Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [24]
What exactly is this mystical mise-en-place I keep going on about? Why are some line cooks driven to apoplexy at the pinching of even a few grains of salt, a pinch of parsley? Because it's ours. Because we set it up the way we want it. Because it's like our knives, about which you hear the comment: 'Don't touch my dick, don't touch my knife.'
A fairly standard mise-en-place is a pretty extensive list. A typical one would be composed of, for instance:
kosher or sea salt
crushed black peppercorns (hand-crushed - not ground in the blender)
ground white pepper
fresh breadcrumbs
chiffonade parsley
blended oil in wine bottle with speed pourer
extra virgin olive oil
white wine
brandy
chervil tops in ice water for garnish
chive sticks or chopped chives
tomato concassee
caramelized apple sections
garlic confit
chopped or slivered garlic
chopped shallots
softened butter
favorite ladles, spoons, tongs, pans, pots
all sauces, portioned fish, meat, menu items, specials and back-ups conveniently positioned for easy access
Being set up properly, trained and coordinated is not nearly enough. A good line cook has to be able to remain clear-headed, organized and reasonably even-keeled during hectic and stressful service periods. When you've got thirty or forty or more tables all sitting down at the same time and ordering different items with different temperatures, the stuff has to come up together; the various stations - saute, garde-manger, broiler, middle have to assemble a party of ten's dinner at the same moment. You can't have one member of a party's Dover sole festering in the window by the saute station while the grill guy waits for a rack of lamb to hit medium-rare. It's got to come up together! Your hero line cook doesn't let the screaming, the frantic cries of 'Is it ready yet?', the long and potentially confusing list of donenesses all working at the same time throw him. He's got to keep all those temperatures straight in his head, remembering which steak goes with what. He's got to be able to tune out the howls of outrage from the chef, the tiny, gibbering annoyances from the floor, the curses and questions and prompts from his co-workers: 'Ready on seven? Via! Let's go! Vamos! Coming up on seven!'
The ability to 'work well with others' is a must. If you're a saute man, your grill man is your dance partner, and chances are, you're spending the majority of your time working in a hot, uncomfortably confined, submarine-like space with him. You're both working around open flame, boiling liquids with plenty of blunt objects at close hand - and you both carry knives, lots of knives. So you had better get along. It will not do to have two heavily armed cooks duking it out behind the line over some perceived insult when there are vats of boiling grease and razor-sharp cutlery all around.
So who the hell, exactly, are these guys, the boys and girls in the trenches? You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. You wouldn't be too far off base. The business, as respected three-star chef Scott Bryan explains it, attracts 'fringe elements', people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly wrong. Maybe they didn't make it through high school, maybe they're running away from something - be it an ex-wife, a rotten family history, trouble with the law, a squalid Third World backwater with no opportunity for advancement. Or maybe, like me, they just like it here. They're comfortable with the rather relaxed and informal code of conduct in the kitchen, the elevated level of tolerance for eccentricity, unseemly personal habits, lack of documentation, prison experience. In most