To tell the truth, I had cooked breakfast before. When things were slow, I had occasionally taken over from JohnnyT when he went on break or called a girl. I also had the cocky attitude that went along with service in the Ambassador’s kitchen. How hard could cooking breakfast be? After all, I had fed far more customers at brunch than I was likely to see during a single shift in the coffee shop. I set the station up doubly well before going home the night before: plenty of pancake batter and French toast batter and lots of omelet garnish. I needed to do well for JohnnyT—I knew he’d want it that way—and more important, I needed to show Chef Logan that I was more than just a pantry-boy relief cook. I was smart enough to work this station. After all, I was in college, and only a handful of the other cooks had even finished high school.
Having barely slept the night before, I got in early to put the final touches on my setup. I brought a full case of eggs out of the cooler and stacked the cardboard flats next to my grill. I filled a pitcher with ice water and stashed it under the counter so that I wouldn’t need to step away even if I got thirsty. I stashed a pack of cigarettes in the waitress station so that I would be just five feet away from a smoke if I needed to steady myself. I was ready. My first moment of panic came when I realized I hadn’t turned on the griddle, but it was early so—click—no harm done. Then I felt around the storage shelf for some egg skillets and came up with not JohnnyT’s immaculate pans but some neglected, charred, scarred, and despicable-looking egg pans that had clearly seen better days. Second moment of panic.
By then the waitresses were trundling in, having heard through their grapevine that JohnnyT had shuffled off this mortal coil, and clearly some were heartbroken. Others were visibly angry at JohnnyT for having been so reckless and, oddly, at me for not being JohnnyT. I thought I had said all the right things about mourning, persevering, and going easy on the new guy, probably emphasizing the new guy part. My partner on the breakfast line came in. Her name was Willa Mae, and she and JohnnyT had been close. Her eyes were red, and she seemed pretty shaky, until she saw me. Then she was shaking. Willie Mae had never particularly liked me, this white college boy, and now that she was stuck out here with me, she was, as near as I could tell, somewhere between irritated and enraged. Obviously, I’d get no help from Willa Mae.
The hostess arrived and unlocked the front door. She was an older lady who had been a waitress for years before her arches broke down and forced her into a less-demanding role. Her job now was to greet customers, distribute them evenly in each of the five waitresses’ stations, and offer departing diners a mint as they paid their checks. She also had to answer the phones, keep the front of the coffee shop tidy, and, hardest of all, be pleasant to each member of the Ambassador’s management as they came in to cadge a free breakfast. She was rather selective as to which fools she would suffer gladly. I don’t think I was one of them.
The bakery guy arrived. Every morning he’d show up with two long, flat heavy-gauge cardboard boxes of assorted doughnuts and danish for the Ambassador’s breakfast service. This was a much-anticipated delivery, as all the employees with a sweet tooth (mainly due to substance abuse) crowded around to grab their favorite pastries. The delivery guy, as usual, admonished the breakfast cook, me today, to make sure that the empty bakery boxes were given to Paul, one of the main kitchen cooks. Paul had been designated to put those boxes aside for the deliveryman to pick up a few hours later. The idea was that, since the boxes themselves were expensive, the Ambassador could keep its bakery costs down by preserving them for reuse. The reality was that Paul would surreptitiously fill those boxes with beef tenderloins, sirloins, or lobster tails and put them aside. The delivery-man returned and picked them up later, thanking everyone for their thriftiness, and then met Paul after his shift to divide up the loot.
So we were ready for business.
The first customers arrived, were seated, and ordered their food. “A waffle and two eggs scrambled,” the waitress called. Good. Willa Mae worked the waffle iron, and scrambled eggs were easy. I cracked two eggs into a pan, doing the very professional one-handed egg crack, nonchalantly flipped the shells into the garbage can, and swirled my fork into the pan, well and truly scrambling the eggs. They cooked quickly, perhaps too quickly. As I poured the cooked eggs onto the plate, I noticed that Willa Mae had just started the waffle. Worse, there was a lot of scrambled egg cooked solidly, immovably, to the sides and bottom of the pan. Obviously, this pan was pitted and hadn’t been seasoned, the long process whereby a pound of salt is heated up with oil in the pan, the salt acting as an abrasive to smooth the surface of the skillet’s metal. I tossed it aside. Oh well, I still had five pans left—for the moment.
Since the waffle took forever in the lukewarm iron, by the time it was finished the scrambled eggs were stone cold, and the waitress rightly demanded a replacement. No problem, except the second pan duplicated the performance of the first, only more so. The restaurant was filling up now, with the waitresses scurrying about with coffee and juice and writing down orders at each table. We were getting slammed. They were soon shouting things that sounded like TWOEGGSBASTEDWITHASIDEOFHASHBROWNSANDBACONEXTRACRISPYUPWITHTWOPOACHEDFIRMONTOPOFASHORTSTACK. HOWSOONONTHATCHEESEOMELET? Oh, the cheese omelet! The one I put in the oven a few minutes ago. I’ll just open the five-hundred-degree oven and quickly grab it and AHHHH! SON OF A BITCH, FUCKIN’ A!!! Hot plate. I plunged my seared hand into my carefully prepared ice water.
By now all five waitresses were standing across the counter from me, screaming orders and begging for the food they had ordered seemingly hours ago. Yolks were breaking, and whites were singeing. My pans were still sticking badly, so I adopted the expedient of just loading them with oil before dropping in the eggs. Basically, I was deep-frying every order, and the eggs slid across the plates in a queasy puddle of vegetable oil. I fantasized about JohnnyT in his coffin, with his hands curled around those pristine skillets of his, as neglected pancakes blackened and I tried to figure out which omelet was filled with what.
By this time I had asked the waitresses to write their orders down, as I clearly could not remember what anybody needed. This annoyed them even more, but they each took a place mat, put their name on top, and began writing out their orders, each in a different and mutually unintelligible shorthand. All except for one. The new girl from Tennessee was standing in front of me, wide-eyed and trying to make sense of a fistful of guest checks. Her hands were shaking, and occasionally a check would escape her fingers and float to the greasy floor. Looking out from the open kitchen, I could see scowling customers staring at me or trying to flag down their harried servers. Glancing back, Tennessee girl was now openly sobbing, her shoulders heaving as she buried her head in her hands across the pickup counter. A meltdown. Her guest checks were scattered everywhere, and the other waitresses just maneuvered around her in a frantic effort to get what little food was coming up out to their customers.
Enough guests had now walked out or refused to pay that the hostess came over and added her raspy voice to the general din. Willa Mae disgustedly slammed her butter spreader down and walked off the coffee shop line and into the main kitchen. I was eyeing the exit too, seriously contemplating the ignominy of walking out, defeated and grievously incompetent, when two veteran cooks appeared from the main kitchen and elbowed me aside. They calmed the waitresses, cleared the debris from my station, and manfully set about making things right in the coffee shop. It probably took us an hour to reestablish order and feed the remaining customers. This debacle had cost the waitresses some serious tip money, but the refugee from Tennessee had disappeared, apparently forever, and all agreed that she wouldn’t be missed. Finally, the servers turned their anger toward Chef Logan, who had obviously put me out there under fire with no effort to train me on the breakfast station. It was he who showed up next.
By the time I saw him, he had already been briefed by some of the jeering cooks, and he was plainly angry. Having listened too much to the newly sympathetic waitresses, I was now full of what felt like righteous indignation myself. I had experienced quite enough humiliation for one day.
* * *
The French culinary evangelism that spread throughout the Europe-dominated world in the nineteenth century has always been written about in terms of its greatest proselytizers. We have already made the acquaintance of Carême and Ranhofer, who stand in for hundreds of other capable chefs of this period, and we will soon meet the greatest of them all. None of these notable names would have come down to us had they been merely autodidacts exercising their genius in private and not marshaling the forces under their command. We seldom hear about those supporting forces. Generation after generation of anonymous commis (apprentices), pâtissiers (pastry cooks), chefs de partie (line cooks), and lowly plongeurs (dishwashers) made the careers of the great chefs possible. The passion and toil of these workers, as well as their subservience, were the currency chefs spent to buy notoriety.
Theirs was a realm existing, both literally and figuratively, underground. Kitchens of restaurants and hotels in major cities were located in windowless basements. In an era before mechanical ventilation, air entered through holes at pavement level, though they were often filled to prevent the egress of obnoxious odors or the ingress of vermin. The heat generated by the kitchen’s ovens, grills, and rotisseries therefore mostly stayed in the kitchen, along with some of the smoke and the fumes from the various appliances. Gaslights sputtering to give some weak light only added to the inferno, and even the doors opening to other sections of the establishment had to be kept tightly closed during meal periods to prevent drafts from cooling food destined for the customers. The floors were covered with greasy sawdust, and an ember falling from a charcoal-fired rotisserie could easily set the shavings afire.
The introduction of cast-iron cookers at midcentury did little to alleviate the hellish atmosphere. These great stoves, roughly twenty feet long and ten to twenty feet wide, dominated the center of the kitchen. Each morning the crew’s apprentices would load the stove with coal and get it burning in time for the cooks to work around its perimeter. The flue pipes of the great stoves often leaked and vented poisonous fumes directly into the workspace. The fires within were stoked throughout the day, and the thick iron plates glowed under the pots and pans as the cooks prepared the complicated, multifarious menus of the time. Those pots and pans, when dirty, were stacked up in the corners of the kitchen, awaiting the eventual attention of the plongeurs, who typically suffered the loss of all their fingernails from the continual scraping and scrubbing. Open drains carried waste water away but often became plugged, flooding the kitchen and adding to the general misery.
Years of working in these conditions inevitably took a toll on the health of the cooks. Their afflictions included slow asphyxiation from the fumes of the cooking appliances, tuberculosis, undernourishment, varicose veins from standing throughout long shifts, and deformations of the ankle from carrying heavy loads. An 1883 article in La Revue de l’Art Culinaire reported that most cooks died in their early forties and that there were more occupational diseases to be found among cooks than among miners. The greatest scourge for the cooks was, however, chronic alcoholism. Sweating profusely in these infernal regions, cooks sucked down whatever beer, wine, or spirits they could find, and sauciers making wine- or liquor-based concoctions were the most prone to abusing the ingredients. Most of the ordinary cooks toiled on in a more or less continual stupor until they died. Only the most astute or ambitious made it out of the restaurant kitchens to private service or the exalted status of head chef. Even Carême himself lived to be only fifty, succumbing too young to his early years of drudgery.
This stultifying atmosphere had little to recommend it, and those uninitiated into its sweltering precincts had little desire to visit. Besides, the cooks who populated the kitchens had a reputation as uncouth, vulgar, and occasionally violent. Shouted obscenities as well as crashing crockery could often be heard by restaurant diners, and the chefs’ purported bullying of their staffs, with frequent resort to corporal punishment, seemed eminently justifiable to the public. The cooks themselves called their chosen employment le métier (the profession) and were largely fatalistic about its outcome.
A young man gained entry to this fiery underworld through an apprenticeship, a system that was in itself brutalizing. Parents would deliver their thirteen-year-old son to a chef-patron and pay a fee to feed, house, and train the young man for a period of three years. The apprentice had to supply his own clothing, shoes, aprons, hats, and even bedding. During apprenticeship the boy was supposed to live in a dormitory, but few proprietors actually could afford such accommodations. In reality the apprentice often slept in a corner of the kitchen or in the stables with the horses. Essentially, his parents had purchased the youth three years of slavery.
The apprentice’s day started early, as he accompanied his master to the market to procure provisions for the day’s meal service. These he had to carry back to the restaurant across the crowded pavements, either on his head or in an overloaded wheelbarrow. The rest of the day and evening was consumed with menial tasks and periodic abuse from workers with more seniority or skill. Often he was bullied mercilessly by his coworkers, and it was common for chefs to mete out rough treatment, including kicks and blows, to the newcomer. Formal training barely existed, and the young man learned by observing experienced crew members on the job. The apprentice could be discharged for any reason, without compensation, and new employers seldom opened their doors to those who failed elsewhere. Anyone who succeeded in this gauntlet of abuse had to prove himself daily, in order to graduate to the status of commi, the lowest order of kitchen worker in the fiery world of le métier.
The man almost singularly responsible for civilizing the restaurant kitchen was Auguste Escoffier. He had the good fortune of being born near Nice in 1846, far from the pressure cooker of the Paris restaurant milieu. Although he went through the normal process of culinary apprenticeship, the circumstances were mitigated by his uncle’s owning the establishment. The restaurant offered delivery to every address in Nice, then as now a fashionable resort destination on the Mediterranean. One of the apprentice’s duties was making these deliveries, and so the young Escoffier gained admittance to the sumptuous residences along the Côte d’Or. Inside, he observed everything and recorded for future reference his impressions of clothes, table settings, styles of service, manners, and expressions. His uncle also favored the boy by putting him in charge of procurement for the restaurant. This gave him access to produce from Provence, seafood from the Mediterranean, and meat and game from Piedmont. Few regions on earth are better situated for sourcing an abundance of gustatory delights.
Escoffier was an apt pupil, learning every station in the restaurant’s kitchen and nearly every technique practiced in the provincial establishment. He astonished his peers with his expertise, and all realized that Nice was too small a stage for his art. Like all promising cooks, he aspired to a position in Paris. Completing his apprenticeship, he applied for a position at Le Petit Moulin Rouge and began working at that famous location in 1865. His first job was as rôtisseur, in charge of all the roasted meats and fish on the menu. In addition, he was responsible for soufflés and deep-fried items. This meant that each day he simultaneously labored over charcoal grills, open-fired rotisseries, and sputtering vats of fat, running to and fro in the barely organized kitchen. After a couple years of this, Escoffier was promoted to the garde manger (cold-food cook) and then saucier positions, a phenomenal rise in less than five years.
Paris in those years was truly the capital of the world. Another Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon, reigned as Emperor Napoleon III. The city itself was being redesigned at his behest, the broad boulevards and monuments we know today replacing the ancient warrens of the city. It was La Villelumière (The City of Lights), the intellectual, political, and cultural beacon of Europe, and visitors flocked to Paris from all corners of the globe. One of its undoubted attractions was the haute cuisine available in its restaurants, setting the standard for fine dining everywhere. Le Petit Moulin Rouge was one of its brightest lights, and Auguste Escoffier was rising inexorably as one of its most inspired and skillful contributors.
The officer corps of the French army continued to show its good taste by requiring accomplished chefs to accompany the headquarters on campaign. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Escoffier was still serving in the reserves and was mobilized and sent to the front to feed the generals. These generals, it turned out, were much abler at gourmandizing than they were at strategizing, and France was quickly and utterly defeated. Escoffier was nearly killed on several occasions, but in the end he trudged off to a prisoner of war camp when most of the army surrendered. Even in captivity, however, the French general staff had its privileges, and Escoffier finished out his confinement in tolerable comfort serving the defeated officers.
In a sense Escoffier’s capture had been a stroke of luck. Had he remained in Paris, he would have undoubtedly undergone the horrors of the siege the Prussian army conducted against the capital. The population was reduced to starvation as German shells rained on the city. Most of the restaurants closed for want of provisions, though some kept going by offering meals of cat, dog, or rat. Even the animals in the zoo were slaughtered, and for a few days those who could afford it dined on elephant or ocelot. Instead of enduring these privations, Escoffier was imprisoned hundreds of miles away, with plenty of time for thinking.
His experience in the army, though decidedly unsatisfactory, had taught him a lot about organization. Escoffier began to imagine a wholesale redesign of the kitchen staff, where each worker would have separate and distinct duties that followed a rigid chain of command. He termed this the brigade system, and it is still in use today in nearly every restaurant worthy of the name. As expediency forced Escoffier to shorten ingredient lists and reengineer courses, he came to realize that the menus of the time, largely imitations of Carême’s practices from decades ago, were too lengthy and complicated. Experiencing real hunger for the first time as a captive, Escoffier realized that foods themselves, not ritual and embellishment, were what brought people to the table. Finally, Escoffier concluded that captivity in a squalid military prison was not all that different from working in the restaurant kitchens of the time, and he set out to change things. After his liberation these ideas drove Escoffier to action for the rest of his long career. He summed this up in his autobiography:
Having realized that there was, in the field of cooking, a vast domain to explore and develop, I said to myself, “Even though this is not the [circumstance] I personally would have chosen, since I am here, let me work to make the grade and do my best to improve the standing of the kitchen chef.” This has always been my goal, and I think I have given ample proof of my devotion to this cause.
Escoffier returned to the milieu more determined than ever. In 1878, he opened his first restaurant, Le Faisan d’Or, in Cannes. Moving on to Monte Carlo, he took over the kitchens of the Grand Hotel, making it a world culinary destination. Escoffier’s visionary cooking and dedication to quality soon made him famous, as did his writings. A superb organizer, he also popularized his theories on running a successful operation. These included modernization of kitchen design to make facilities more healthful and holding cooks to a higher standard of performance and deportment. Foul language was banned from Escoffier’s kitchens, as was sloppy appearance and poor hygiene. Moreover, this greatest of chefs advocated for culinarians to have formal education, health care, and even treatment for alcoholism. His goal was nothing less than to make his profession respectable.
During the summer season Escoffier also ran the kitchen operation of the Hotel National in Lucerne. There he met César Ritz, the great hotelier. They formed a partnership and, in 1890, moved to the Savoy Hotel in London, where they established the model for the back-of-the-house and front-of-the-house operational modes that continue to this day. Successful on every level, they gained control of many of the finest establishments of the day, started the Ritz Hotel chain, and established Escoffier as the acknowledged master of international haute cuisine. Training under Escoffier was the surest route to success. At the Ritz Carlton in London, he trained a pastry chef by the name of Ho Chi Minh, who really never lived up to his potential as a pâtissier. Later in life, Escoffier settled down to catalog all the recipes of fine French cooking, including his own numerous contributions. He also edited culinary journals and wrote his memoirs, in which he conveniently forgot to mention that both he and Ritz had been fired from the Savoy for accepting kickbacks from suppliers.
My conversation with Chef Logan in the aftermath of the breakfast disaster was conducted, at least initially, at a high decibel level. Retelling it verbatim would be impossible, both because my memory is not all that exact and because my sputtering was answered with Logan’s stuttering and the resultant dialog would be much too long and difficult to punctuate. Here’s the gist of it.
Righteous indignation was the only card I held, and I played it early.
“Why wasn’t I given any training before being thrown to the wolves on the breakfast station?”
“Why should I bother training the likes of you?”
“What’s the matter with me?”
“Well, for one thing, you’re a waste of my time. You’ll be gone soon, and I’ll just have to train somebody else.”
“Are you firing me?”
“Not really. All I’m saying is that once you’re done with fucking school, you’ll be gone like every other educated idjit. It’s all just a part-time job for you, so you can afford beer and pussy. You’ve got no dedication. You only want to learn what you need to get by. I hope the university teaches you something, because you’re not learning shit here.”
Weakening now.
“Well … maybe if I had a better teacher.”
“Look son, I’ve taught certifiable retards to be better cooks than you’ll ever be. At the Savoy Hotel I had to train a crew of bleedin’ Pakistanis. I can teach anybody, except for people who have been to cooking school. They’re hopeless. I could even teach a … What are you studying in college?”
“Ah … political science.”
“Well, I think I could teach even a political fucking scientist if he was willing to learn.”
“Dammit, I want to learn! And I’m not an idjit just because I go to school … ”
But there it was. The kitchen culture had a deep suspicion of formal education of every sort. In the world of culinary professionals, on-the-job training was viewed as the sole legitimate path to career success. Most of the cooks had barely finished high school, while many, including the chef, had never graduated at all. Though some occasionally expressed regret about their lack of schooling, most felt that wasting any additional time in the classroom would only have cost them money later on. Better to work, earn, and learn than to sit through hours of some boring sod trying to explain algebra or, in my own case, Latin.
Paul replaced me the next day on the breakfast station. This meant that I could go to JohnnyT’s funeral at the old Baptist church in North Minneapolis. Ambassador employees were the only white people in attendance, and I found myself sitting next to Chef Logan during the service. Afterward, he invited me to have a beer with him, but there was no such thing as a beer in Logan’s world. We went to a bar where being underage was nullified by being with John Logan. The hours in the bar sped by, and I woke up the next morning, pried my eyes open, and prayed for death. When my prayers went unanswered, I got dressed and went to work. Logan was already there, in fine spirits, and when I walked in, he said, “About f-f-fucking time you got here. Let’s get started.”
Apparently, we had resumed our discussion at the bar after the funeral and had come to some sort of understanding, the details of which I probably forgot during my fourteenth trip to the restroom. At any rate, I must have promised to get serious about my work, and for his part Chef Logan had decided to try to give me a real education. True to my principles, I never wavered in my determination to excel in college. Having started at the university in 1967, I finished my course work in 1981 and walked down the aisle in cap and gown in 1995 to receive my political science bachelor’s, with a soaring GPA of 2.56. But the eight years following our postfuneral binge was when I really got educated. Chef Logan put me in every situation in his kitchen where I could learn. I worked every station under his guidance, helped in culinary competitions, baked thousands of the infamous loaves of soda bread for various Irish festivals, and even got involved in union politics as an election judge and contract negotiator. When he bought an Irish bar downtown, Logan had me do the cooking. When he agreed to cater an out-of-town wedding, I was the one who had to drive the stolen supplies to the site in my (shudder) Gremlin, while he flew down in a borrowed private plane. After ten years at the Ambassador, I was the sous-chef, the number-two man in the Ambassador’s kitchen, the chef’s protégé.
So I found it surprising when Chef Logan sat down with me in his office and informed me that I would soon be leaving the Ambassador. He had concluded, correctly, that there was nothing left for me to learn at the Island in the Sun and that I needed to move on as the next step in my career. Before I could ask where I would go, he announced that he had spoken to the chef at the Sheraton Ritz Hotel in downtown Minneapolis and that I would be starting in this much larger, much more complex property in two weeks as sous-chef. It was all arranged, even my minimal pay raise. Naturally, I was shocked, but by this point I was showing some restlessness, and Logan clearly thought I was ready to take the next step. How could I argue with him?
On my last day at the Ambassador, Logan approached me, wished me luck, and promised to help me in any way, blah, blah, blah. I thanked him, and he handed me something, saying, “You might n-n-need this.” It was a tattered little book, grease-stained and dog-eared, that had plainly seen more than a few years’ service in kitchens. The book was Chef Logan’s own copy of Le repertoire de la cuisine by Auguste Escoffier.
Ingredients
1 fresh tom turkey, 16 to 18 lbs
1 tbsp pepper
1 tbsp salt, plus one nearly empty box of salt (iodized OK)
2 to 3 bottles (or maybe more, who knows?) inexpensive tequila
1 dozen lemons, hacked into wedges
4 to 6 friends, preferably college students, reprobates, or any combination of the two
Preparation