BY MICHAEL RUHLMAN
From Tin House
The line between writer and chef is porous with Michael Ruhlman, whose culinary school days led to his 1997 book The Making of a Chef. Gastronomic stars such as Thomas Keller, Eric Ripert, and Michael Symon have since enlisted his wordsmith gifts. For the literary journal Tin House, he spills the truth about his adopted tribe.
Not to brag, but I think I may have written one of the most stolen cookbooks in America. The first hint came a few years ago, when I read the following on Twitter: “My copy of @ruhlman’s #salumi was stolen. #heartbroken.”
The writer attached a photograph of the passenger side of his car, shattered glass covering the seat.
Someone had not simply stolen my book, but had caused considerably more damage than the book was worth in doing so. What would have been petty theft became a second-degree burglary. For a book? I found this curious enough that I asked chefs if they had ever lost a copy of Salumi, or of its precursor, Charcuterie, to theft. Every one I approached said yes. Four of the chefs I asked have had thirteen copies stolen between them. (Another responds to the unspoken rules of the kitchen by taking her book to and from work with her.) All of which would explain why a ten-year-old book containing recipes that take days and even months to follow—some of which can kill you if you do them wrong—remains such a steady seller. The same people have to keep buying them.
Salumi’s theft from restaurants rather than home kitchens makes some sense. Professionals love its unabashed embrace of fat and salt and complicated preservation methods, plus the perfect recipes of my collaborator, chef Brian Polcyn. But it’s a $35 hardcover, and young cooks, who earn a subsistence wage, are at once the people who would benefit most from it and who are least able to afford it. So it gets stolen. A lot.
I grew so proud of this dubious distinction that I bragged about it to New York Times reporter Alex Witchel, who regarded my claim skeptically. Later, however, she told me that she asked a chef if he owned Charcuterie or Salumi and had either ever been stolen?
Yes it had, he told her. Twice.
That a single book in our ocean of cookbooks may be more pilfered than any other makes it unique, but its theft from restaurant kitchens does not. There may be more general thievery in the restaurant industry than in any other.
The restaurant is more vulnerable to theft than most other retail businesses. It requires a large number of low-wage workers to make it run profitably, and all manner of food, alcohol, silverware, and tools must be accessible to these employees, not to mention to diners. But I think, also, that there might be something in the nature of restaurant kitchens and the people who work in them that encourages theft. While I’m sure servers steal, the stories I hear are almost always of cooks stealing, which leads me to consider a most intriguing possibility: that there is something built into the job of professional cooking itself that generates the desire to steal.
This idea occurred to me after rereading a book called But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz, by Geoff Dyer. In it Dyer notes the high incidence of drug abuse by and early deaths of great jazz artists—Chet Baker, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, a list that goes on and on. Even some of those jazzmen who made it into their sixties and seventies (Ray Charles, for example) ultimately succumbed to alcohol-related organ failure. Dyer suggests not that high-risk personalities are drawn to jazz, but rather that there is something dangerous inherent in the form itself, some unseeable power that wreaks havoc on those who play it. The same might be said of early rock and roll, even beyond the “27 club” (Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin), or, more specifically, of rock-and-roll drumming, which is satirized by the exploding drummers in This Is Spinal Tap.
It was M. F. K. Fisher who made a similar observation about cooks, noting “the grim picture drawn by statistics which show that in many great prisons there are more cooks than there are representatives of any other one profession.
“Most cooks, it would seem,” she goes on, “are misunderstood wretches, ill-housed, dyspeptic, with aching broken arches. They turn more eagerly to the bottle, the needle, and more vicious pleasures; they grow irritable; finally they seize upon the nearest weapon, which if they are worth their salt is a long knife kept sharp as lightning . . . and they are in San Quentin.”
Cooks certainly are a singular breed. Most would have you believe they are artists, not criminals. Passion, heart, love. Chefs will say these are what they cook with and the qualities they want in a cook. “Show me a young cook with passion and I can teach him the rest,” most chefs will tell you. They will fall over themselves explaining how they cook from the heart, how they cook with love.
This, of course, is bullshit. Professional cooking is a kind of addiction available only to a select kind of human, typically a manic youth with ADD who is willing to follow eight hours of monotonous, stand-in-one-place prep work with six hours of action that’s not unlike playing a soccer match while juggling knives, hot steel, and scalding oil.
I learned to cook at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and it wasn’t out of love; it was out of anger. I’d talked my way into the CIA to write a book about learning to become a chef. The process of persuasion had taken more than six months (eating up half the book advance) before the administration agreed to let me in. I had to rent our house in Cleveland and move my family to New York’s Hudson Valley before the CIA acknowledged I wasn’t going away. Still, it took months of daily phone calls before I got into my first kitchen.
But I did.
Once, on the day of an important test, a blizzard hit the Hudson Valley. I called my chef, Chef Pardus, and told him I couldn’t make it out of the driveway, let alone twenty-five miles south to the school. He said, “Fine.” I said, “I’d get there if I could but I can’t.”
He said, “Fine.”
Frustrated, I said, “You’ve got to believe me, Chef, if I could get there I would.”
He said, “That’s fine, Michael. You have your work, we have ours. We’re chefs. We get there. We like it like that.”
The motherfucker.
I drove twenty-five miles through a blizzard to make a béchamel sauce. I was a writer, but goddamn him, I would be a cook. And a cook I became.
I discovered that anger is valuable. It’s what gets you through a service—the work is just too hard, the pace too fast, to rely on anything so squishy and elusive as love or heart. And once you are through it, if you didn’t get your ass handed to you but rather sent out plate after plate of perfect food until that ticket machine’s incessant chatter ceased, the adrenaline and testosterone will make you want to head-butt your fellow cooks in jubilation.
Anger is dependable, as is its twin: fear. Fear motivates. The second reason I (like so many others in the industry) took up cooking was fear of poverty. I was an unemployed, unknown writer living in Cleveland with a wife and baby daughter to support. Cooking was the only job I could get. The restaurant that hired me, a fancy French Mediterranean place called Sans Souci, was owned by Marriott, and the chef to whom I’d applied for a job looked at me (I had no resume; I had just told him I could cook) and said, “You have to take a drug test, you know.” He held my gaze, eyebrows raised. I said not a problem, and he hired me on the spot. Ah, the irony! How we’ve glorified the chef, made The Chef a celebrity and media star, when, really, the only qualification for the job is to be able to pass a drug test.
The last quality defining the true cook is itinerancy. The profession is the closest thing we have these days to medieval journeymen traveling from town to town. Cooks are vagabonds. Until they are ambitious and lucky enough to own a successful restaurant that keeps them grounded in one place, they travel from restaurant to restaurant, city to city, practicing their craft. There are exceptions, of course. But I’ve written about a lot of restaurants and cooks and chefs, and I have often returned to a restaurant I’ve covered to discover I don’t recognize a single cook beyond the chef owner.
So. Compile a fleet of men and women who are motivated by a volatile mixture of anger, fear, and adrenaline addiction, people who are perpetually broke or on the edge, and who are spiritually homeless, and you have a workplace primed for small crime.
“I had a cook walk out on his last day with a New York strip between his butt cheeks,” a cook in Seattle told me. While taking a smoke break, he watched the departing cook reach his car, unbuckle, and pull out the beef before driving off.
I asked chefs on Twitter for stories of cooks stealing. Matthew Grover wrote back: “Tenderloin down the pants—he had to saran it in place. (And unfortunately my kitchen copy of Charcuterie is gone. Will get one again.)”
Some thieves are more clever and ambitious than knucklehead cooks pinching protein. The guy who entered a restaurant wearing a gray Hobart work shirt and pushing a dolly, for instance. Hobart is one of the leading suppliers of appliances to restaurants. The man in the shirt hefted a Hobart meat slicer onto the dolly. When the kitchen steward, in charge of keeping track of what’s in the kitchen and in the coolers, halted the man and said he didn’t have a work order for this slicer to be taken, his sous chef stepped in, screamed at the steward, and told the workman to take the slicer. An hour later when the chef arrived, he asked, “Where the hell is the slicer?”
Cooks don’t just steal from the restaurant; they steal from each other, such as a guy in San Francisco who stole shoes and clothes from the lockers and sold them to his roommates.
Jason Royal, a cook at a restaurant in New Hampshire, remembers a cocky young cook just out of culinary school, nicknamed Skittles, who brought in a set of handmade knives forged in Japan. His father had paid $8,000 for them. They were dark, dull steel, not shiny like factory-made knives. The blades were etched with exotic Japanese insignia. To cooks, knives can become intensely fetishized; and the rest of the kitchen marveled. The executive chef, concerned for the young cook’s valuable set, told him to keep the knives in his office, which would be locked. After a hard night’s service, Skittles left, forgetting the Japanese knife set in the office. When he returned the next day, the knives were gone. Infuriated, the executive chef made the kitchen stay late after service to hunt for the knives. They were never found. (Skittles, too, was gone three weeks later.)
Of course, everybody believed the thief was the executive chef, who was the only one with a key to the office.
This kind of theft does not happen in finer restaurants, one would think. The most common stories are of dishwashers in lower-tier restaurants finding hiding places for booze to consume after work and of cooks stealing food and expensive tools and books.
Actually, theft does happen in finer places. The finer the place, the bigger the heist. This past winter, seventy-six bottles of wine with a total value of more than $300,000 were stolen from the French Laundry. A month later, the wine was discovered clear across the country in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Chef/owner Thomas Keller, one of the most respected men in the industry, told the Los Angeles Times: “We have 130 employees, we have dozens of delivery people every day, we have hundreds of guests. Someone close to the restaurant? Yes. Somebody who knew where the wine cellar was? Certainly.
“But that could have been the linen delivery guys, the wine delivery guys and any of the people who service the restaurant, as well as everybody who ever worked at one of our restaurants over the years. That’s a lot of people.”
Keller invoked the crux of a restaurant’s vulnerability. All those people required to make it run, all that expensive equipment, food, and wine. That and the fact that most of those employees are people for whom minimum-wage work is the only option.
Except for the cooks. Cooks are different. They could easily trade their apron for a bow tie and earn a living wage as a server. But they don’t, because they’re cooks, and cooks are different.
The restaurant kitchen is a world dominated by high heat and speed and knives, which often come in handy. Among my favorite theft stories is the following, which comes from one of my culinary instructors, certified master chef James Hanyzeski. At the restaurant he ran prior to joining the CIA, he learned that not one but two of his cooks were stealing from the restaurant. The next day he fired them on arrival. At the end of the night, he found that his car had four flat tires.
Hanyzeski shook his head. I could see he was still kicking himself all these years later. “I knew I was going to fire those guys,” he said. He kept shaking his head. “Why didn’t I bring four spare tires to work with me? That was stupid.” Hanyzeski knew the nature of kitchens and who you become when you work in one.
Only when you enter the rabbit hole of the professional kitchen, where theft is built into the culture, do you recognize the peculiar laws of the cook’s universe, where wine and knives and books go missing and one must plan accordingly. You don’t leave copies of a book your cooks want on the passenger seat of your car. Or if you do, you don’t lock the car.
Midway through my reporting at the CIA to write about becoming a cook, one of my classmates asked if I paid tuition. I explained that I was writing a book and therefore wasn’t paying tuition. He narrowed his eyes at me and, in a heavy Boston accent, said, “Man, I shoulda thought a dat scam.”
This was the main reason no one had wanted to let me in, the president of the school told me: too many chefs thought I was trying to get a free education. All I’d wanted was to get in and get out with a story so I could write the book I’d taken an advance on. Instead, Chef Pardus infuriated me into becoming a cook.
It wasn’t until many months later, having returned to Cleveland, having finished the manuscript for the book, having eaten through its advance, having tried and failed to sell another book, going quickly broke and nearing the end of my rope, that it dawned on me: I’ve scammed a free education! I can get a job as a cook!
I did. And that cook’s job led to another book, and to another book after that, and, eventually, to a book that would be among the most stolen in the country, thanks to my fellow cooks.
And I could do all this only because I’d stolen the most valuable thing of all: an education. I was a cook, it seems, from the beginning.