Sex, Knives and Bouillabaisse by Kelly Teri Louise;

Author:Kelly, Teri Louise;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BM
ISBN: 557596
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Published: 2010-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

17.

Children Of The Revolution

T-E-A-M & T-I-M-I-N-G. That’s what professional cookery is all about. I might have given some of you the impression that a hotel kitchen is just a hotchpotch of psychopathic gangs, but come service time it’s all about the TEAM. Okay, so during prep we can fool about and take the piss, grind a few axes and maybe even exchange a few blows, but come curtain-up we’re congealed again like a blood clot, forced by the nature of the game to all pull together in the one direction, oarsmen under the lash of a tall white brute.

If the hors have gone too early or too late then the fish is fucked, if the fish is delayed that puts the onus onto the sauciers and the grill chefs, if the main comes up but the veg chef has lost it completely then it’s useless sending up the mains. And that is just the sequence on the line.

If the larder buys a big one and the raw materials aren’t coming over as fast as they’ve been requested then the service quickly disintegrates into a farce. Many people will lose their heads in such situations and quite a few might grab the nearest utensil and begin attacking any passing apprentice. Fish chefs are the worst, for theirs is an art that depends upon split-second timing and theatrical delivery – poissoniers are not the kind of people you want to force into the shit bog through your own stupidity. If you have ever had the misfortune to be smacked around the head with a Dover sole, you will know why.

On the fish section, the buzzword is ‘syzygy’, and although I never quite understood what it meant, it sounded pretty fucking snappy. Since acquiring a fish-section vocabulary I have enjoyed many heated debates around scrabble boards vis-à-vis the legality of such a word.

What kind of a fucking egghead are you? irate opponents will rage, I thought you said you were a fucking chef? Syzygy, my fucking bollocks.

Of course I am always pleased to be able to point out that in any reputable dictionary, the word refers to a perfect alignment of the earth, moon and sun. It is syzygy that is required in a professional kitchen twice a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year – and that kind of cosmic karma is fucking hard to come by.

Some awareness of astrological influences is required in the psychological profile of the professional chef, but on some days even Nostradamus himself would have been hard fucking pressed to predict what iceberg lay ahead. That is the beauty of the Game.

It started off like any other service.

This mob were a crew of pig-dogs, each and every one venal in the most unsubtle of ways. Right at the very top stood the Duce, though to be sure it was obvious to even the most myopic disciple that the Big Cheese couldn’t hold on much longer. Most days he stumbled around like a junkie in rehab, groping for the nearest solid structure to stabilize his unsteadiness.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.