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.Doesn’t happen tonight, though.2.Take those boxes out the back door, pull off the locking lids, set them up inside empty bread racks braced at an angle against the back wall, and let Hero open up with the power sprayer we use for cleaning the floors and the grease out of the hood vents.With the hose screwed into the hot water tap and the sprayer turned against ice, it might as well be a flamethrower.3.Power-wash the shit out of the fish tubs until the steam stops and the ice starts to crumble, stopping periodically to set back up the racks that have been pushed over or to retrieve the icy fish bricks that have slipped from their boxes and gone skittering off into the gravel.During these interludes, the chances of the sprayer “getting away from” Hero and “accidentally” soaking either Freddy or me are 100 percent.Tonight, Hero gets Freddy while Freddy is lighting a cigarette, his timing perfect, catching him just as he bends to cup the flame of his lighter against the wind.Freddy jumps, sputters, charges and takes a running swing at Hero.This just gets him another shot with the hose.The two of them need to be separated briefly.I shove Hero aside, tell Freddy to go back inside, and he does, shaking water out of his long, ratty blond hair.4.Bring the partially thawed cases into the prep kitchen, dump them out on the tables, and split the disintegrating fish-cicles length-wise into twenty portions, preserving as many whole fillets as possible.Place each chunk of fish ice into a long, shallow metal baking pan called a hotel.5.Walk twenty laden hotel pans onto the line where James (with Wendy’s bewildered assistance) will have set up deep bains1 on every available hot surface, each filled with a few inches of (hopefully already boiling) water.6.Set hotel pans on top of bains, making twenty scratch double boilers, and cover hotels with plastic wrap, now making twenty jerry-rigged pressure cookers.7.Wait.Smoke cigarettes.Bicker angrily with crew.Freddy is off in his corner by the fryers (standing post for the absent Juan), muttering under his breath and staring death rays at Hero.Hero just keeps laughing.This is going to come to a head soon, but not yet.8.After ten minutes or so, pull the plastic wrap off the hotels, and what you have is eighty pounds (give or take) of surface-poached, center-frozen, limp gray haddock fillets and a god-awful stink.To get rid of the stink faster, pop the filters out of the ventilation hood and just let that baby roar.Hero does this, climbing up between the grills and pulling the greasy filters out of their tracks.The suction immediately snuffs the flames on the four-burner.This is going to come back to haunt us, too.But not yet.9.Because they are now half-cooked, the fillets will flake to pieces at the least prompting.Look at one wrong and it’s likely to dissolve into fish mush and ice.Owing to this physical instability, they can no longer take the pressure of being dredged in batter so must be casseroled.In assembly-line fashion, bring in a new set of hotels.Layer each one with batter, ease in as many fillets as it can hold using a long spatula, then cover with more batter.Stack the pans back in the freezer for a few minutes to firm up the batter and shock the fillets, then remove to the ready cooler.As orders come in, shovel fillets gracelessly into the oil.Fry long and hard.Carefully remove to plate for service.10.Pray to whatever god might be listening that no one catches you.Oddly, the fish actually tastes pretty good this way.Well, maybe not good, but less bad than you’d think.Flaky and slightly oily outside, mid-rare in the middle.In texture it’s not unlike a poached fillet of sole, and in flavor only as bad as frozen haddock ever is—which is pretty bad even under the best circumstances.The real problem is, going into the oil cold (and often still frozen in the center), the fillets will drop the temperature of the fryer oil precipitously.This screws with the fry cook’s timing, and when cooking for drunks—especially lots of drunks—the fry cook’s timing is of paramount importance to the synchronization of the rest of the kitchen.It also makes a terrible mess, pisses off the dishwashers, breaks about a dozen different health codes.And it’s just wrong.You probably think that wouldn’t matter to a bunch of guys like us.But it does.It matters a lot.If you’ve ever worked in a kitchen, you understand what I’m talking about.You know that little catch you get in your chest when you’re doing something you know is wrong.And if you haven’t worked in a kitchen, you’ll just have to take my word for it.All the bullshit, the punching, the posturing, the macho crap; all the bad behavior and criminal impulses; all the hard talk and pleasure-seeking and shameless conduct—that’s all true.That’s The Life, the atmosphere in which so much food is created every day.But it’s also true that we want to be good.Not good people.Not good citizens.Not good in any general way.A lot of us (and I’m talking about all cooks here, not just the four guys standing with me on this line) prefer the opposite of good so long as we can get away with it.But we want to be good at what we do because being good at what we do is what saves us—balancing out all the rest, at least in our minds, at least in my mind.Someday, when the heat comes down, when they finally slap on the leg irons and the Hannibal Lecter mask and lead me off to come-what-may, I want my guys to be able to say, “He was a good cook.Sure, he was a reprobate, a degenerate animal.Always broke.Always borrowing money.He was a foulmouthed, bad-tempered, cross-eyed, snaggletoothed, brain-damaged, tail-chasing fuckup and a total wreck of a human being.But man, Sheehan could really cook.”That would be enough, I think.Mitigation—that’s all I’m after.And I’m not alone in that.I’ve known chefs who’d scream and curse and throw pans and torture cooks for any little slight.I’ve known guys who went to jail for stealing food stamps from old ladies, for sticking up convenience stores; guys who would work any angle, screw their friends over for a buck, behave in ways that are just unimaginably bad.But I’ve seen these same knuckleheads quit good jobs rather than do wrong by the food.I’ve watched them take pride in the perfect placement of scallops in a pan, in cutting a microscopic brunoise, in standing up under fire on a Friday night with a bunch of other like-minded bastards, throat-cutters and fuckups without blowing it for the team.Cooking can be a miserable gig sometimes.Gouge-out-your-own-eyeballs awful.But when you sign on to a kitchen crew, what you’re doing at the simplest level is indenturing yourself to the service of others.You’re feeding people, providing for one of their basic needs, and that is—all else aside—a noble thing.And I have long held to the conviction that at every station, behind every burner, in all the professional kitchens in the world, is a guy who wants to walk out the door at the end of the night, into whatever personal hell or weirdness is waiting for him, knowing that, if nothing else, he did one thing real well.But tonight, we have done wrong and are duly ashamed [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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