Standing in the Kitchen

I work at Maxie’s Supper Club, one of Ithaca, NY’s, fine eating establishments, and I love what I do there. Every step of the way I can see what I’m accomplishing in a way that rivals – and sometimes surpasses – the pleasure of seeing word follow word onto a page. The words need work, are never done. But when we “sell” a crab cake platter (put it up for the servers to deliver to the customer), my part is done, and in a few minutes it’ll be eaten, finished, gone.

I’m new at Maxie’s, and I’m training. At some point during every shift one of my managers will say, “Ezra, you hungry?” By now they’ve heard me say a few times, “Don’t ask me that. I’m always hungry!” But my manager is telling me it’s a good time to take a break and order dinner from the kitchen.

Every time I face the decision of what to eat, I freeze up for a moment unless I’ve planned an order in advance; but I love the menu, and I love the feeling of plenty that comes from standing in the well stocked walk-in cooler, dipping into a five-gallon tub of flour or cornmeal, or watching plate after plate come off the line. Today for the first time I actually fried some of my own dinner, a horseradish potato cake. It sat under a rare tuna steak in a slightly sweet glaze, and the whole thing was delicious.

Late tonight, a couple of hours after I’d helped close and clean the line at Maxie’s, I stood in my own kitchen, thinking about a snack. How could I apply what I’ve learned about cooking at the restaurant to my own space? What could I fix for myself? In a flash I envisioned the whole Maxie's setup that is already becoming familiar to me and will soon be second nature (and second home). “Man, I should fry up some green tomatoes,” I almost thought. But it would require a shopping run. It would take an hour. It would be, let's face it, a project.

My freezer is full and my pantry is overflowing; I have a range of spices, and I have a good stove, a nice pan, pots, and so on. But the feelings of plenty and simplicity that the Maxie’s kitchen now offers elude me at home, because the simplicity and totality of the Maxie’s stock presupposes constant and massive turnover; in a word, volume. (Of course, the simplicity at Maxie's is an illusion that hangs on complex provisions management, but I’m still fairly removed from the stock lists, prep lists, and organizational aspects.) As I stood alone in my kitchen at one in the morning, trying to find a snack I both wanted and could extract from my own ingredients, I felt a gulf open between what I’m learning to do and what it would take to do it on my own.

In this way cooking is like writing. It’s one thing to cook for others in a fully stocked and professionally equipped space, to serve up surprising and tasty hot food, carefully done, in a few minutes. This is like editing, or teaching writing, or even just writing for others: “You want a paper on the symbolism of the green tomato? I’ll have it for you in the morning.” But writing for oneself is like looking in one’s own full, familiar pantry and wondering whether anything there will be good.