The sweet stink of success

I got my first cooking job when I was 16. I worked as a cook’s assistant at a camp in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where I earned $100 for an entire summer of flipping pancakes, smearing peanut butter on Wonder bread and concocting buckets and buckets of GORP. The quality of the work didn’t matter. I loved being in the kitchen, even if it was just to help feed a bunch of barefoot, semi-feral savages who didn’t care what they ate, as long as it was fast and they could get back to the rough and tumble of camp life.

It was thanks to my grandmother that the kitchen felt like home. My best memories are of helping her bread eggplant and roll meatballs, and operating the ancient clamp-on grinder to mash chicken livers for pate. Everything that happened there felt like magic, and that sensation stuck with me, even as I attended college and agonized over what I wanted to be. As I matriculated and debated my options, I floated from kitchen to kitchen, earning some cred in an environment where women were scarce, if not entirely absent.

My first line cook job was at a vegetarian dive bar/music venue in West Hollywood, where we’d start our mornings by emptying mice out of the greasy woks they’d gotten trapped in overnight. The work was grueling, with no room for complaints of heat or long hours, or God forbid, the absence of a tampon dispenser in the bathroom. I worked my way up from dive bars to soulless, corporate burger enterprises that catered to the suburban crowd, and then backtracked to hole-in-the-wall French bistros where the chefs were rigid and perpetually furious. One particularly bad job lasted all of a single day, during which the chef threw his boning knife in my general direction. After that, I asked myself, once again, what the hell do I really want to be, but still found no satisfactory answer forthcoming. I dabbled in office work for a bit, and spent a year in a school for massage therapy, wasting a whole lot of time and money only to find myself back in the kitchen.

And for what? To be subjected to physical hardships reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition? To endure long hours over boiling pots and scalding oil? To suffer heat stroke juggling a dozen saute pans on a 500-degree flattop, or risk hypothermia desperately searching for that bag of petit peas in a freezer full of hangar steaks and chicken wings? I asked myself these questions every day for decades until I realized all of that hardship – the misery, cuts, burns and ever-present stench of onions and garlic permeating my clothes, skin, hair, car and even my home – is well worth it. Because cooking is a way of life. Ask any cook. We love what we do with such intense passion that we are willing to eschew the finer things, like ever ever looking or smelling nice, like skin free of heat rash and contact dermatitis, like every once in a great while getting to sit, for just five minutes, while we eat.

Now that I am in the sunset years of my cooking career, I have the pleasure of cooking when I feel like it, which is to say every single day but without someone yelling over my shoulder, and best of all, from the comfort of my own kitchen. Here, I am surrounded by the trappings of over four decades of feeding family and friends. I have my very favorite tools: a Cuisinart food processor, still going strong after three decades; my Wusthof and my Mac, reliably sharp with a bit of steeling; my enormous Williams Sonoma ceramic mixing bowls with nary a chip, which have been my constant companions since the beginning of my marriage; and a few carefully curated wooden spoons imbued with the seasonings of thousands of meals past. Last week I discovered that one, an old olivewood beauty that was a gift from my grandmother, was chipped down its length from years of whacking it against pot lips, the crack running from the tip to the base, which had begun to splinter. Ah, old paint, I thought, your time has come. I brought it out to the edge of our property, gave it a kiss on its smooth curved bowl and sent it home to be with its family in the woods. I went back to my kitchen, to the warmth of the stove and the reek of onions, and put my apron on to begin another culinary adventure.