Baked Alaska: Sweet Reflections of a Restaurant Kid
I usually entered the kitchen through the back door just past the dumpster. The hallway was ripe with smells of meat and vegetable deliveries and, depending on which way the wind was blowing, the dumpster. The lobster crates, their unknowing occupants tangled in seaweed, made for a slippery floor. I bounded along, saying my hellos to the prep cooks and ignoring their reminders to be careful. Rounding the corner and looking up, my favorite sight was the row of glistening prime ribs standing (as prime ribs are apt to do) sentry atop the range. Next, I’d spot an enormous stockpot bubbling with fragrant broth. I was fascinated by those pots. They were just so big! One of the chefs used to say he could make soup with me, and to prove it, he’d pick me up and drop me into an unused one. I just loved that!
We had a dishwasher with a powerful thirst (read: serious drinking problem) who, at the beginning of his shift, set up a gallon jug with a funnel. Every unfinished alcoholic beverage went down the chute — beer, wine, Singapore slings, Manhattans, brandy Alexanders, screwdrivers, sidecars . . . Oh! These period cocktails are so much fun, I can’t stop, but out of respect for my reader, I will. When Thurston wasn’t passed out in a corner, his drinking precipitated some pretty frightful calamities. I’ll never forget the time he stumbled while transporting a double-sized sheet pan of baked stuffed lobsters to the banquet room. Poor Thurston! My stepfather (no stranger to the Devil’s brew himself) could not accept the fact that Thurston couldn’t sober up. The reason why? “But he’s a Harvard graduate!” he’d exclaim, dumbfounded. And with that absurd logic, Thurston kept his job. Good for him.
Mary, our diminutive and toothless salad “girl,” worked her station with the concentration and speed of a Benihana cook. I was mesmerized. She’d fill a tray of thirty empty salad plates with the requisite iceberg lettuce, cherry tomato, cucumber slice, a ring of red onion, and a sprinkling of grated carrots in a flash. Boom-boom-boom. The sum of so many mundane parts adding up to one humdrum side salad. I don’t think side salads have improved much in 60 years. Oh, dear.
The massive meat slicer sat off to the side on a counter that was too high for Mary. With her hairnet sliding down her sweating brow, Mary hoisted what looked like a side of beef onto the tray with a determined grimace that only a toothless mouth could muster. Poor thing, reaching up, pushing that heavy blade back and forth. After the meat met its maker, she’d have her way with a bag of Spanish onions. And there was no fighting Mary; the silvery globes became a pile of paper-thin slices in seconds.
I spent my 20s working in kitchens and, I can attest that it is demanding physical work. I loved it and had a blast. We drank, smoked, yelled, and swore in the days before open kitchens and strictly enforced health codes. But those were my grown-up kitchen days. I was young, had all my teeth, and didn’t have to wear a hairnet. My life was easy. Mary’s life? Probably not so much.
After making my kitchen rounds, I’d head to Patsy’s kitchen. Patsy was our pastry chef; round and friendly, his name suited him perfectly. The industrial-size Hobart mixers perpetually blending, kneading, whipping, and whisking up something delicious. I was just a little squirt perched on the corner of a worktable, observing his every move and lobbing questions at him. Why is an ice cream pie baked? Doesn’t the ice cream melt? How do you tie the dinner roll dough in a knot? And, Do you have any hair under your hat? Patsy used to make mini Danish pastries for my mother when she hosted our church coffee hour. Filled with a dollop of lemon curd, raspberry, and blueberry jam. Drizzled with white icing — they were so cute! A sweet reward for showing up and staying awake during the sermon. Baked Alaska was trending on the dessert circuit during the 60s. For those that missed it, Baked Alaska is a pie shell layered with vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry ice cream known as Neapolitan ice cream, also trending in the 60s. The pie, topped with a mound of meringue, its sweet peaks licked by broiler flames, was cut in fat wedges and served with a drizzle of raspberry sauce. Fancy!
It was the smiles, the blur of kitchen whites, the constant flap of the double doors, and the kaleidoscope of food pulsing before my eyes that engendered my love of cooking and restaurants. Yup, I was rough and ready to cook and to be cooked at a very young age.
