Terrible Story Time: Feel the Burn!

Welcome to a new feature on the ALWAYS, NEVER blog: Terrible Story Time! Here’s where I’ll reveal my absolute nightmarish kitchen experiences in my Bourdain-esque tell-all fashion. Read on…IF YOU DARE! (Jesus, I’m insufferable.)

Content Warning: bad words and non-vegan stuff

Feel the Burn

I’ve only been a vegan for 22-odd years and the first decade or so of cooking was definitley NOT vegan in any way shape or form. Not only did I work primarily as a saucier, but I usually took on all of the charcuterie as well. I was keen to do so, as I loved the challenge of some of the more difficult projects in the kitchen like patés, torchon, gallontines, ballontines, sausages, and terrines. These involved meat, lots of it, and I became adept at making perfect mousselines, adding the right amount of pork fat to a rabbit farce, and anything else involving sel rose (aka nitrates).

I worked in a particularly brutal kitchen in the upper east side of Manhattan in the late 90s/early 2000s where my daily schedule was something like this:

05:30 get to the restaurant
05:35 smoke a cigarette and drink a beer in the garbage room to soothe nerves. Throw up.
05:40 get into the kitchen and start finding every pot and pan I needed before the pastry team got there and hide them on top of the ventilation hood
05:55 look at my walk-in and figure out my prep list, plus see if there were any menu changes I needed to worry about
06:15 start sauce work, usually starting with getting the ovens on for roasting veal bones for demi, washing chicken bones for making stock in my 60 gallon steam kettle, making consomme, braising short ribs, making creams, savory flans, lobster stock, crab stock, blah blah blah…there was a lot to do
10:30 break off sauce and get staff meal for 20-30 people started
11:00 serve staff meal. Chef arrives and complains about staff meal. First screaming of the day.
11:15 start setting up mise en place on the line as quickly as humanly possible, set sauce work aside
11:30 open lunch, work the fish station. Get called “fat fuck” or the f-word all service.
14:00 all night shift cooks are in, if not earlier, and complain about not getting stove space
15:00 lunch ends, break down my station and get back to my sauces which need to be off the stoves asap. Chef threatens to assault me in all sorts of unseemly ways if I don’t hurry up.
15:30 move all my sauce work to a six burner stove and the kettles. fill up cooling sinks with ice and water. Present sauces to chef on b&bs. Third (or fourth?) screaming of the day.
16:40 try to start cooling all the sauces down. take the chicken stock down and strain. start veal stock to go overnight or strain the veal stock and start reducing for demi
17:00 tear apart my walk-in cooler, scrub the walls and floors and racks, size down containers, get everything put back away and labeled, organized
17:45 get stock put into stainless milk cans. lock new cans up with chain and padlock to make sure scumbag line cooks wouldn’t let your old stock spoil. FIFO you bastards!
18:00 meekly go up to the chef while he’s freaking out and ask if he has other projects for me. Get told to start curing pig heads/rabbits/whatever…
18:30 get pigs heads (for example) split on bandsaw, remove brains and save for poaching, remove tongues for corning, remove eyeballs, cure head with sel rose, moscadet, shallot, white pepper, sugar, thyme, and salt.
19:30 clean up my mess
20:00 go help the line push out the last few tables and get screamed at just for fun.
20:30 get sucked into helping folks straighten up so we can go out and get plastered together. Chef leaves (yay!)
21:30 walk out, leaving the heavy cleaning to the porter, and go get absolutely knackered at The Subway Inn off Lexington
23:30 stumble over to the restaurant, get let in by the porter, and go pass out in the private dining room so you can wake up early already at work and get started all over again! Hurrah!

(The schedule was brutal, but the most brutal aspect had to be working for the absolute pig of a man that was my chef. This “person” was the cruelest, most disgusting, foul-mouthed, violent, despicable, xenophobic, tip-stealing scum bag I’ve had the misfortune of meeting. He was a conductor of a toxic, aggressive culinary orchestra which cling clanged it’s pulsing symphony nightly under the heaving efforts of the half dead cooks. He was, however, an incredible artist in the kitchen who’s hands somehow had the delicate strength of a ballerina and seemingly lifted plates above natural gravitational forces. Unfortunately he knew he was really good and he was an absolute c-word about it. But, back to the story…)

Don’t miss you, chef.

Those aforementioned pig heads would be on cure for a few days. After cure, I’d need to complete the rest of the preparation for a delicious “tete de cochon,” aka “head cheese,” This head cheese wasn’t anything like the Oscar Meyer version, and required some effort to make. The cured pig heads would be washed then braised with aromatics in a very rich jellied chicken stock made with chicken feet. Once the meat was falling off the bone, you’d pull the heads, reserve all the head meat and take the ears off. The liquid would first be strained, then I would prepare it like a consomme with ground meat, egg whites, and mirepoix to clarify it to a very translucent, golden amber color. It would be so fortified by first the chicken feet and then the pig heads, it would gel as an aspic. The head meat would be diced, placed into a terrine mold, and the aspic/consomme broth would be melted and poured over hot. After cooling in the walk-in a bit, it’d be sliceable. Each slice was a mosaic of pig head meat held together with a melt in your mouth meat jelly. We’d served it with pickled tiny bets, course mustard, and toasted brioche, and a fried julienne of the pig ears.

I made the tete de cochon many times, but one day the pigs got their revenge on me. I had started a large braising pan that would stretch over six full sized burners on the “sauce station” stove on the end of the hot line. The pig heads were brought up to a boil with the jellied stock so I could then cover them with foil and put the whole thing in the oven to slowly braise while I finished my other work. This was a two person operation, moving the pig heads,as the total weight of the full pan was well over 150 pounds.

I was having trouble finding someone to help me. I saw our dishwasher, Danilo, at the end of the kitchen and asked for his help. “Not my job!” he yelled back. I got pissed. My anger transformed into idiotic machismo, and I screamed “fuck you” while grabbing this enormous braising pan and attempting to put it in the oven myself. Needless to say, it wouldn’t be much of a story if I was succesful. No, instead the entire pan turned over onto me, burning the absolute shit out of me with boiling hot stock and sticky, hot pig fat. I screamed, pulled off my pants, and jumped into the ice sink almost immediately. It wasn’t enough, and my right leg and especially my foot were fucked.

Fearing my highly abusive and terrible chef boss might not understand why my work wasn’t done, I gingerly put my pants back on and tried putting on my clogs. I could get my left clog on, but my right foot was destroyed and there was no way I could squeeze that baby into my Birkis. Instead, I tied a plastic bag around my foot and went back to work. Like an idiot, I might add.

Later in the day, my chef noticed I was limping around and asked what the issue was.

I told him I burned my foot and leg.

He asked why I had a fucking bag tied around my fucking foot.

I told him i coudn’t get my clog back on.

He told me to show it to him

I took off the bag and showed him my foot. His face said it all. I look down and the skin…well, didn’t look good. I was whisked off to the hospital where the doctor was confused why I wasn’t screaming in pain. It felt a little uncomfortable, but not the worst pain I felt. It wasn’t serious enough for an operation, but it was pretty bad, and I was given Silvadene and some pain meds to take care of it. The REAL pain came later as it healed, and it took months for it to stop hurting at all. I found myself having to constantly move my foot in order for it not to hurt, and would be prepping at my station with my shoe off shaking my foot up and down.

I was given zero days off to revover. Was back to work after my doctor’s visit.

I didn’t even know that this was terrible, it was just the way it was. Sometimes I wonder what my life would’ve been like if I had taken that other job instead of the one I took.

The morale of the story: don’t cook pig heads! Eat plants instead. I mean, that’s one morale, there’s a few lessons here, but it took me a decade or so to figure the other ones out.