You can generally tell how a woman was raised by the way she wipes down a countertop.
Some mothers of my generation shooed their daughters out of the kitchen in the hopes that they’d never have to toil in it and gave them little direct instruction. Others, like my mom, insisted that their daughters could “do anything” they wanted to do, but then continued to school them in the housewifely arts anyway.
When I was nine years old, my mom taught me how to wipe the countertop in the following very specific way: You soak the washcloth in steaming-hot water, wring it out hard with both hands so that it no longer drips, then stretch the cloth flat on the countertop and lay your hand on it, middle finger pointing toward a corner, that corner flipped back up over your fingers like a toboggan. This way, when you wipe (and if you haven’t seen this demonstrated, let me tell you, it’s a goddamned miracle), the corner of the cloth stays up over your hand. “With a flat expanse of cloth, you can pick up crumbs,” my mom stressed, her body leaning into the surface, running her cloth-covered nail tip into the crevice between the stove and the countertop. Her face, hanging above the shiny surface, was smooth and contented. Not joyous, not sad, but what you might call Placid Wiping Face. Unconsciously I absorbed the look of spine-tingling satisfaction she gave the gleaming countertop and knew it contained something even greater: hope for tomorrow and its many projects. If you’re despondent about the future, you don’t wipe like that. You let the crumbs lie.
The other way to wipe a countertop is to distractedly grab the wet cloth in a bunch, the sloopy ends dripping water, and run it along the surface, pretending you don’t see the crumbs that remain—which is how Aaron does it, and how many people do it, and which still generally gets the job done.
But inside my mom lived many generations of female ancestors who elevated mundane household maintenance into a craft. Women who wiped their countertops with rags so hot they steamed, who bleached their cutting boards monthly; women who thought that walking away from a crusty dish to let it soak would be like inviting the demon himself into her kitchen. From my barstool perch on the other side of the counter, I watched my mom wipe the mouths of glass condiment bottles, digging the crud out of the rim threads before putting the lids back on. I watched her transfer diminishing leftovers into smaller containers before putting them back into the fridge. For jobs too fine for a washcloth, she grabbed the old graying toothbrush from the bucket beneath the sink and frantically brushed the tight corners. The level of detail to which my mom and her mom, Grandma Dion, cleaned their kitchens was borderline obsessive-compulsive, and yet it pretty much sums up the entirety of professional cooking. Via the simple act of wiping, they passed on to me about 85 percent of what I’d need later on to survive my years of cooking in Manhattan kitchens—which is to say, the percentage of line cooking that depends on your ability to keep shit clean.
After my summer trip to France, I went back to Danube for a second helping—five or so nonillustrious months on the entremet station—before quitting once again. Out of fear that I was becoming addicted to the Bouley brand of dysfunction, I felt I needed to move on to another kitchen to see what else was out there. My next cooking job was at Daniel Boulud’s db bistro moderne (all lowercase), where everyone, whether subjected to housewife training or not, knew how to properly wipe down a countertop. Unlike at Danube, where I was often the sole woman, this place was flush with female cooks—and from what I could tell, they were all angry.
Jean-François, db bistro’s chef de cuisine, assigned me to train with Julie, who was working the cold station but moving up to entremet. She was to be my handler, and she did not look real happy about it.
Upon first meeting, all cooks posture to each other to let the other know exactly at which level of the game they’re playing. Men in the kitchen generally do this subtly, dropping clues of their experience whenever they find it convenient. Women in the kitchen get right to the point. The serious ones generally play to win.
Julie let me know right off that she had cooked for so-and-so and so-and-so, and also at Café Boulud for years, and was only working the cold station as a favor to the chef. They were short-handed because some pisser—naturally, a girl—had quit.
“Ugh,” she said. “The last girl sucked. Let’s see if you can do better.”
I wasn’t sure. The prep list was serpentine.
At the time, db bistro moderne was Chef Boulud’s third restaurant. He shared a French cooking pedigree and initials with Bouley, but they differed in temperament. Boulud’s comments were delivered at a higher volume, and he was more briskly businesslike. And because he also ran two other restaurants—Café Boulud and his flagship, Daniel—he was also less likely to be hanging around during service.
db bistro was in the theater district, meaning it courted the hell horde of pretheater dining: tables in by 5:30, out by 7:15. Unlike at Danube, there was no gradual slide into the dinner slam. And being newly opened, the restaurant was also mobbed with the usual New York City scene-chasers; there was usually one at each table who ordered the $27 db burger, a high-end ground-beef blend stuffed with braised short ribs and a center chunk of foie gras, topped with two petals of tomato confit, and a tuft of pale green frisée. Dubbed “the most expensive burger ever” by the press shortly after it appeared on the menu, the db burger pretty much had its own public relations team and absolutely required its own cook. There was one guy who just made burgers all day long, pressing the tri-ply meat cake into the clean lid of a mayonnaise jar to mold it, filling sheet tray after sheet tray with burger pucks. The rest of us put hundreds of portions of tomato confit—peeled plum halves that shrank slowly overnight in a bath of olive oil—into low ovens every night before we left.
Apparently I had not learned my lesson at Danube and had not found a mellower follow-up restaurant, if such a thing even existed in Manhattan. The schedule in this newly opened place was after my dad’s own workaholic heart: It was thirteen-hour days if you were quick enough to finish your work and six-day weeks. And sometimes, if for some reason Jean-François couldn’t finagle your day off, you lost that day and had to work fourteen days in a row. This happened at inopportune times, like during the Christmas holidays. Everybody got off for Christmas Day, though, because the restaurant was closed, and the lucky ones were even sent home with a Christmas capon from Daniel Boulud himself. I quietly shared my grumbling with my friend, the Scottish meat cook. He had introduced me to a special little snack of cribbed French fries shoved into a soft bun, “the chip butty” (pronounced “buh-hee”), and tried to raise our collective Christmas spirits by making an elaborate Scottish haggis out of lamb lights (lungs) and heart and tongue, assembled after he’d finished his significant prep list. Returning to work on December 26 at six-thirty in the morning, the Scot and I trudged up the steps together and he said, turning his cuffs back, his kind eyes drooping at the corners, “So I guess that was the ’olidays, then?”
Unlike the Scot, Julie didn’t seem to expect days off. She continued to ride me, following me around like we were twins, pointing out where I should have transferred my slightly-too-small amount of lobster mayonnaise into a container of a more befitting size, reminding me to cut my labeling tape with a scissors so that it had perpendicular corners instead of amateurish ripped ones, shrieking when I tested the artichokes barigoule for doneness with a meat fork, which left two small holes in the olive-green flesh. “Pinch them to test! Don’t leave holes!” (We sliced them and the holes wouldn’t even show, I thought, but whatever.) Whenever I appeared calm and in control—clearly not hustling enough—she ordered, “Come on, lady! Move your dick!”
I followed her around, too. For one thing, I was learning an invaluable amount of precious info from her, every bit of which was making me a better cook, but I also trailed her in the way that the abused cling to their abusers. She didn’t like it when I got too close, though, and when we were lined up in the tight alley behind the hot line she hissed, “I can feel your dick in my ass,” and bounced me back a step with a well-placed bump.
Dear Jesus. I could have complained and resisted her, but there was no point. Engaging would have just egged her on. So I decided to take that moment to internalize her teachings and truly improve. I heard her voice even when she wasn’t around, changing out containers, religiously rotating my mise en place to be FIFO compliant (first in, first out), stretching my plastic wrap neurotically over the corners of the metal containers until not a wrinkle in the plastic remained, until the taut top looked as see-through as glass and its containment was totally invisible. I ripped apart forty live lobsters every morning the same way she did: furiously. I screwed off the big claw and threw it into the big claw bin, the small into the small; I swiftly spun the tails apart from the bodies, then twisted and ripped out the middle fan of the tail, taking with it the ropy gray intestinal tract. Then, firmly holding the muscular clenching tail, I shoved a wooden skewer up that same poop chute to flatten it out and tossed it into the tail bin while its little arms were still waving good-bye. I didn’t stop to watch the arms stop fluttering; I moved on to the next one. And the next. Nor did I take a minute to clean the lobster juice spittle from my glasses in the middle of ripping lobsters, but instead waited until it piled up so thickly that I could hardly see, when I was done with all of them. I tried not to feel sorry for these creatures, as I knew that would slow me down. My lobster meat was fast disintegrating into a goo. It needed cooking, pronto.
If Julie’s predecessors, such as T1, had taught me to cook well fast, she taught me to cook well even faster, and for bigger numbers.
I was in the vegetable walk-in at the end of my shift organizing my day’s prep when she came in. She leaped up to the top shelves to grab a nearly empty box of watercress, then the last of the carrot carton and a half-gone box of limes, manically taking to heart her own advice to keep things neat, and pitched everything violently into the center like she was making a pile for a bonfire. Something was really stoking her.
“I’m just so sick of this crap!”
Either she was taking the nearly empty vegetable boxes way too personally or she was choosing this moment to reveal something to me—but I shouldn’t have been surprised, because we were in the walk-in. Displays of emotion had no place in the kitchen, but the minute the walk-in cooler’s massive vault door sucked shut, the coast was clear. It was the private inner sanctum of the kitchen, equal to a therapist’s couch. Like wolves howling into the arctic night, cooks stood in the purifying freezing air and expressed themselves, snatching a moment to slowly grab herbs and share their grievances, to disgorge some burning kitchen gossip, or, like Julie, to angrily smash every nearly empty box to the floor and unleash her hot fury, which steamed off her in waves in the cold fan-powered wind.
When she found a metal six-pan of white beans soaking, the wrinkly top beans rising up above the waterline, she started railing—not at me, but at some nonpresent incorrigible someone.
“These beans are improperly soaked!” She could have just said that someone didn’t use enough water to cover them, but for her the incompetence went deeper than that. The amount of water wasn’t just insufficient, it was improper. It offended her kitchen ethic.
“Not mine!” I backed up.
“Shut up, I know they’re not yours. Do you cook beans?” she taunted, shaking the six-pan. We both knew I did not.
Julie threw her head back in the air and spun for the exit. “Thirty-one years old and I’m still doing this fucking veg shit!” she said, punching the button to open the door. The air pressure gasped, releasing her to the outside.
I made a quick deduction that she hadn’t been promoted to the meat station, recently vacated by the giant I-forget-his-name-now guy, the sweaty one who kept the tip of his rolled-up tongue pressed to his top lip during service in a state of pure concentration. For some reason, you rarely saw chefs assign women to cook the main protein, even if that woman was a sous chef. Sometimes the fish, but never the meat.
Honestly, it didn’t make sense to me, though. It seemed that Chef Jean-François trusted Julie. We all liked him. He was a fair guy. I looked around the kitchen at all the cooks’ moving, bumping, swirling shapes and thought, It wasn’t that Jean-François, or most of the male chefs, meant to be sexist. What was going on here was actually worse. It was a failure of the imagination. Promoting a cook to a position of greater responsibility involved squinting at that cook to see if you could imagine him (or her), as they said, “stepping up” into the harder job. It was the lazy side of cowardice: when the chefs looked back in time to their own line-cooking youths, they fondly remembered their own chefs squinting at them and gauging them sufficiently ready to step up, so they promoted the guy. Pleased with themselves to close this circle, they failed to see that it was an unfair eternal cycle.
Or maybe I was being too generous. They also knew the girls would take the sideways promotions to fill the stations that needed filling, good strong girls that they were. So capable and uncomplaining, just like a mother.
When I walked out, Julie was heatedly discussing this issue with Faye, our thirty-something “junior” sous chef. They broke the huddle when they saw me. The last thing they wanted was an all-witch bitchfest. They were too smart to dilute their power by embracing their lessers.
By the end of my seven years in Manhattan kitchens, I’d come to feel their pain. Like them, I nearly always worked the vegetable station and never the roast. Always a bridesmaid, never a groom. Only later did I realize that the vegetable station—the entremet—which I thought of as my gender-specific bondage, would be my revelation.
Soon after, Julie left to be the head chef of a restaurant in Brooklyn—I cheered both her success and her evacuation—and I took over her entremet position on the line.
This was classic French food reimagined by Daniel Boulud, inarguably one of the great chefs in New York City. But due to the amount of covers we were doing, the multitude of people we were serving, it was the classics on speed. Escargots with garlic and parsley puree took three minutes. Chicken Grand-mère took two. There were two guys to my left, the Scot cooking fish, a new towering guy cooking meat—so much meat that he sliced the duck breasts and steaks with an electric knife, a tool I hadn’t seen used since my mom buzzed through the Thanksgiving turkey back home. To my right was the burger guy, responsible for about a quarter of the main courses that flew out the door. His fries were as crispy and light as balsa wood, and exquisite. I ate many, many, many of them. I was cooking all of the garnish for the meat and fish plates, and when we got slammed, Jean-François hopped onto the line to help dig me out.
The first rush was over and I was replenishing the garnish for the chicken, which had experienced an uncharacteristic run in the first quarter of service. I was cooking fat blocks of bacon lardons in a sauté pan, starting them in a shallow bath of water, as the morning entremet had instructed me to do. Jean-François asked incredulously, “What tha hell are you dew-ing? Is this how you cook lard-ohns? In water?”
He was right. Why was I cooking them in water? With a chill I thought: Because the morning entremet guy had told me to. How could I screw up bacon, the ingredient that defined my childhood, the thing I watched my mom cook with such devotion? She’d drilled me on the bacon. Don’t crowd the pan, she’d said. Don’t cook it so fast, or it sticks to the bottom and its juices boil away. Don’t cook it too slow or too much fat renders and it’ll taste dry. You want to tease out the fat. The bacon should swizzle steadily away in its own juices until its edges constrict like a shrunken wool sweater and turn coconut-brown. These visuals were hardwired into me.
If I was screwing up the bacon, something was seriously out of whack. And at that moment I reached the very peak of my information-gathering phase; the stage of absorbing the lessons of others like an indiscriminate sponge had ended. Going forward, I’d follow my instincts.
Meat got all the glory, but the roast position seemed to me the most straightforward one in the kitchen. The protein had to be cooked to the correct temperature, no question; that was easy to see. And not that hard to do once you got in the groove, cooking identically sized portions of the same things night after night. Once it was sliced, it was truth time. The color told you whether to cook it harder the next time or ease up.
The garnish, though—the starch and the vegetables and the sauces—were all more subtly make or break. Oversalted or undercooked yellow wax beans? Those are invisible mistakes. Lack of soulful cooking, also invisible. And, crucially, in order to sing on the plate, the starches and the vegetables need to contain some soul. Undercooked fish came right back to the kitchen for refiring and was grudgingly reaccepted a few minutes later, but if a diner bit on the tough core of a carrot they registered it the way a carpenter does a nail found in the center of a board: with supreme annoyance, but silently.
Everyone, even the big bulky guys, referred to cooking the garnish well as cooking “with love,” a phrase rarely applied to the protein. The first time I heard it, I was taken aback. A big lumbering guy, reminiscing about his days cooking at Alain Ducasse in Monaco, said: “The guy I trained with, he cooked the vegetables with so much love…” and shook his head, as if trying to dislodge a big, fat imaginary tear in his eye, a kaleidoscope that turned the sauté pan before us into twelve swirling gems of vegetable-garnish loveliness.
At the time I saw the world in much the same way, in terms of colors, sounds, and shifting textures: silken scarves of hot squash puree, dunes of homemade bread crumbs as mottled and cool to the touch as beach sand. Fresh parsley puree of a stinging green, pure liquid chlorophyll. The cackle of thyme and garlic hitting brown butter, its reassuring scent rising up. I also admired the seared golden-crowned scallops and the sliced pink duck breasts and the dark lobes of venison split open to reveal their savage red interiors—but I fell in love with the garnishes. In fact, nearly every emotion I felt during that time was connected to the food; my relationships with humans were secondary. (And I say this with deepest apologies to Aaron because he knows it’s true.) My egg-shaped silver plating spoon was an extension of my hand, the plates an extension of my thoughts. I was pie-eyed for the garnishes and knew nothing of current events. Even now, when someone mentions a major happening from my line-cooking tenure, I often look at them blankly. (Hanging chads from that contested 2000 election? No flipping idea.)
At the end of the day I fell into bed and a color factory of sauces and purees washed over me: the bright yolk yellow of the corn sauce; the milk-green of creamed favas; the inner glow of beets in red wine.
This is what happens to a cook when she spends so many hours gaping at the contents of the pan before her, waiting for doneness. It’s not unlike the way a gardener watches her tomatoes ripen. Both end points mark the moment at which a vegetable contains as much liquid sweetness as it ever will. When perfectly cooked, a wedge of white turnip will drip juices as if its light purple veins run with fat, and its tissue will soften and taste like butter. On the raw side of things, an utterly ripe tomato at the end of August swings low on its vine, opalescent and suntanned gold at the shoulders, its voluptuous flesh nearly falling out of its skin.
To me, becoming a cook meant being able to spot that point and know when the time came to stop—to pull it, slice it, and put it on a plate. Raw or cooked, that is the vegetable finale. And to me and all my entremet sisterhood—both the women and the men—it looks pretty much like happiness itself.