I don't eat nearly as much as one might expect. At work, I spend 14 hours a day preparing and serving food. I am surrounded by it, immersed in it. By the end of each day I reek of roasted garlic and fish and oil and herbs and smoke. I could do no worse if I were rolling in the stuff. On any given work day I prepare ten-to-twenty serves of each dish on the menu and specials board, totaling a couple hundred possible meals, with the expectation that I'll serve at least half of them. Amidst all this cooking, all this preparation and serving, I often fail to eat much at all. It's an affliction that affects many of the chefs I know. It's silly, I know, to be surrounded with food for more than half of the hours in a day and not eat enough, but it is quite common. Ask a chef, at the end of the day, what he's eaten during work; I guarantee he'll have trouble recalling a single meal.
Gypsy Curses
Fancy Baked Beans
NOTE: THIS POST CONCLUDES OUR THREE WEEK SERIES, WE'LL BE USING THE ELEMENTS FROM LAST TWO WEEK'S POSTS TO COMPLETE THIS WEEK'S RECIPE.
Some dishes are about far more than a paltry meal. These are the foods so very saturated with tradition and history and ceremony that eating them is as much about ritual as it is sustenance. One need look no further than American Thanksgiving dinner for an example; where tradition supersedes practicality, and each individual feast is marked by a bird far too large, flanked by sides far too numerous, and manned by relatives eating far too much. It's tradition. The French, in particular, excel at this sort of elevating food beyond a meal to a rite (sans gluttony). France, and it's culinary history, are filled with such stereotypes. Take, for instance, the ceremony surrounding the release of each new vintage of Beaujolais, or the pomp during the first winter truffle harvest. There are several such specimens, but my favourite, if I might cut to the quick, is cassoulet.
How to Cook Beans (The Prep Shift)
NOTE: THIS POST CONTINUES OUR THREE WEEK SERIES, WE'LL BE USING THE ELEMENTS FROM LAST AND THIS WEEK'S POST TO COMPLETE NEXT WEEK'S RECIPE.
It's not all glory. Not remotely. You need to know this; someone should tell you. It's not at all like TV. Professional cooking is, at best, only about 10% glory. The rest is, well, the rest. Actually, “the rest” makes up the majority of what a professional cook does on any given day. That 10% of the goods – service, finishing meals and sending them out, getting the odd bit of positive feedback from the customers – is completely eclipsed by the amount of work required to get ready for dinner service on any given day. Typically, I work a fifteen-hour day and only during a tiny bit near the end do I actually cook meals for customers. The rest of it fills up will roasting this, peeling that, blanching and rolling and confit and boning, chopping and sauteing and salting butchering, cleaning and simmering and a whole host of other generally menial activities. Not glamorous at all.
Snags
NOTE: THIS POST BEGINS A THREE WEEK SERIES, WE'LL BE USING THE ELEMENTS FROM THIS AND NEXT WEEK'S POST TO COMPLETE THE THIRD WEEK'S RECIPE.
“Perhaps,” Brian, a friend and fellow chef said to me, shaking his head, “we should have listened to hundreds of years of tradition.” The tradition he was referring to was that of sausage making, a long and fine tradition indeed. Making sausages is one of the rare instances in savory cooking (as opposed to pastry work) where science meets creativity. Crafting a sausage requires strict adherence to certain, long-established ratios of fat-to-meat-to-salt. There are other rules as well, regarding the number of times you pass the meat through a mincer, the temperature of the meat, and more. Obviously, there is plenty of room for improvisation and tweaking, leading to a near-infinite different types of sausages. Know this: all of them, if they taste good at all, fall within the guidelines set forth by countless generations of sausage makers.
Foolishly, the sausages Brian and I had just produced, did not.
The Rip-Off
I get a little worked up about culinary plagiarism, as I might have mentioned once or twice before. There is a restaurant here in Sydney which is consistently rated in the very top echelon of the City's dining scene. The meal I had there was technically flawless, worthy of Michelin Stars, but for one thing: three of the six courses we ate that evening were direct copies of dishes I've seen elsewhere. I'd seen them in my cookbooks at home, to be more precise, and what was presented to me at the table could have been the photographic twin of the dishes in my books at home. I can, on some level, appreciate the technical ability required to re-create these meals, but I didn't then, and don't now, understand why the wholesale duplication of another, sometimes well-known, dish qualifies one for “best-of-the-best” status in Sydney. If I copied the same dishes and sold them in the bistro I now run I'd be called a copy-cat. However, when one fine-dining chef rips another fine dining chef off, it's rewarded, and called artistry. I don't get it. What happened to originality?
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