Warning: swearing
a fuckload of swearing
Couldn’t you do it without the swearing? The recipes are even good, but the language is straight out of the gutter.
Fuck’s sake, no fucking way.
A few years back, looking for some recipe, I think, I stumbled online on a gorgeous and truly sweet picture, the kind where even if the heroine farted, it’d smell of jasmine.
The heroine, as you could guess, the blog’s author or how she imagines herself in the perfect life, is laying the table for the family.
Everything’s perfect, white, positively angelic. And all the little angels in heaven fart jasmine.
The heroine is standing, or actually bending over the table. On the table there’s a beautiful checked tablecloth, a beautiful basket with beautiful bread, beautiful plates for the whole, no doubt beautiful, family. And the heroine is holding a beautiful dish with, presumably, a beautiful meal in it.
Beautiful blond hair flows from her head almost down to her waist…
And I look at that and shout on autopilot: FUCK, WHERE D’YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING WITH THAT MOP OVER THE POT, FUCK OFF!!!!
Long hair is a nightmare in the kitchen. In fact, best to shave your head bald before you walk into a kitchen.
Yes, I know. I’ve got long hair too. That’s why I’m so touchy about it.
But at nearly 60, I’ve still got hair down to mid-back – cutting it off would be a wrong done to the world. Every thirty-year-old with a hairline that’s receded down his back just backs me up on that. And fuck it!
But that wasn’t the worst thing about the picture.
It was exactly the same perfect world as today’s Instagram, and yesterday’s Hollywood films. Perfect and non-existent. Simulacrum.
And nothing further from the reality of work on the line (on the line, ‘cos in the kitchen’s where hubby gets to give the missus a tickle).
Vulgar language, swearing and screaming are a permanent and immanent part of kitchen reality. Though compared to turning up to work hammered or getting pissed at work, taking other substances, nicking expensive produce, fighting, the swearing is pretty innocent fun.
And nothing else captures the reality of a professional kitchen like this vulgar, lowlife language. And I mean literally villain’s cant, because take Poland, where a few years ago there was the much-talked-about case of Chef Patryk Galewski, ex-recidivist and dealer, whose spiritual Master was the great bodhisattva Father Jan Kaczkowski. I was a prisoner of conscience, so not your typical criminal, but when it comes to drugs and boozing few people alive can match me. Especially since Burroughs died. And there’s nothing odd about that in this trade.
It was the great Anthony who wrote that “the professional kitchen is the last refuge of the misfits”. That’s a prettier way of saying society’s margins. And what language that margin speaks, everybody knows. And we don’t say ‘gosh darn it’! Or ‘oh, fiddlesticks’!
And nothing could be further from this truth about the kitchen and the language of the kitchen than what that beautiful Lady, with the beautiful hair, at the beautiful table, with the beautiful dish in her hands, represents.
And part of that truth is swearing too. And that’s the smallest of the kitchen pathologies. And although these and other pathologies should be fought and kept down, you shouldn’t kid yourself that they’ll ever disappear completely.
The kitchen is a haven for outcasts, alcoholics, junkies, criminals. People like that, with their problems, make up kitchen reality. The typical Chef has trouble with the law, or with alimony, or with his own head. Or a combination of the three above. I scored two and a half.
And swearing also captures that reality. What’s the worst that can happen to someone working at a computer? That he’ll fall flat on his arse going for snacks and/or coffee? That he’ll hurt his finger tapping the keyboard?
He can say ‘gosh darn it’ or ‘oh, fiddlesticks’ then.
But nothing says what you feel, when you grab the door of an oven at 250 degrees, any truer than a juicy FUCK!!! you can hear in the next kitchen over. Different stakes, a different meaning of accident at work. Like when someone goes flying carrying 20 litres of hot stock. Pfft, pfft, bad luck be gone, touch wood…
And nothing sums up what work on the line is like better than saying that on the line you don’t work, ON THE LINE YOU FUCKING GRAFT!!
If you’ve read this far, maybe you noticed the word simulacrum on the way. Maybe you even looked up what it means. Or maybe you knew. Then respect, mate.
‘Cos there’s both “simulacrum” and there’s “fuck”. And of course if there are more fucks in a sentence than content, it should be chucked down the shitter, author and all.
But by cutting out the swearing, we cut out an important area of linguistic expression.
And ourselves, ‘cos the limits of my language mean my limits. And I, like many Chefs, always wanted to cross every limit going. Usually it ended with me crossing the limits of common sense and mental health. Typical in this job, too.
The language of the kitchen is the language of the street, of dealers and junkies, boozers and crims. Social outcasts, the margins, the excluded. It’s the language of the Morlocks.
In this metaphor the Beautiful Lady stands for the Eloi. Whose palaces stand on the bodies of murdered Morlocks like the stadiums in Qatar, for the delight of fans all over the world.
But it’s the Morlocks who’ve got the best knives. And they know how to use them.
The kitchen is my space for lifestyle medicine.
I'm not a dietitian or a doctor – I'm a chef, and a member of the Polish Society of Lifestyle Medicine. Nutrition is essential to a modern kitchen, and that's nothing new: working from Hippocratic dietetic principles was part of a cook's craft centuries ago. At Rude Kitchen I tie that tradition to modern science — and to lifestyle. Read more about how I bring cooking and lifestyle medicine together on the About page.