Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [100]
But let's say you do suck dick, you do 'take it in the twins', it's no impediment to survival. No one really cares about that. We're too busy, and too close, and we spend too much time together as an extended, dysfunctional family to care about sex, gender preference, race or national origin. After level of skills, it's how sensitive you are to criticism and perceived insult - and how well you can give it right back - that determines your place in the food chain. You can cover your ears all you want, pretend they're not calling you chino or morena or indio or gordo or cachundo . . . but they are. Like it or not, that's your name, your street tag, whether you chose it or not. I've been flaco and cadavro, probably borracho. That's just the way it is. I call down to my prep kitchen on the intercom - calling for butter or more sauce - and that little gangster who keeps my stock rotated and makes that lovely chiffonaded parsley for me is going to reply (after I'm out of hearing), 'Fuuck YOUUH' before giving me exactly what I asked for. Better I say it first: 'Gimme my fucking mantequilla and sauce, motherfucker. Horita . . . and . . . fuuuck YOU!' And I love that little thug, too - the headband-sporting, baggy-pantsed, top button-buttoned, bottom button open, moon boot-shod, half Puerto Rican, half cholo vato loco, with his crude prison-style tats and his butterfly knife tucked in his wristband. I have, on many occasions, pondered adopting him. He's everything I'd want in a son.
Why do I, a fairly educated sort of a swine, take such unseemly pleasure in the guttural utterances of my largely uneducated, foul-mouthed crews? Why, over the years, have my own language skills become so crude and offensive that at family Christmas I have to struggle to not say, 'Pass the fuckin' turkey, cocksucker'?
I dunno.
But I do love it.
I wallow in it. Just like all the other sounds in my life: the hiss and clatter and spray of the dishwasher, the sizzle as a fillet of fish hits a hot pan, the loud, yelping noise - almost a shriek - as a glowing sizzle-platter is dropped into a full pot sink, the pounding of the meat mallet on a cote du boeuf, the smack as finished plates hit the 'window'. The goads, curses, insults and taunts of my wildly profane crew are like poetry to me, beautiful at times, each tiny variation on a classic theme like some Beat era jazz riff: Coltrane doing 'My Favorite Things' over and over again, but making it new and different each time. There are, it turns out, a million ways to say 'suck my dick'. Most of the people in my kitchen can do it in Spanish, French, Italian, Arabic, Bengali and English. Like all great performances, it's about timing, tone and delivery - kind of like cooking.
There are also the terms of the trade, the jargon. Every trade has one. You already know some of our terms. '86' is the best known. A dish is 86'ed when there's no more. But you can use the term for someone who's just been fired, or about to be fired, or for a bar customer who's no longer welcome.
One doesn't refer to a table of six or a table of eight; it's a six-top or an eight-top. Two customers at a table are simply a deuce.
'Weeded' means 'in the weeds', 'behind', 'in the shit' or 'dans la merde - a close cousin and possible outcome of being 'slammed', 'buried' or 'hit'.
A waitron or waitron unit is an old-school '70s, term - gender non-specific - for floor personnel, who are also, at staff mealtime, referred to as the floor or the family or simply scum. And the meal itself becomes - particularly if it's the usual trinity of chicken, pasta and salad - the shaft meal or the gruel.
Then there's the equipment. Since the introduction of the Cuisinart, any food processor can be referred to as the Queez; the square and oblong metal sauce containers are six-pans or eight-pans depending on size, and the long, shallow ones hotels. The cook's spoons with holes or slots