Blood, Bones & Butter - By Gabrielle Hamilton Page 0,50

telling me and worse, without taking me, Misty worked her last day at the catering company and went across town to pursue an opportunity to open a restaurant. Misty, without letting on in the slightest, was in the early stages of opening a restaurant across town, with her brother as co-chef, and because she would never behave in such poor form as to poach cooks from the catering company, she did not offer jobs to anyone there. She just left. Her spot across from me at the prep island remained empty as we continued to cook the old familiar menus on autopilot. We watched as the owner apprehensively auditioned new chefs. One chef came, and then another, and one more still, and I stuck it out at the catering company for a few more months. The last chef I worked for introduced his signature dish in the first week or two—a pounded veal breast with a blueberry-Frangelico sauce topped with prosciutto, Parmesan, and pine nuts—and I clocked out on that dish and ran to Misty. I begged her for a job. Decent, timid catering food was one thing, but blueberry-Frangelico sauce …

They were planning a pan-tropical place, which allowed her to cook dishes from countries around the equator. I could feel and see her excitement and fresh energy not only to be in a new place, after eight years in the old one, with permission from the owners to really open up, but also to get her hands on new ingredients, and to read incessantly about unfamiliar dishes and cultures. The giant pile of books on her desk was heavily marked with yellow sticky memo tabs. The whole experience gave her demeanor a brightness that made the stained V-neck T-shirts that she still wore seem almost clean. Within weeks, she was happily exhausted rather than hopelessly worn down; she was almost talkative. For the first time I had picadillo, the slightly sweet ground meat hash popular in Spanish and Latin countries; and chimichurri, the green Argentinean sauce with chopped herbs; and asafoetida, the pungent, sulfuric Indian flavoring. Reluctantly, I tried Malibu coconut rum in cocktails, and they worked. She made pho, lemongrass ice cream, macadamia nut tartlets with lime curds, coconut creams, and passion fruit syrups. It was legitimate and well-prepared and delicious. We tested dishes over and over until we got them right, and they seemed, in spite of their Vietnamese origins, not out of place there on State Street across from the university. She found a local tortilla maker in Detroit, and she persuaded the famous Michigan store Zingerman’s to make chipotle challah for her rock shrimp club sandwich. She found fresh kefir lime leaves. She went through cases of nuoc mam. And enough galangal to fill a boat at the Bangkok floating market.

I saw fresh turmeric for the first time in her new kitchen and so learned—a bit late in my cooking life, I thought, for someone who thought for sure she knew everything—the difference between a root and a rhizome. Misty was able to distinguish between an Indonesian, a Chinese, a Vietnamese, and a Thai ground shrimp paste. It was the first time I heard a chef say, “I don’t know, let me look it up.” It was the first time I saw a chef solicit the opinion or experience of her staff. She was willing—always—to learn from any source. If the dishwasher’s mother had made posole for twenty years at every family reunion, Misty would ask him about it. If not to learn something that she didn’t already know, at least to benchmark her own experience against it.

It was a good kitchen. She ran it well.

It was the first time I saw a chef ask relevant questions of job seekers at their interviews. How long is your commute? Your fiance lives in Chicago? This is your third DUI? Between jail and TGI Friday’s you worked salads at Bombay Bicycle Lounge for how long? She knew well that the cooking end of things would be apparent in these applicants as soon as they entered the kitchen, and that it was a waste of interview time to ask them about their kitchen skills, which everybody lies about anyway. She was keen to discover if the rest of the package existed—the part where you need your crew to be somewhat sane, logical, and reliable. I learned from Misty that when a cook tells you that his girlfriend is moving to L.A. to break into movies, you had better