Mastering the Art of Classic Rockery

"I'll never be
Your pizza burning..."
- The Stones

Every kitchen has one. Perched atop the metal shelving units that house the spices, tucked between buckets of dried fruits and legumes in the dry goods area, splattered with tomato sauce, smeared with buttery fingerprints and fuzzed by the ambient grease that saturates the air, the Kitchen Radio, battered nearly unto death, continues playing. Not so much like the band playing on the deck of the Titanic, more like the drums and pipes that lead young men into war.

How loud the music is played depends very much on the Management, and the time of day. In the incredible cacophony of a busy kitchen during service, where information is conveyed through either silent gesture or top-of-the-lungs shouting over the crash and clatter of the dishwasher, the endless retching of the printer, the Expeditor's commanding tones, pans hitting the stove, food hitting the oil, pans hitting the other pans in bus tubs on the floor, shouts of "Behind! Behind! Behind! Coming through! Hot! Screaming Hot!" or "Etras! Etras! Etras! Muy caliente! Cuidato! Etras!" as prep cooks and dishwashers wend their ways through the foxtrotting linecooks with refills of chopped garlic and portioned pastas, or to restock plates and grab filled-to-overflowing tubs of pans hot enough to melt holes in the plastic tubs before they reach the dishpit, the Radio isn't always heard, but knowing it's on is oddly comforting. Just as knowing a terrible thunderstorm is over because you can at last hear the busy gurgle of water in the gutters, we know the pounding service is over because we can hear the closing chorus of "Hotel California."

Left to their own devices, cooks will play the music a bit loud. (Of course, left to their own devices, they'll also be drunk before noon, smoke four packs of cigarettes a day, roll through a 300-cover night stoned to the gills, eat all the steak and crab, never refill the paper-towel dispenser or remove masking-tape labels from empty containers, never have a retirement fund set up, and never consider that the motivating force behind line cookery and the creation of beautiful food is nothing short of pure love.) Customers and servers have all experienced that moment upon approach toward the kitchen when the music from the dining room begins to compete with the music coming from the kitchen. These are the Borderlands, where servers and line cooks can mingle without fear of being mocked by their compatriots, and where customers behave erratically, suddenly unable to find the restroom or swerve to avoid a laden employee, as though their wits were addled by the competing gestalts. (In the decades I've spent in restaurants, only once in my experience has the dining room music synched with the Kitchen Radio. The song: "Don't Stop Believing," by Journey. So there's that.)

Past a line of demarcation, where you can no longer hear the dining room music and can only hear the Kitchen Radio, whether it is playing Mexican polka, death metal, KEXP, KBCO, or Classic Rock, past that point lies the Kitchen Proper, a land of flashing knives, 22-quart containers filled with onions, stocks, soups, sauces… and, on the burner, bubbles rise and pop through polenta, beans, rice, or caramel in rondeaux three feet across, as though the chef had put "Molten Lava with Magma Preserves" on the menu. Careful: that'll leave a mark. The music provides a sort of force-field around us, as well as a tempo and a soundtrack to the night's work, its tinny treble rising above the shouts of rage, the crash of pans, bringing us together around a slice of "American Pie."

In retrospect, my musical education seems to be a collection of well-timed exposures, gradual inoculations with catchy lyrics, a general impatience with Judy Collins and my own experiments with What I Like. That's probably not too unusual; everyone has a Collins Point. It's just science. Just as everyone has a moment when they discover the tuner on the side of the radio.

Christmas, late seventies: lazy plop of snow from branches, mess from burst pipes cleaned up. Santa had left me a clock radio! Musical independence! I could grow beyond Abbey Road, despite my whole-hearted love for "Octopus's Garden" (which I listened to about 100 times a day until late last week), and the disturbing, but fascinating, discordance of "Come Together." No more "Cat Came Back," except for during the deep melancholic days of late eight-year-oldness, when I needed a boost that Danny Kaye just couldn't provide. Instead, I turned on the radio to 56-KLZ, Colorado Countreyeeyee. My country music phase began, a time for which I remain unapologetic to this day. Despite the townkids' stubborn refusal to listen to anything but KIMN, I held on to my Eddie Rabbit records and Kenny Rogers lyrics until the turn of the '80s. And then, except for a certain fondness toward men with beards, everything changed.

I'll brush past the early days of the decade, pausing only to nod toward "Evita" and ABBA, both discovered when I lived with my father in Vienna, both of them currents that steered me toward Kitchens and Restaurant Work. Also, at one time or another, both helpful demonstrators of why I shouldn't sing publicly. My rock star dreams faded when people politely put their hands over their ears as I warbled along to "A New Argentina," although, much later, other hopes arose when I learned to grill an Argentine steak and was met with applause and napkin-waving.

By the middle of the decade, I was saving my babysitting money to buy cassette tapes by the Fixx, Big Country (only their first one), Depeche Mode -- to this day, the song "Somebody" makes my vision blur and my heart hurt -- Howard Jones, and did I mention the Fixx? My hair was short, my tail was long. My t-shirts were black. My shoes were jazz. As the inexorable slide toward the 90s, and college, began, I discovered Oingo Boingo, the Psychedelic Furs, U2, and while the noisiness of punk rock never quite grabbed me the way it did some of my high school crushes, I did take to the clever writing of the Dead Kennedys, the Suicidal Tendencies, and the Circle Jerks, and I did discover the Clash, a band that will forever be on my iPod, or whatever new technology we have in store for us -- a brain chip, perhaps.

Somewhere in there, the "Boyfriend Factor" began to crop up in listening habits, if not actual purchases. Robert Cray, Stevie Ray Vaughan. Later still: Dave Matthews, Sublime. All discarded, tossed overboard along with affection, concert ts, and the other jetsam of failed relationships. And my own taste emerged like a wet chick from an egg: the Weakerthans, Radiohead, Feist, the Fighters of Foo, the Cold Players, Tori Amos, Johnny Cash, M. Ward...

But a curious fact remained. With a few notable exceptions, I'd never purchased a single album, cassette, cd or single by Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Eagles, the Doors, Boston, the Rolling Stones, Rush, Blue Oyster Cult, 38 Special, Jim Croce, The Little River Band, or Crosby, Stills & Nash, and yet, I could sing along (quietly, really, practically under my breath) with hundreds of songs by these artists. Hmm.

September, 1987: I interviewed for my first Real Job (canvassing for SANE doesn't count. Never has anyone been less successful at anything). A friend had landed a job at Sea Galley, and her stories made restaurant work sound like great fun, so I'd narrowed my search from...well, actually, given the skill set of a 16-year-old, I guess I'd broadened my search from Babysitting and/or Weeding the Neighbor's Garden to include Kitchens. And I got the job!! And they were right in the middle of a run of Evita! Such fun. My first day, I pushed through the kitchen doors at Boulder’s Dinner Theater and into a bubble of Classic Rock: the Kitchen Radio was spinning yarns about Seeing the Southern Cross, Today’s Tom Sawyer, Godzilla Going and Going, and Mother's Little Helper. The Hobart dishmachine was crashing along in time (until the show started, when dishwashing became eerily quiet, a skill all kitchen employees should strive to achieve...just saying...), and I realized I'd been allowed into a circle that didn't welcome everyone, but, for those on the inside, there was nowhere we'd rather be. “More Than a Feeling,” indeed. These songs, at various volumes, in different kitchens form an intrinsic part of my restaurant experience.

If classic cooking is a convergence of ingredients and technique, the musical analog seems to be a combination of a band’s longevity and appeal, its “bandurability,” if you will. Epochs slip past and the same songs by the same bands are setting the tempo for the egg cooks’ mad scramble, the chef’s orchestration, and the prep cooks’ nightly playlist of tasks. Escoffier hums the Stones' "Satisfaction" as he tempers eggs into an Anglaise. The only difference is the gradual accumulation of bands that were, in my youth, just releasing records and are now being played on Oldies Stations. Makes me feel as though I should be carrying a cane. But you know, as I put on my dancing shoes (clogs) and get ready for work, it occurs to me that while Boy Bands may come and go, restaurants open and some fail, for me, through it all, kitchen work rests on the solid foundation of Classic Rock.

Dedicated to Brad Delp, who may have done it differently, or not at all, had he known how many Broiler Cooks his soaring vocals carried across the Rage.

Notes From the Prep List

"The earth was soft and crumbling, with a scattering of the weeds that are found in cultivated fields -- fumitory, charlock, pimpernel and mayweed, all growing in the green gloom under the bean leaves. As the plants moved in the breeze, the sunlight dappled and speckled back and forth over the brown soil, the white pebbles and weeds. Yet in this ubiquitous restlessness there was nothing alarming, for the whole forest took part in it and the only sound was the soft, steady movement of the leaves." - Richard Adams, Watership Down


Peas came into season not too long ago, which means that Seattle's chefs are throwing handfuls of the legumes into just about everything, and prep cooks all over town have funny little green stains on their thumbnails. Fava beans were just moments behind peas -- a duo as frankly tiresome as two heiresses on a four-day martini bender. A restaurant as busy as ours goes through about four cases of fava beans a week. The trash overflows with green husks and feet tire from just standing in one place, shelling and shelling and shelling. But they are delicious, and the time spend shelling, blanching and hulling is great for strolling down the somewhat mossy and overgrown flagstone paths of memory.

My thoughts turn toward childhood, favorite destination for a wandering mind, and the Kugels' garden. Their patch was a regular smorgasbord for a pair of browsing children: strawberries, snap peas, corn pulled from the stalk and eaten raw. In the vines that climbed through the stand of corn, I'd catch an occasional glimpse of a sleek green zucchini surrounded by crumpled apricot-colored blossoms and know that the dread -- and wonder -- of vegetable breads was right around the corner, as almost every household on that particular shelf of Sugarloaf Mountain harvested enough of the squash to keep the elementary schools open through bake sales...kitchen counters were practically lousy with them.... The zucchini path beckons, so I shake myself back into the present and put on a pot of water to boil, salt it heavily (though not as heavily as I'm supposed to), and prepare an ice bath to shock the peas after their quick dunk in boiling water.

Guy recently planted peas on the back porch of his house, out where he parks the car, so he'd have a snack when arriving and departing. I've decided to try this idea as well, except I went for a blueberry bush instead of planting peas. Now I have to fight through a small flock of rapacious birds to reach my front door. Peas may have been the better choice.

Forced to choose between peas and fava beans, I will always choose peas. They are yummier, less steppy, and peas lack the power to evoke Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of one of fiction’s scariest monsters. And then there’s favism, which sounds like the punchline to a joke about nepotism, but is actually one of those ancient enzyme deficiencies that may have at one point suppressed malarial parasites in red blood cells, but now just leads to serious anemia. Peas just seem cheerier.

A monkey could be trained to shell peas, though it would eat most of them. One doesn’t really want a monkey in the kitchen. Maybe a small child, though I don’t really want one of those in the kitchen, either. But there’s some kind of historical precedent there – back porch, long afternoons, dogs lolling in the shade of the arbor, many hands, both old and young, making light work. I think if we put an ad on Craigslist we could probably drum up some kind of multigenerational team of shellers. And then I look around the kitchen, at the very young pantry girl, the line cooks all in various stages of the late, late adolescence that we like to call “their Twenties”, the slightly wizened dishwashers who shell peas and hull fava beans between running loads of plates and silverware, and I realize that we already have a pretty good multigenerational/multinational shelling team. We could probably take this on the road. Sell tickets, even.

If I had my McGee with me here at work, and a better command of Spanish, I could tell the guys about the nitrogen fixing properties of legumes, that they are actually a fruit, not a vegetable, they are weirdly healthy for humans... I could tell them stories about legumes’ ancient cultivation – 9,000 years! Imagine that! I could even speculate about the co-evolution of legumes and humans. (And despite the work done by Gregor Mendel, we still haven’t managed to breed a pea that will open upon command.) I could tell them that four prominent Roman families (Fabius, Lentulus, Piso and Cicero) took their names from legumes (Fava beans, lentils, peas and chick peas, respectively). And perhaps most fun of all, I could tell my co-shuckers and shellers that beans and peas comprise the third largest family in the flowering plant world (after orchids and daisies) and, after cereals, they are the second most important to the human diet. That would lead to a treatise on the soybean, however, another path beckoning, another story left for later. Instead I mention that los dining room neccesitas mas chucharos.

Two quarts finished.

Left alone in the walk-in, the peas will rev up their little motors and start turning their sweetness into starchiness. After a day or two, tiny nubs appear, and the pea takes on the form of a sprouting seed, which is harder to throw into boiling water. Seems a bit sad to toss a tiny vessel of optimism into the pot. Invariably, at this point my thoughts turn toward the Siege of Leningrad, the food bank, and the scientists inside who starved to death surrounded by seeds and peas, while the city starved outside. This line of thinking leads to a furrowed brow, however, and one of the cooks stops next to me on his way back to the line from the walk-in and asks for a smile. I can do that.

The mind wanders. Risi pisi. Petite pois. Mushy peas. Split pea soup. Bags of frozen peas hardening into a solid block in the freezer, satisfyingly shatterable when a handful of green ice balls are thrown into a creamy bowl of macaroni and cheese. Gotta get your vegetables.

And look! The case of peas is shelled! We have but a meager three quarts for our labor, but I have the satisfaction of drawing a line through the item on the prep list.

The next item is “Roll Gnocchi.” Another path beckons….

Hold the Mayo

Vincent: ...you know what they put on french fries in Holland instead of ketchup?
Jules: What?
Vincent: Mayonnaise.
Jules: Goddamn!
- "Pulp Fiction," by Quentin Tarantino

My relationship with mayonnaise began with all the promise of young love: Obsession, wild cravings, and, at last, a midnight rendezvous on the moonlit kitchen counter with a large spoon and a jar of Hellmann's®. I remember taking as large a spoonful of mayonnaise as a six year old girl could. My childhood affair with mayo ended somewhat violently that night, and if I dwell on the memory, I feel a bit woozy with regret. But time healed that culinary injury and I now name mayonnaise my favorite condiment. Although by the end of this piece that may no longer be the case.

The other day, my buddy Guy looked up from reading a menu description of a sandwich served with basil aioli and asked me, “So, when do we get to go back to just ‘mayo’?” The question made me wonder, have we reached a point in the evolution of diners where it is safe to assume that aioli equals mayonnaise in popular understanding? How different are they really?

Well, both are emulsifications – a temporary union between two substances that have nothing in common (water and oil, for example), brought together by a third substance (the emulsifier) (how’s that for a super hero name?) that helps the other two get along and can therefore create a sauce that is greater than the sum of its parts, but is still, by its very nature, unstable. What sounds like a stressful relationship is made more so by the fact that the oil droplets have to be whipped, beaten, pounded, shattered into a billion smaller droplets very slowly to allow the emulsifying agent time to do its work….

Without spending too much time describing the molecular structure of mayonnaise, think of a huge stack of clove-studded oranges piled up in a swimming pool filled with water. The cloves are the yolk’s emulsifying granules which break up and gamely surround the dispersed oil droplets – the oranges – sinking their oil-loving tail into the oil droplet while their positively charged “head” sticks out into the “continuous phase” (the water) of the emulsification and simultaneously repels the other droplets so the structure doesn’t collapse into a runny, oily pool. (The clove-studded orange provides a useful visual image, but it is a flawed analogy because the oranges would remain discrete objects with the removal of the cloves – they wouldn’t flow together to form a huge orange, even though that’d be cool. Instead, think of a screaming group of three-year-olds standing next to a pool. One by one, the group is separated into the pool where they are fitted with water-wings. It takes forever to split up the children, especially the sets of twins. Finally, the toddlers are all paddling around, unable to get too close to each other. That is an emulsification of children and pool, aided by the water wings. Remove the inflatable arm bands and the children cluster back together in their original state of being a screaming group.)

Aioli is traditionally made with garlic and oil, using a mortar and pestle, sometimes stabilized with bits of bread (as in the Greek skordalia), or potato (a situation in which the starch is acting as the emulsifier). In Spain, the Catalans put great store by their Allioli, which is perhaps the pinnacle of a garlic and oil emulsion, as it historically contained no other ingredients. According to one source, however, the time-consuming method of pounding the garlic and adding the oil drop by drop is falling out of favor in the modern world of the Cuisinart®, and egg yolks are starting to be used as a way of stabilizing the garlicky paste.

Mayonnaise is an emulsification of oil that uses eggs (really the yolks, which are themselves an emulsion of fat in water) to stabilize the final product. Unlike a charmingly rustic aioli, mayonnaise is eminently French, with all that that implies. Reading about the furious debate that surrounds the origins of the sauce, especially its name, spurs in me an almost irrepressible urge to end every sentence with some French flair: Some say the name comes from the French victory at Mahon (“Oo la la!”), others say the name “magnonaise” and claim it is a derivative of the French verb “to stir” – manier (“But how can zat be? Zere are zo many stirred sauces!”), while a third story holds that the name comes from the old French word moyeu, which means “yolk of egg.” (“Oui, oui! But ov courze!”)

All the restaurants I’ve worked for in the past decade make their own aioli (or mayonnaise), flavored with garlic, sometimes lemon or basil or chipotle (not all at the same time). But there was a time when I worked in houses that ordered mayonnaise in large quantities – the five-gallon container. On the big buckets that arrive at a restaurant’s back door, there is a warning about drowning hazards with a small drawing of a toddler tipping headfirst into the bucket; I can’t help but think, every time I see the picture of that clumsy, curly-headed child falling face-first into the bucket, that drowning in mayonnaise would be really awful, worse than drowning among pickles or blocks of feta cheese. Although the latter is a very close second.

In any case, the mayonnaise/aioli story is not without a narrative thrust – one can imagine the boat routes taken around the Mediterranean, and the ancient Roman’s proclivity toward planting olive trees and vineyards on every shore they landed upon was certainly an unforeseen benefit of imperialistic expansion. The world is criss-crossed with such migratory patterns of foods. These are the lines of history, exploration, and exploitation: not just the Roman’s spread of olive oil and vineyards, but also the Portuguese and Spanish bearing the chained-up flavors of Africa to the New World, and back again…

Guy looks up from his sandwich and interrupts me to ask where Miracle Whip fits into the mayonnaise-aioli story.

Well, okay. Let’s take a look.

As with the origins of the name “mayonnaise,” there seems to be some debate about the where the name “Miracle Whip” came from. Sources tend to agree, however, that this tangy emulsification hit the marketplace during the Great Depression, when folks could no longer afford the luxury of real mayonnaise. Miracle Whip® is going through a bit of a renaissance, right now, with advertising campaigns that highlight the fact that this “salad dressing” really isn’t for everyone. I’ve always liked ads like these, and it’s tempting to “Like” Miracle Whip® on Facebook™, even though I really don’t like Miracle Whip® in real life, especially not on french fries.

The migratory pattern of ingredients in this country is not unlike the spread of olive oil around the Mediterranean. So, the spread of mayonnaise in America began in New York City when a German immigrant named Richard Hellmann opened a deli. The popularity of his wife’s mayonnaise eventually led Richard Hellmann to open a mayonnaise factory (the American Dream!). A west-coast company called Best Foods® decided to jump on the mayonnaise spread-wagon, and voila! Hellmann’s® became the mayonnaise east of the Rockies, while Best Foods® held down the market to the west of the Continental Divide. Best Foods® eventually bought Hellmann’s® and, rather than try to force one brand on the entire country, the company retained the two names and tied them together with the Blue Ribbon familiar to all American mayonnaise eaters.

It is at this point in the story that I began feeling genuinely woozy, as though I'd kicked over a rock to reveal the squirmy things beneath it, and black helicopters will appear over my little house one night.

Large-scale corporate acquisition is not unlike the spread of the Roman Empire - just as Miracle Whip® belongs to the global behemoth Kraft®, Hellmann’s®/Best Foods® lives beneath the Unilever corporate umbrella.

Guy takes a sip from his cocktail and asks, “Unilever?”

Unilever is an enormous corporate empire, with a very friendly website, where they tell us that they are spending some time and money on things like Sustainability and Non-Evil Corporate Practices, for example, the large-font announcement that Hellmann’s® mayo is moving toward using only cage-free eggs. (There are some wild rumors flying around that Proctor and Gamble might acquire Unilever; you heard it here first.)Unilever places its origins in the late 19th century, when a guy named William Hesketh Lever invented a new kind of soap “to make cleanliness commonplace” in super-stinky Victorian England. Over the next one hundred years, Unilever acquired food brands such as Ben & Jerry’s®, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter®, Klondike®, Knorrs® and others. Unilever’s personal hygiene department went on to include not only Lever’s 2000®, but also Axe®, Suave®, Noxema®, Dove®, Vaseline® and more. What these products have in common, besides the oft-touted hair conditioning effects of mayonnaise, is that they are all manipulated fats and oils.

Closing my eyes I can see huge vats of products in various stages of emulsification, vats filled with tallow and gelatinous materials trucked in from rendering factories all over America. Some of this mixture will be poured off, fragranced, and formed into soaps. The rest of it will find its way into supermarket freezer aisles, salad dressing sections, and the spread area. In this nightmarish factory, the idea of a clumsy, curly-headed toddler drowning in a vat of mass-produced mayonnaise suddenly seems much less funny and much more like a Sinclairian metaphor for early 21st Century living.

Granted, this is a somewhat irresponsible oversimplification of the process, and I must confess that a recent midnight rendezvous with my small jar of Best Foods® produced a very delicious fried egg sandwich, but I may begin making my own mayonnaise. Step off the grid, as it were. I’ve tried this twice – the first time produced a vile, runny concoction that forced me to take to my bed for half an hour, the second time yielded a delicious spread, perfect for turkey sandwiches. As long as no one asks where the turkey comes from.

Rapini, Rapini

“…And is this the upshot of your experiment?” – Rappaccini’s Daughter, Nathaniel Hawthorn
Yesterday I spent a good chunk of time poring through books – cook books, gardening tomes, collections of fairy tales – trying to find a direct correlation between Rapunzel and rapini. We’ve started using the latter on a few of the spring dishes and part of my workaday routine is blanching and shocking the greens, a task I find impossible to complete without eating at least 30 of the raw, leafy stalks, and then another 10 of the post-blanch lot.
The flavor of rapini, aka broccoli rabe, isn’t the tame chlorophyll-heavy comfort-food flavor of broccoli. Rather, rapini has a bitterness to it, a hint of wild, craggy slopes where only lavender and stunted pines can compete with the greens, and the only mammals are feral goats. At least, that’s what it tastes like to me. I crave the imaginary cheese made from the imaginary milk of these particular goats, because the calcium-rich greenery also has a hint of sweetness, and a genuine robustness that would come through the cheese extremely well. Ah, the terroir of cheese. The imaginary bees pollinating these lonely, rock-strewn fields of rapini and lavender would produce a honey that would pair exceptionally well with the imaginary cheese.
As you may recall, Rapunzel’s mother spent her confinement in a room overlooking a beautiful garden of “rapunzeln”, which the gravid woman craved in huge quantities, and her husband, not wishing to develop a sty because he denied a pregnant woman her wish, crept over the wall in the dead of night and robbed their neighbor’s garden. Unfortunately, their neighbor was a witch and all kinds of trouble come from stealing a witch’s vegetables. But I think Rapunzel’s mother craved calcium and folic acid and that’s why she kept fainting and carrying on.
Anyway, there I was, on the sofa, coffee close at hand, going through the indices of 40 different books trying to find a strand that would tie the tale to the kale – from McGee I learned that rapini belongs to the sprawling Brassica family (Brassica rapa), which, in addition to kale and rabe, includes cabbage, collards, cauliflower, mustard, arugula, radishes, rutabagas, turnips and more. What a family reunion! Delicate Watercress chatting with plump little Brussels Sprout, Rutabaga wondering whether he was in the right place – so many leaves! – and there’s Horseradish, sitting alone in the corner. Not entirely unlike other family reunions I’ve been to, actually.
Had I not been taking a break from the Internet the search would have yielded results a bit faster. As it was, I did track down a book version of the fairy tale in which “rapunzeln” was also called “lamb’s lettuce.” Back to McGee – lamb’s lettuce is our friend mâche, also known as “corn salad.” Not misleading at all. Imagine asking a grocer for some corn salad. She would point you directly to the deli case.
“No, no, I mean lamb’s lettuce.”
Blank look.
“Ok, how about some mâche?”
A smile, a nod toward the stacks of plastic clamshells containing a living bunch of the fragile greens. But at $26/lb, the point is moot.
Today I decided to fire up the ol’ Dell and take a turn around the interrooms. No more dilly-dallying around with “books” and “libraries.”
Somewhat unsurprisingly, my search yielded mixed results. There is a plant called “rapunzeln” (Campanula rapunculus) that has edible roots and leaves, with a slight radishy flavor. Aha! So, while not a Brassica, Campanula rapunculus may be some far-flung relative, uninvited to the Brassica reunion. Perhaps a long-held grudge exists between the two families. The Campanula family is all about bell-shaped blue flowers, which I mention for two reasons: one is that, while we don’t eat a lot of blue food, and I'm not sure a pregnant woman would have craved rapunzeln, a garden filled with blue flowers must have been very beautiful to look down upon; and, two, upon following up the “lamb’s lettuce” lead, I discovered that corn salad nee mâche nee lamb’s lettuce is part of the Valerian family (Valerianella locusta), which is notable for its small BRIGHT BLUE FLOWERS. Aha!
So maybe the Brother’s Grimm took an even older cautionary tale which simply mentioned a garden filled with blue flowers and then they, being Northern Germans and therefore accustomed to seeing fields of Rapunzeln flowers nodding in the breezes, nibbled by sheep (whose milk would produce a cheese with slight almond notes, a bit of a grass flavor and a clean, slate-like finish), simply plugged in the name of the local blue flower. (Here in Seattle, our common Bluebell is also known as “Squill.” And I don’t care how pretty she is: no prince would ever stand at the base of a tower built by a witch and call up to the princess, “Squill, Squill, let down your hair.”)
I happen to have a copy of Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm here with me and the garden is described thusly:
…der voll der schönsten Blumen and Kräuter stand; er war aber von einer hohen Mauer umgeben, und niemand wagte hineinzugehen, weil er einer Zauberin gehörte, die große Macht hatte und von aller Welt gefürchtet ward.

They go on to talk about the schönsten Rapunzeln that was bepflanzen all over the place, but there doesn’t seem to be any mention of blue flowers. So where does this lamb’s lettuce business come from? A faulty online translation page that mistook Macht for mâche? That doesn’t make any sense. Mâche hails from France, where it grows close to the ground on the edges of fields browsed by dewy-eyed French cows (who would produce milk that would make a soft, slightly sweet cheese, hints of strawberry in the nose and finish).
There may be more digging to be done in the Grimm garden, given the fact that we’re talking about plants that were cultivated in the 17th Century and have since been swept up in the bewildering swirl of taxonomy, but for now I think the obvious answer is probably the correct one: Rapunzel was named for rapunzeln, and lamb’s lettuce is naught but a herring in sheep’s clothing.
All of which has absolutely nothing to do with rapini, which I am craving powerfully enough to sneak into work on a day off just so I can eat a few leafy stalks. Perhaps I’ll just go to the store instead. Should you find yourself with a bunch of rapini, treat it as you would broccoli, or kale, or watercress. Rapini would not appreciate being treated like a Rutabaga. I would quickly sauté it with olive oil, minced garlic (watch the heat of the oil – garlic can burn ever so quickly), and a handful of currants that had been soaking in either balsamic or sherry vinegar. Finish with a knob of butter, a good pinch of salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper. If it were me, I’d also put salt-roasted walnuts on the cooked greens, and maybe a sprinkle of feta cheese. Enjoy with friends, a hunk of crusty bread, wine and stories.

Fortune Flavors the Brave

“Ridiculous as it may be that I should expect so much for myself from roulette, yet I consider even more ridiculous the conventional opinion accepted by all that it is stupid and absurd to expect anything from gambling.”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler

In the closing remarks left pinned to the kitchen bulletin board at my last job, I declared my long-held belief that cooks are among the luckiest people in the world. This was an assertion unexpectedly supported by recent events on I-95 – among the survivors of the horrific March 12th casino-bus accident were two gentlemen, both in their fifties, who both listed their profession as “cook.” These guys were practically still wearing hospital gowns and blood-soaked socks when they climbed onto the next available casino bus, ready to escort Lady Luck back to the tables, back to the one-armed bandits. I’m not sure there is anything lucky about line cooking into your fifties, I’m afraid, or being on that particular bus in the first place, but these guys told the papers they were feeling lucky.

This is not the “opportunity meets preparation” sort of luck, the predictable outcome of diligent networking and having your answers ready when you are called upon. The group practicing this variety of luck usually has their retirement accounts set up, they wear slacks and/or blouses. They have expensive hobbies. They tend to be seen as lucky by the less organized and more covetous among us, but this isn’t the kind of luck that spares: this is simply good analytics, and chance has very little to do with their success.

The more you tease at the meaning of luck, the more slippery the strands become – there is a striking difference between the luck of preparedness and the luck the draw, there are those who are “lucky to be alive” and those who are “lucky to have never stepped foot on a casino bus,” there is chance, risk, gambling, odds-playing and the occasional stroke of luck that looks like benediction. You see this in kitchens all the time: there are cooks who are always prepared, their lists are completed, their mise is set up, their back-ups are filled and easily reached. The other cook, the one who was mostly ready before service, will play the odds throughout the evening – he might have only eight orders of mussels, but he knows the house hasn’t sold more than seven in one night since the dish went on the menu; a big part of his set-up is leaving several things to Chance, an unreliable employee at best, and, the occasional sauce notwithstanding, a really terrible line cook.

When the twelve top comes in at five minutes to close, both line cooks are already wiped down and ready to head out the door. Both line cooks see the twelve top, both experience a frisson of dread, followed by feelings of joyful good fortune when the seated group reveals they are only in for drinks and desserts (the bartender and pantry cooks might not feel so lucky). Chance and Preparedness head to the bar for their shift drink, making fun of the pantry cook on their way off the line. As their careers unfold, Chance will probably stay in the rank and file. Preparedness will probably go into management. Both will probably become alcoholics.

Luck manifests itself in odd places in kitchens. There are a million anomalies: weather, newspaper write-ups, a cook’s plantar wart acting up, and each anomaly acts as its own set of butterfly wings flapping in the walk-in.

But what happens when relying on luck – on chance – becomes a way of life? What happens when a good cook decides to become a professional gambler?

Let’s visit 1987 for a moment and take a quick look at a cautionary tale. And, no, this is not a way of steering the reader clear of the Chicken Cordon Bleu. For a frozen brick of chicken, ham and cheese, smothered in a Knorr’s powder-based white sauce, it really wasn’t too bad.

Back then, Boulder’s Dinner Theater's kitchen was staffed by four guys in their mid-to-late twenties, a couple of recent high school graduates, and one 17-year old girl with close cropped hair and a pretty long “tail” that she sported in honor of Rupert Greenall, the keyboard player for the Fixx. This girl caught the fancy of one of the cooks, a young man who happened to be working on his poker career. Every girls’ father’s dream. Over the course of the next few years, she learned one or two things about gambling, and graduated from college with some clear ideas about risk versus reward, luck versus winningness, and truth versus consequences. So maybe there was a little bit of imprinting, thinking that gambling and kitchens go together like a suited A-4 and an A-A-4 flop.

A good Chef is able to sift through disparate factors and come up with the number of specials you should run, the poundage of root vegetables necessary on any given evening, the projected busy-ness on a week by week basis. Restaurants, like any business built upon sales of a product and the vagaries of the public, are usually staffed by decent gamblers, a lot like the professional handicappers you see at the dog track, the older guy poring through the program with a yellow highlighter. A good Chef, like a good gambler, is a numbers player, a non-risk-averse adrenalin junky, who will only occasionally look to Chance to get the job done.

I was talking to my friend Guy about the relationship between gambling and restaurants the other day over a game of Seattle Six Dice, a game in which numbers players and riverboat gamblers can harmlessly splash around in a wellspring of luck; it’s a haven for us. He pointed out that Vegas rules apply to successful restaurants, too: The House always wins. A great Happy Hour is like a casino with loose slots – folks will come back and spend more.

In a recent Esquire magazine interview, Las Vegas Iron Chef Michael Seymon had this to say in response to the question, “Do you think part of being a good chef is being a good gambler?”

MS: Being a chef, you can't let yourself get stuck in waves of emotion, which makes you a good gambler. Any chef or restaurateur — when you're getting into a business where 70 percent of them fail — I would say is pretty good at risk-taking.

I wonder if he also feels lucky.

Luck may be no more than a matter of perception, which means you get to have as much as you can perceive around you. I believe that cooks are lucky, not because they are gamblers, but because there is something gorgeous about the impermanence of food, something about the disruption and subsequent consumption of a composed plate, that calls to mind the good fortune of glancing out of a car window to see a double rainbow -- transient beauty. I believe cooks are lucky – that I am lucky – because there is in what we do the occasional glimpse of the sublime.

And then a server bears it away.

April First: Breaking News

Seattle, WA -- A.P. The New York Times announced today that it will suspend all food writing for the foreseeable future, in both the print and online versions of the newspaper, except for a little-known collection of online scribblings entitled, "Clogs." The news has stunned such food-writing luminaries as Ruth Reichl, and reports from the Lower East Side suggest that Gabrielle Hamilton, Chef/Owner of the spectacularly unappetizingly named "Prune" and author of the recent chefography Blood, Bones & Butter, was in fact, set back on the heels of her own scuffed and stained clogs. Mark Bittman, regular contributor to the food section of the paper, reacted to the news by buying a ticket to Oahu, saying only that he welcomed the vacation and looked forward to some good hot Hawaiian lunches. Seattle-based author of "Clogs," Robin Posey, was surprised by the news. Breaking away from chopping an enormous pile of green peppers and celery to speak to this reporter, Posey responded to the news with this statement: "How fun!" Posey recently returned to the kitchen world after a six-month hiatus. She has written "Clogs" in a sort of on-again-off-again way for more than a year. When asked how often the dining public can expect a column, Posey eyed the pile of vegetables and responded, "Well, more than before. But probably not daily." The New York Times was unavailable for comment.

Holding Fast

"It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it.
It takes off a lot of anxiety."
- George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

Of all the vegetables in all the kitchens in all the world, why green peppers and celery? 22 quarts of each? I have a throbbing, quarter-sized blister where my knife callous used to be, the fingers on my left hand are a little bit numb and tingly, and my feet feel as though they’ve been bound and gagged, thrown into a basement, held for ransom, and forgotten. But you know what? Even surrounded by copious quantities of the only two vegetables in the world I don’t like, I am suffused with a peculiar joy. I got a job!

Just in the nick of time, too….I was running out of books to sell. In fact, the epigraph I wanted to use for this clog blog was in a book sold to buy three eggs, an onion and a pound of spaghetti. My cupboard was bare. Really, really bare, which meant I was using the fun, cheffy stuff in place of staples: Instead of crushed red pepper, kosher salt, olive oil or sugar, I was using imported pimenton picante from Madrid, Hawaiian red sea salt, Meyer-Lemon infused olive oil, and Tasmanian leatherwood honey. I had long since used the two remaining potatoes and the can of corn to make a thin, but edible chowder. I was wearing pants that hadn’t fit me for years.

I must confess that my efforts to find a job, while consistent and generally optimistic, did not represent a truly whole-hearted Job Search. Because really, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I was willing to become penniless in order to find out. Nothing really motivated me to work, neither fear nor food, and I didn't really expect anything to unless I were really and truly against a wall. And even then, I figured I’d probably be okay – we no longer have a Debtors' Prison, and my friends and family are known for their generosity. Anyway, I wasn't retiring. I was restarting.

One of the ancillary effects of taking six months off from any sort of regular paid work is that you start to question the value of doing anything you don’t want to do. Ever again. If most of those six months was spent on a boat, and most of that time was spent staring at the vast openness of the South Pacific, you can really wrap yourself around an existential axle. So when it came time to return to the land of the employed I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about all the options: I could become a farrier, or a trapeze painter, or a world-renowned entomologist…. The job I should have been seeking with vim, vigor and artisanal vinegar was the job I was most reluctant to land: Chef.

There are chefs in the world who believe there is no better job. They are chefs through and through, with all that that implies, chefs who grew up wanting to be nothing else, the way other children grow up wanting to be dancers, professional athletes, or doctors – they are consumed by WANTING it enough to get it. I am not one of them.

I liked being a chef because I am bossy, creative, hard working, and I derive a real pleasure from feeding people. (There was also that set of pans Santa brought me when I was four and which I played with on dead stump stoves on our lower lot. That could be a smoking gun.) But, for a while now, the fear of being exposed as a fraud has had its own ill side-effects, most often manifested through teeth gnashing, a short fuse and the occasional public outburst. The day-to-day realities of being a head chef are exhausting: Charred flakes of adrenalin spinning through the blood because a customer got wheat instead of white toast, a pretty good appetite for nicotine and rye but little else, except for maybe a sandwich eaten quickly while hiding in the mop closet. The fact remains, however, that I have a decent career and a solid restaurant resume' -- it would be foolish to throw away my professional momentum.

I've worked in kitchens since I was 17. I love being a part of this enormous family, and, however tempting it might seem to quietly stock toiletries on the shelves of "Bed, Bath and Beyond", future restaurant hiring managers might see the decision as the professional equivalent of a facial tattoo. What I needed was a job that kept me in the family, taught me some new stuff while leaving time for taking long walks, reading copiously, experimenting with the Oxford comma, and writing. I wanted a life.

In the meantime, there was the not-insignificant problem of how to pay rent. I applied for Unemployment in the spirit of, "Well, it never really hurts to ask." Vestigial loyalty to the company I’d spent my thirties working for prevented me from describing the real reasons people quit being chefs in restaurants that serve breakfast, lunch and dinner and change menus every three months (mostly just a profound awareness that your life is being shortened by unfavorable Yelp reviews). So, when the letter arrived that explained why benefits were denied (according to my case officer, quitting a job to go sailing isn’t a good enough reason) I was disappointed, obviously, but a little relieved, too, because maybe NOW I’d be scared enough to get a job, any job, just get a job, girl. Also a little embarrassed – I couldn’t help but picture the good people at the Washington State Unemployment Office laughing their heads off when they heard about my claim, because they couldn’t see the whole picture – I didn’t quit to go lounge on a yacht in my bikini (I usually wore shorts, and there wasn’t a whole lot of lounging), I quit because I needed to step off the side of my known world. Because you know what, Unemployment Office people? I do know a good reason to quit when I see one and when I left that job, I know I couldn’t have made a better decision.

And that, plus $2.50, will get me a bus ride. So, I’ll walk, thank you very much. And keep mulling over what I want to do.

I continued baiting my little hooks and throwing lines into the water, thinking about the different kitchens I’ve worked in, all the different cuisines, the chef mentors I’ve known, the crews who have worked their asses off with/next to/for me -- a connection somewhere would ultimately emerge. After trying out in a couple different houses around town, my resolve to continue cooking was further weakened ("You want me to do what with the frog legs? All of them?"), and I went so far as to send out resumes to a few Development Departments.

Then one day the phone rang and I spent an evening working with the Prep Lead in the kitchen of a crazily busy new restaurant. He had been a chef for years and, as the night clipped along and we split up the list of stocks to make, vegetables to chop, gnocchi to roll, caul fat to temper, he said, "Make a little less, live a little longer." Occasionally I ran to get fries for the line, enjoying the reversal of roles (I spent years yelling, "Fries to the line!" the way other Professionals yell: "Oxygen!", "Suction!", or "Ammunition!"). At the end of the evening, I gladly accepted the Chef's offer.

Suddenly, I had a job, in a high-end Cajun-Creole house…what’s especially funny and wonderful to me is that when I moved to Seattle from D.C. in ’98, I worked in a Cajun-Creole house under the tutelage of Hilary “Hilbo” Craig, a grizzled Vet not two inches taller than I who ceaselessly encouraged me to stay in the culinary world instead of retaking the MCAT. He was a mentor and a friend. So when I slipped my clogs off that first night, tired but employed, I felt as though Hilbo had thrown in a good word for me during one of his smoke breaks in the alley behind the big restaurant in the sky. I felt grateful.

But green peppers and celery…really? Cajun-Creole is so easy to roux-in.