In fact, it was the unsavory side of professional cooking that attracted me to it in the first place. A few years ago, I wasn’t surprised to hear rumors of a study of the nation’s prison population which reportedly found that the leading civilian occupation among inmates before they were put behind bars was “cook.” As most of us in the restaurant business know, there is a powerful strain of criminality in the industry, ranging from the dope-dealing busboy with beeper and cell phone to the restaurant owner who has two sets of accounting books. I came into the business when cooks still smoked on the line and wore headbands. I’ve been a chef in New York for more than ten years, and, for the decade before that, a dishwasher, a prep drone, a line cook, and a sous-chef. They bounce from kitchen to kitchen-free agents in search of more money, more acclaim. Today’s top chefs are like star athletes.

Nowadays, most aspiring cooks come into the business because they want to: they have chosen this life, studied for it. Confined for most of their waking hours in hot, airless spaces, and ruled by despotic leaders, they often acquire the characteristics of the poor saps who were press-ganged into the royal navies of Napoleonic times-superstition, a contempt for outsiders, and a loyalty to no flag but their own.Ī good deal has changed since Orwell’s memoir of the months he spent as a dishwasher in “Down and Out in Paris and London.” Gas ranges and exhaust fans have gone a long way toward increasing the life span of the working culinarian. The members of a tight, well-greased kitchen staff are a lot like a submarine crew. Professional cooks belong to a secret society whose ancient rituals derive from the principles of stoicism in the face of humiliation, injury, fatigue, and the threat of illness. Your first two hundred and seven Wellfleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture, but your two hundred and eighth may send you to bed with the sweats, chills, and vomits.

It’s about danger-risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish.

It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay.

Kitchen confidential