I'm reading, and loving, Heat by the New Yorker columnist Bill Buford. It's about his adventures in Mario Batali's kitchen.





His chapter called "Kitchen Slave" had me laughing out loud on the train (which is not too common for me) because it reminded me so much of my own former "kitchen slave" days. He describes being left alone with a pile of ducks to be de-boned and screwing them all up by missing the "oyster." The exact same thing happened to me long, long ago in New York.

The funny thing about this vignette is that old Bill and I had the same thought, when faced with that interminably high pile of bone-ful little duckies: Why would a duck have an oyster?

Well, the oyster is a little nugget of meat that game birds have (quails and cornish game hens have them too) that is a really tasty piece, so you don't want to lose (or maim) it when deboning. It's kind of hard to explain where it is, and I'm not even sure I could show you if faced with a game bird right now, but it's in a place that's really easy to miss or go straight through, so a novice deboner has a lot of trouble getting it out in one piece and not mauling or missing it.

Reading the passage reminded me of three things: how happy I am to be free from the shackles of a day-to-day kitchen job, the universality of the learning curve for chefs, and how steep and intimidating that learning curve felt when I was first starting out.

A cynic would say my appreciation for Heat can be boiled down to schadenfreude, but I prefer to think of it as kinship. When I'm reading it I feel like it's my own story, ghostwritten by a better writer. Regardless, it's a great summer read.