career mandolines
Please note that this piece discusses kitchen injuries as well as culinary education. Both of these involve some bleeding.
Last month Betsy DeVos repealed the Obama administration's gainful employment rule, which required for-profit schools to demonstrate that their graduates mostly landed jobs that enabled them to pay back their student loans. Culinary schools had a hard time clearing this bar, so many of them shut down, including the American franchise of the Cordon Bleu (when I refer to the Cordon Bleu here I am always referring to the American franchise).
We went to a Cordon Bleu career fair once, because we had an opening in the kitchen and nothing to lose.
Class after class was ushered through by panting, red-faced instructors. The instructors were all Aramark refugees, white men in their 50s and 60s, obese to various degrees, with a rogues gallery of grey moustaches — 70s porn star, central casting bandido, full Hulk Hogan. They moved in a miasma of old garlic and older fry grease, and one of them had stains on his pants where he’d wiped a greasy hand. He stood out, because he was the only person who looked like he’d cooked that day.
Across the aisle from us was the booth for another restaurant, a standard bearer for Boston’s hot (sic) cuisine. It was staffed by a wan man who looked as mild as cheap butter and just as greasy, with a badge that labelled him the Director of HR. He had a television playing a slideshow of formulaic close-ups of food, and an empty kitchen gleaming. Their recruiting pamphlets talked about 40 hour work weeks and free yoga classes and how the chef really had stopped screaming at his staff in public (for good this time).
The students wandered around, stiff in their whites and neckerchiefs, toques folded under their arms. For all the understanding they displayed, they might have been in a career fair for nuclear engineers. Conversation was difficult.
“What kind of food do you want to cook?”
“… we learned to make hollandaise yesterday.”
The school basically funneled people who shouldn’t have been cooking into kitchens. People would enter to “learn to cook” and leave with hillocks of student debt. Under pressure to pay their loans, they would take jobs in the first kitchens that paid, which were almost never the right places to start a cooking career. Eventually, they would burn out or get fired, but that just ensured there were jobs for the class coming through.
……
My culinary education took place at a French restaurant in Singapore called Salut.
Salut had been opened by one Meyjitte Boughenot, who had held two Michelin stars in France before he turned them in and moved to Singapore. Cooking is the only profession I know where people move to Singapore to escape the rat race elsewhere. Before I set foot in Salut, he decided he needed to be even further away from France and moved to Tasmania.
Meyjitte’s local partners shrugged and hired Bright. Bright had not held two Michelin stars in France. He was an eternally smiling Buddha of a man from Penang who had worked his way around restaurants in Singaporean hotels for a decade and a half. The places where he’d worked were mostly Italian, but in Singapore these boundaries seem less distinct. I have no idea why he allowed me into his kitchen. The sum total of my knowledge of professional cooking came from reading Kitchen Confidential. I think he was bored, because the dining room was empty, and I kept showing up.
These are some of the things he taught me: put a wet kitchen towel under your cutting board so it doesn’t slip. You should always use the smallest knife you can, unless you should use the biggest knife you can. Both a peeler and knife work better if you hold them lightly. You never force a liquid through a chinois, but you always force a puree through, and the only acceptable implement to use for this is a ladle. Season from a height, and by feel. Don’t lose your side towels, and don’t steal your colleagues’.
If you walk into a busy kitchen and do not know these things, they have no use for you. This isn’t knowledge you pick up in a kitchen, it’s a precursor to fitting into one. Four cooks doing 200 covers at lunch don’t have time to tell you to set up a small trash container on your station, or label your saucepans so you grab the right reduction in the middle of service.
Culinary schools don’t teach these things. They teach you to make hollandaise.
……
I remember Sean because he was the only job applicant we had from the Cordon Bleu who was actually competent. He was a skinny kid with the beginnings of a beard, barely old enough to drink. He could actually dice an onion fine, and when we sent him for a chinois he came back with not just the chinois but everything else he needed to use it (two containers, lids, ladle). None of the other applicants managed either, in spite of $20,000 or more of for-profit culinary education.
At the start of service, Sean was ribboning carrots on the mandoline. To our surprise, Sean knew the safest way to use a mandoline, which actually looks spectacularly dangerous. It is based on understanding that mandolines are the sharpest tools in the kitchen, and to use more force than you would in, say, pushing the button in an elevator is to invite trouble. With this fact foremost in your mind, place your hand on a table, palm down, fingers relaxed and slightly spread. Keeping your palm on the table, lift your fingertips off the table while keeping your fingers straight. You will feel, at the base of your middle and/or index fingers, a firm point of contact with the table. You use this point on your hand, with your hand in this posture, to hold the food on the mandoline. If you do this without an excess of force, your chances of getting cut are actually quite minimal.*
The problems come when you get greedy, and ask the mandoline for one more slice than it wants to make, or give it a job too tough for its delicate constitution, or when you simply forget good technique and do something that you know better than to do. In these scenarios the great temptation, to which Sean succumbed, is to plant your thumb on the back of the food to help drive it in the direction of travel. You will then, as Sean did, slice a flap of skin off your thumb.
The medical term for this is a suprafascial avulsion: “an injury in which a body structure is torn or cut off, reaching to but not below the subcutaneous layer.” The missing flap was smaller than a dime, but avulsions are unreasonably painful and bleed with gusto. Direct pressure is only moderately effective at staunching the flow. You may as well apply direct pressure to a wet sponge.
We sat Sean on a bar stool in the dish pit with a gauze pad clamped to his wound and a glass of orange juice to steady his nerves. We tried to persuade him to go to the emergency room.** The bar was slow, our bar manager had a car, the emergency room was less than a mile away. Being a young man who wanted to work line, he refused. Whenever he tried to stand or bend his elbow or even let his hand down to the top of his head, fresh blood welled through the gauze, like crude oil through tar sand. He stolidly refused to leave, either for home or the emergency room, for the next three hours. He became part of the dish room furniture. We took turns nursing him. We made him dinner, which he ate one handed. We did not hire him.
I saw Sean again a year later. He was riding pillion on a motorbike, riding through Union Square without a helmet. They pulled over at a crosswalk. He was no longer cooking, and was working as a mechanic instead.
……
I don’t know if we’ll see a new wave of for-profit culinary programs now that DeVos has declared the wild west open again. Restaurants are still desperate for staff, and there are more kitchens and fewer cooks than ever. But teaching kitchens are a substantial investment, and there are probably easier ways for for-profit schools to make money. The Cordon Bleu and its ilk ostensibly existed to teach people to cook (they mostly existed to make money for their shareholders), but they should actually have taught people to be cooks, or to decide that a cook wasn’t something they wanted to be. There probably isn’t a lot of money to be made doing that.
*Doing this takes practice and a sharp mandoline. Most home cooks have neither. Please take this into consideration if you want to try this. That said, I have cut myself more, and much more badly, while using a finger guard than while doing this. The problem is that finger guards invite you to use force to hold the food down, because they aren’t very good at holding food. The secondary problem is that they are made of hard plastic and attack the blade of your mandoline, thereby dulling it and accentuating the problem. Replacement blades for mandolines really cost very little, and they make your mandoline sharp like the day you bought it.
**Where, it must be said, they would have done no more than clean out his wound for a third time (after we had done so twice), bandage it tighter, and send him home. You cannot stitch an avulsion shut, because there is neither an incision nor a hole to close. I’ve brought several people with avulsions to the ER, so I speak from experience.
Thank you for reading let them eat cake, a weekly newsletter about food systems and food. And as always, a super-special thank you to my pre-release readers, Jen Thompson and Diana Kudayarova.
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tw
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