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Old cooks never die


I am now officially old, at least in the eyes of Suffolk Transit, anyway. Since my beloved truck is in intensive care for a couple of days, I’ve had to take the bus to and from work. I got on at Riverhead and put in my $1.50 and the driver said, quite loudly, “Are you over 60?”


“I’m just 60,” I whispered, casting furtive looks around the bus. “Then you only have to pay 50 cents!” he announced in a voice that could be heard by drivers passing in the opposite direction at 50 miles an hour with their windows up. “I’ll just pay the full fare anyway,” I said, maybe hoping that the extra money would jerk me back to my late 50s for at least the duration of the bus ride.


I recently did a little time cooking at a charity event, and was reminded after a mere eight hours of heavy lifting, burning fingers and running up and down stairs that restaurant work is a realm for the young. A very entertaining if not downright scary look at a fifty-something seeing if he can still cut it behind “the line” at a busy Manhattan restaurant, can be had by picking up a DVD of Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations.” In the episode entitled “Into the Fire,” he goes back to Les Halles for a double shift and faces full-on the relentless brutality of the sauté station on a busy weekday. Although I’ve never worked in Manhattan on the line, I’ve worked the line at some very busy places. Looking at Bourdain’s eyes at the height of the rush, I could feel the terror. 


Many people wonder why anyone would be willing to subject themselves to a hot, cramped, largely hostile environment, pumping out meal after meal for five, six or even seven 12-16 hour days per week. It takes a huge amount of skill, focus and stamina to survive as a professional line cook, the stress levels of which have been compared to that of air traffic controllers. In fact, that’s really what it’s like, except instead of planes you have orders arriving and departing one right after another, sometimes two, three or four at once, with some coming right back after leaving only shortly before. You must be able to hear and process multiple conversations at one time, while managing the steady supply of cold food, hot food, hot pans, dishes and towels used to meet the demands of the chef, the waiters, the runners and ultimately, the customer. 


Is there any good side to this? Of course there is. There is hardly any other job that can deliver the feeling you get at the end of the night when you know that all the guests have left satisfied and you, along with your three or four line-mates, still have most of the brains and all of the fingers you had when you started the shift. Like comrades in arms, you have conquered the beast; you have ridden the tsunami and survived to do it all over again the next day.


Back when the Earth was young and I was an apprentice, a veteran roast cook said to me, “You know, if you couldn’t have any fun in this trade it would be a bad business to be in.” And while some of the aforementioned job satisfaction could loosely be described as fun, we also had other types, like practical jokes. They were invariably perpetrated on newbies, much to the delight of those who had the same tricks pulled on them when they were just starting out.


It should be said here that upon entering the hotel trade I noticed a particular animosity between the bake shop and the range. The bakers tended to look down on the cooks because they perceived baked products to be the result of carefully crafted formulas and scientific techniques, while cooks just threw things together, corrected their mistakes and hoped for the best. I beg to differ.


Two stunts that come to mind were the efforts of one pastry chef who shall remain anonymous in case there are still active warrants for his arrest. Many have probably witnessed the “funnel trick,” where the perpetrator (perp) sticks a funnel in his belt and tries to drop a quarter balanced on his forehead in to the funnel. Missing and succeeding occasionally, he keeps doing this until a hapless passerby (mark) stops to watch, invariably asking if he can try it. After numerous rebuffs, the perp relents, and after several attempts by the mark to perform this skill the perp quietly reaches for a hidden glass of ice water and pours it in to the funnel and down the pants of the rookie funnel-athlete. Our dastardly pastry chef, however, would take it to the next level and use slightly warmed corn syrup instead of water. 


Probably the most famous of all his crimes involved a large vat of chocolate milk-shake he once made for the cooks to quench their thirst during the hot and hectic dinner service. 


Unbeknownst to anyone save himself, the shake had been laced with chocolated laxative. Beforehand he had gone downstairs and nailed the two bathroom doors shut and hung “out of order” signs on them leaving only one available bathroom way down at the other end of the hallway, 40 to 50 yards away. The unbridled carnage that resulted when nearly 300 hungry guests descended on the dining room almost in unison, with only two out of perhaps a dozen cooks left surviving on the front line, is the stuff of culinary legend.


Like I said, professional cooking is a young man’s game.