Cooking Dirty

Fülszöveg

This was The Life.
The part they
can't teach in culinary school, don't ever shovy on TV. The unscheduled death and disasters and heat and blistering adrenaline highs, the tunnel vision, the crashing din, smell of calluses burning, crushing pressure and pure, rav^ joy of it all as the entire rest of the world falls away and your whole universe becomes a Small, hot stoel boX filled with knives and meat and fire; everything turning on the next call, the next fire order, the twenty, thirty, forty steaks in front of you and the
hundreds on the way. This was what made everything else forgivable, a nd I knew
that if I could just do this one thing, all night, every night, under the worst conditions and without fail,
nothing else mattered.
—from Cooking Dirty


COOKING DIRTY s a rollick ng
account of life "on the line" in the neighborhood restaurants—far from culinary school, cable TV and the Michelin Guide—where most of us eat out when we eat out. It takes the kitchen memoir to... Tovább

Fülszöveg

This was The Life.
The part they
can't teach in culinary school, don't ever shovy on TV. The unscheduled death and disasters and heat and blistering adrenaline highs, the tunnel vision, the crashing din, smell of calluses burning, crushing pressure and pure, rav^ joy of it all as the entire rest of the world falls away and your whole universe becomes a Small, hot stoel boX filled with knives and meat and fire; everything turning on the next call, the next fire order, the twenty, thirty, forty steaks in front of you and the
hundreds on the way. This was what made everything else forgivable, a nd I knew
that if I could just do this one thing, all night, every night, under the worst conditions and without fail,
nothing else mattered.
—from Cooking Dirty


COOKING DIRTY s a rollick ng
account of life "on the line" in the neighborhood restaurants—far from culinary school, cable TV and the Michelin Guide—where most of us eat out when we eat out. It takes the kitchen memoir to a rough and reckless place.
From his first job scraping trays at a pizzeria at age fifteen, Jason Sheehan worked on the line at all kinds of restaurants: a French colonial bistro and an all-night diner; a crab shack just off the interstate and a fusion restaurant in a former hair salon. Restaurant work, as he describes it in exuberant, sparkling prose, is "the last true American meritocracy. No one cares about your past or what you do on the outside. Can you cook? That's all anyone cares about." The kitchen crew is a fraternity with its own rites: sneaking cigarettes in the walk-in freezer, having sex in the basement, surviving the wartime urgency of the dinner rush. Cooking Is a series of personal challenges, from the first perfectly done mussel to the satisfaction of surgically sliced foie gras. And the kitchen itself, as Sheehan tells it, is a place in which life's mysteries are thawed, sliced, broiled, barbecued and fried-a place where people from the margins find their community and their calling.
With this deeply affecting, unrelentingly pleasurable book, the acclaimed restaurant critic Jason Sheehan joins the first class of American food writers. Vissza