Rite of Sausage

Things are heating up in the Cochon kitchen.
Fall and winter are the restaurant's peak seasons, and each weekend we brace ourselves to square off against an increasingly packed dining room. To prepare for busy nights of service, the guys who head the kitchen--Steven (owner), Bill and Ben (sous-chefs) and Charles (somewhere right below sous-chef)--work insanely hard, often arriving in the morning as early as 8am, staying until 2 in the morning and, in general, doing everything in their power to make sure the kitchen is prepared when dinnertime arrives at 5:30 each night. They'll work with strep throat, with fresh stitches in their hands, on very little sleep, non-stop and at full-speed for the entirety of their very long work days. If they work a sixteen hour shift, they most likely will not sit down once the entire time. Even more impressive than this physical stamina is their consistent ability to make things work no matter what type of unpredictable situations arise. If I mention to Bill that we're low on pear sauce then, before I've had a chance to process this discovery or ponder its consequences, he has peeled and diced several pears and set them on the stove with honey and butter to simmer. If every square inch of kitchen counter is occupied and a large party is in the dining room, then Bill will place salad plates up on shelves, balance them on top of pots, find room for them anywhere he can so that eighteen salads are plated and ready to go on time. If a party of eight comes in five minutes before closing and four of them are vegetarians, Charles will whip up a vegetarian special on the fly (most recently, a roasted half acorn squash stuffed with mushrooms and vegetable hash, served with creamy greens and garnished with fried threads of onion). If the restaurant is unexpectedly packed at 4pm between dish washing shifts, Steven will go back there and wash dishes himself. If I get nine dessert tickets in the course of five minutes, one of the guys will come flying back to my station and provide me with back-up support until the storm passes. The set of skills that this type of job promotes--the ability to think on your toes, to multitask, to work as a team, to plan ahead, to problem solve, to work under pressure--has made a deep impression on me as I watch these guys and learn from them each night.
The kitchen morale, to a certain extent, thrives upon the adrenaline rush of cooking for a packed restaurant. Bill, in particular, seems born for the heat of the kitchen and happiest when things are at their craziest. The man works with incredible speed; it took me a long time to even watch him break down a pig because I would blink and miss it, turn away for some quick task and then turn back to find that the 170lb animal, so recently intact, had been reduced to four legs in a bin and a head in a bucket of ice (Recently, though, I caught him in action: First off with the head, then cut each leg out at the hip socket, then slice away the skin along the back to be saved for crackling, then remove the loins from along the rib cage, then remove the ribs from the spine). When the restaurant is busy, Bill is like a broken record, reminding people with an amphetaminic grin how many reservations are on the books for tonight and how late he worked last night and how many covers we'll have done by the end of the weekend. Then, at the end of the night, he likes to do a recap of who sold the most food, as in "Joe, you sold 38 oyster roasts tonight!" or "I'm gonna have to make gumbo for the fourth time this week!" But even Bill has a limit to how much pressure he can groove on, and this past weekend was grueling enough that finally, mid-way through Saturday night's snafu, he threw his arms up and proclaimed "this isn't fun at all anymore."
In this pressure cooker environment, speed is key, and I'm afraid to say that, four weeks into the job, I am still operating at a relatively snaillike pace. In my own defense, though, I will add that this slowness is not for lack of effort; I am, in fact, working as fast as I can at all times, often in a state of near panic not unlike I Love Lucy in her classic conveyer belt debacle. On a typical night, I will have multiple prep tasks to accomplish in addition to my dessert plating responsibilities--slice five sheet trays of cornmeal crackers, peel a tub of shrimp (their spiny legs rendering the skin on the inside of my index finger the texture of shredded wheat, the upside of which is that I got to wear a latex, contraceptive-like device on my finger for protection), pick a gallon of parsley, rub fifteen racks of ribs, make a tray of beet cakes--and then, in addition, frenzied cooks will come back from the front line with emergency tasks for me--cut more alligator, slice more mushrooms, portion more cochon--and those have to be accomplished lickety split lest the cooks be caught empty-handed when new orders come in. When wringing moisture out of shredded beets goes awry and I spill the bleeding mixture all over the floor and the sink and my white apron; when I set ice cream containers out to thaw and forget about them until they are five minutes away from turning into soup; when suddenly it is 11 o'clock and I haven't yet begun my nightly wrestle to deliver eleven briskets and four pig legs to their braising pans; when dessert tickets come in so fast that Bill drops a ticket on my table and instead of saying the usual "postre" just says "weeds" i.e. you're about to be in them--at these moments I hang on for dear life, scrambling to remedy the situation before anyone discovers what a mess I'm in.
But between my slowness and mistakes and general rookie incompetence come small triumphs and, over time, I feel more and more like a bona fide member of the kitchen staff. On a recent night, Bill came back and told me I needed to make whipped cream for a lemon buttermilk pie dessert special, and I already had. One time, Steven told me my "latkes" looked good (and he actually called them latkes, which might in itself represent some sort of breakthrough). On Monday, I cut up a pan of lemons for Wes (a daytime line cook), and he actually said "Wow, that was fast" when I brought them to him. Hallelujah. But my most triumphant moment, my true arrival, came late last Thursday evening when Steven came back to my station to tell me I needed to make andouille sausage and then added, after a dramatic pause fit for an action movie (When I think about this comment now, I hear Bruce Willis' voice in lieu of Steven's): "Word on the front line is you grind a good sausage."
This rumor, as it turned out, was poorly founded, and fifteen minutes later I was standing in front of the enormous sausage cranker, praying no one would notice the cylinders of andouille snaking across the metal table, bursting open, falling on the floor, running away from me like a cartoon hose gone out of control.