty theft and truancy. Life in the East End was rough, and since the boy in question was cursed with a pronounced stammer, he found it easier to employ his fists while negotiating his way. Since a similar judicial body in his home city of Dublin had already prosecuted him for similar offenses, the British judge chose not to extradite him. Instead, he offered the accused an unpalatable choice between spending one year in a juvenile detention facility and enlisting as a cook’s apprentice in the merchant marine. John Logan chose to go to sea.
During his first voyage, to India aboard a tramp steamer, Logan’s mentor, the ship’s cook, fortified himself for a gale with a substantial quantity of cheap brandy. That quantity proved sufficient to make him lose his grip while urgently leaning over the ship’s rail, and the old cook was washed overboard. Young Logan sailed into Bombay fully in charge of his first kitchen.
By the time the virtually self-taught Chef Logan returned to England from his maiden voyage, he had learned a great deal about the different cuisines available at the freighter’s ports of call. He had acquitted himself well in alcohol-fueled waterfront brawls on at least three continents and acquainted himself with the tender pleasures of the East. Moreover, he was convinced that the life of a chef at sea had a lot going for it. He commanded his own small establishment, was deferred to by the officers and crew, and was able to provide profitable extra rations of food and drink to his shipmates, all at the expense of the ship’s owners. At sea he was outside the jurisdiction of the courts, and even his mother at home in Dublin was proud of him.
Back in England, he found that the maritime union was chronically short of trained cooks, and each time he appeared at the hiring hall, he was able to upgrade his employment to nicer ships and more interesting destinations. Aboard ship he worked with cooks from around the world and eagerly absorbed what he could about cuisines and techniques. Shipboard galleys also forced Logan to perfect his sense of timing, organizational skills, and ability to meet numerous daily deadlines. He was receiving his chef’s training under fire. Within a few years, he was proficient enough to be hired as a line cook aboard Cunard’s flagship, the Queen Mary, serving the grandest meals to the grandest clientele, a clientele so grand that they resisted boarding the new jet airliners, which were rapidly making the old luxury liners obsolete.
Many of the kitchen crew aboard the Queen were Irish, and Chef Logan fell in with a rough crowd of cronies, with whom he worked and with whom he caroused in seaports on both sides of the Atlantic. It remained a good life. Still, it was unsettling to see fewer and fewer people booking passage on the liners, and rumors of the great ships’ demise were daily conversation, along with putative exit strategies for the crew. On a recent voyage one of Logan’s crewmates met a girl from the midwestern United States. Romance flourished, and soon this Irishman was engaged to the girl and planning to leave the Queen Mary and resettle in a place called Minneapolis. After a visit to that city with his betrothed, Logan’s friend returned with the news that in the middle of nowhere was a prosperous, expanding town trying to make its mark in mid-America. Restaurants were opening there every day, and their proprietors generally felt that the only way to claim they were first-class establishments was to hire a European executive chef.
After docking in New York, Logan collected his pay, jumped ship, and flew to Minneapolis to join his friend, who had landed a job at a local country club. The friend reported that a hotel in St. Louis Park had recently discharged its rage-prone Swiss chef and was looking to replace him with a chef with a better command of the English language. A little stuttering would probably be no obstacle, and since the hotel’s upscale dining outlet was called the Kashmiri Room, the ownership felt it was important for the incoming chef to have some passing knowledge of Indian cuisine. After all, the restaurant had always maintained one (and only one) curry dish on its menu.
John Logan always carried himself well. A big man in several different dimensions, he had thriftily had suits tailored for him when his ship was docked in Hong Kong. He had shirts made for pennies in India and bought fashionable bow ties in London. He even owned a bowler hat but wore it only under duress, to job interviews for example. Thus attired, he appeared in Oscar Husby’s office to interview for the executive chef position. Logan must have seemed a godsend to the old Norwegian. Husby was wearing the white patent-leather shoes and belt that he sported from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Sartorially, he resembled all other members of the local Rotary Club, who held their weekly luncheon meeting at the Ambassador. Now, Husby was confronted by an imposing, splendidly dressed, and plainly cultured gentleman who just happened to be seeking to direct the feeding of him and his fellow Rotarians. For his part Logan had remembered to medicate his chronic stammer with a tumbler of vodka just before the interview. They got along famously. John Logan was hired to be the third (European) executive chef of the Ambassador Motor Hotel.
He was my first boss, my first executive chef. I was a dishwasher, and naturally, he despised me.
According to historian Rebecca Spang, in The Invention of the Restaurant, the actual inventor of the restaurant was a Frenchman named Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau. Roze de Chantoiseau was a polymath who was later to bring a plan for eliminating France’s national debt to the king’s ministers. (The plan might have worked, but since it was submitted in 1789, events pretty much overtook the idea.) Roze de Chantoiseau also ran an information office and edited a gazette, much of which was dedicated to differing views on exactly what was wrong in France. Chief among the many contentions was the parlous state of the cooking available to the masses, particularly in Paris. Certainly, great chefs existed, but they served almost entirely in the manses of the aristocracy, and only in those sumptuous surroundings could true cuisine be found.
For the French, interest in food was not the peculiar preoccupation of a few enthusiasts but rather a component of the broad range of interests that made up a part of being involved in cultural, social, and political life. In the 1760s, most prominent French thinkers were fascinated by cooking and drew moral and medical conclusions from the state of gastronomy in the country. Taste was seen as a universal virtue, and the tastes for art, science, and food were regarded as inextricably intermingled. Cuisine joined mesmerism, clandestine publications, adultery, and the state of the French polity as subjects of fascination and conversation. And as with these other popular enthusiasms, there was much quackery to be found in the culinary realm.
The purported medicinal properties of certain foods were the subject of intellectual speculation. Specifically, it was thought that concentrated and prolonged cooking of various ingredients, primarily proteins, would yield healthful wonder foods that would restore physical well-being and optimize body function. Theorists, most prominently Roze de Chantoiseau, postulated that large-scale adoption of this dietary regime would increase agricultural production and improve commerce. The only obstacle to supplying these salubrious concoctions was that no one seemed ready to start such a new and unorthodox venture.
Roze de Chantoiseau did an end run around the strictures that defined the positions of traiteurs and tavern keepers in Parisian commercial life. Using his influence with the king’s ministers, in January 1768 he purchased an official commission as one of twelve cook-caterers who followed the court. This commission exempted Roze from most of the licensing restrictions and requirements that dogged his erstwhile competitors and gave tacit royal sanction to his endeavors. He then opened a shop to serve the healthful bouillons on rue Sainte-Honoré. Since Roze, in another of his many endeavors, was also preparing to publish his Almanach general, listing all seven hundred places where food was available to a hungry customer in Paris, he placed several prominent listings therein for “Le Restaurateur Roze,” “Rue Saint Honoré,” and “Hôtel d’Aligre.” Here, the anonymously authored Almanack raved, could be found all the choicest, most delicate, and healthful soups, prepared to the most exacting standards. Here could a customer be seated and offered a choice of delights. Here could persons of all backgrounds dine together in an atmosphere enjoying both the blessing of the king and the benefits of the latest scientific knowledge as guarantors of quality.
For adherents to the Cult of Sensitivity, such an establishment seemed a godsend. Instead of nibbling petit fours in the salons of the decadent aristocracy or ingesting whatever nondescript ragout the local cookshop was peddling, the hungry but abstemious cultist could have an entirely unique experience. Though he might water his broth with earnest weeping, the Sensitive One would be able to display his isolation in public, pondering the world’s cruel usages while not adding any superfluous poundage to his quaking frame. He could sate his debased physical hunger while restoring the energy needed to navigate this vale of tears. He could show his differentiation from the common herd at a mere cost of three to six livres per bowl. Roze de Chantoiseau’s restaurant was an instant success and spawned dozens of imitators in the first few years of operation.
Dylan Thomas termed them “Professional Irishmen” when he visited America, and Chef John Logan without a doubt epitomized the breed. He could switch into a stutterless, leprechaunish brogue when the situation demanded and pine for the old sod with the best of them. His favorite credential for proving his Irishness was his mass producing of Irish soda bread whenever the occasion demanded. This feat was relatively easy as he had a staff of ad hoc Hibernians working in the Ambassador’s kitchen, dreading another Irish soda bread challenge. Thus, mounds of the crumbly stuff could be produced for every Irish festival, wedding, or wake without so much as a dusting of flour touching the chef’s starched jacket.
Creating this delicacy required merely a thirty-quart Hobart mixer, a line of ovens, a dozen aluminum sheet pans, and forearms made of titanium. All the wet ingredients were thrown into the mixing bowl, followed by all the dry. Then the mixer, its bowl filled to the brim, was cautiously turned on. The first revolution of the paddle always deposited about a pint of the mixture onto the unhappy cook’s shoes, which prompted him to quickly turn off the machine and reach for a rubber spatula in order to rearrange the ingredients. At this point he naturally wondered whether the portion that had made it onto the floor contained anything vital for making the recipe work. No one, to my knowledge, was able to resist the temptation of brushing his shoes off above the mixing bowl just to make things right.
Once the mixer, in fits and starts, had completed its job, the dough was turned out onto a heavily floured tabletop. At this stage the stuff was viscous and ambulatory and prone to running toward the table edge if not forcefully corralled and contained. Here the mass of dough—now about the size and shape of one of those gigantic tortoises my friends and I used to torture at the zoo—would rest for a minute or two or for at least the time it took to run outside and smoke a furtive cigarette. Nerves calmed, the cook returned to do battle with the incipient soda bread.
The next phase involved the cook’s plunging his hands into the seething mass and scooping out one-and-a-half- to one-and-three-quarter-pound clods of the stuff, as measured by a flimsy portion scale, and his somehow turning each of them into a loaf of bread. This was where Herculean forearms came in handy, if the cook had them (I didn’t), because the recalcitrant dough had to be folded and kneaded and slapped and squeezed until it resembled a much smaller tortoise, its head and limbs prudently withdrawn to avoid the chaos. Chef Logan, who had hands the size of bunches of bananas, could effortlessly form two loaves simultaneously. The rest of us mortals struggled with one at a time.
When the last of the dough was panned up on rows of baking sheets and the clinging remains were scraped from the fingers, what was allegedly the most important part of the preparation took place. A slit was made in the dough before baking, which allowed the internal moisture an escape route, and those slits had to be done in the form of a cross. Logan had instructed us, as he had been instructed, to “say a f-f-fucking prayer” with every cut, or the bread would refuse to rise. Since we always suspected that at least part of the baking soda was in the portion of the mix that hit the floor, the prayer seemed like a reasonable precaution. A ruined batch of soda bread often had dire consequences in Chef Logan’s kitchen.
Once the first batch was safely in the oven, the ingredients for subsequent batches could be assembled. If there was a major Irish event in town, four or five batches per shift were the norm. Soda bread days did chafe Chef Logan in that he needed to attend the entire operation. The rule was that only the chef could pronounce whether the loaves of bread were actually done, a judgment made through a series of visual inspections and, more important, the thump test. Logan, usually barehanded, would remove a loaf from the oven and hold it to his ear while delivering a series of gentle thumps to its crusty bottom. If and only if the proper holy hollow sound was heard, the soda bread was removed from the oven and cooled. Then the next batch was baked until its thumping time. In fact, after each batch emerged, we cooks all thumped a loaf or two, trying to discover the arcane code that signaled the successful creation of a loaf of Irish soda bread.