Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain

2000, Bloomsbury

Nothing put the fear of God into me quite like my mother declaring, “I’m going to make pesto,” especially in her late eighties, when her ambition did not always match her energy.

In the kitchen, my mother was not a neat and orderly person.

Don’t get me wrong. She was an outstanding individual in all the important ways. She had a commanding spirit and a joie de vivre unmatched by most. When it struck, her enthusiasm knew no bounds. However, on occasion, her passions left a path of destruction not unlike that of a tornado. Such was the case when basil beckoned.

Hers was a south-facing kitchen flooded by a steady stream of light throughout the afternoon. Her sink fronted casement windows overlooking a generous expanse of lawn and big trees. The backyard offered a magnetic view; one could gaze out onto it from amidst the chaos of cluttered counters and sail, momentarily, into a modicum of calm.

The kitchen itself was a different story, particularly when mom was possessed by the pesto impulse. Every ingredient— the basil, the olive oil, the pignoli nuts, the cheese, and the garlic—was abandoned in the battlefield once the assault commenced. The cutting boards, knives, and the Cuisinart— they were all there, like actors in a play, assembled and spent after their performance, a spray of pesto splatter, evidence of the deed.

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Try as I do to fight the tendency, messiness might simply be genetic. Although I admire tidiness, I find straightening up tedious and lack the drive to do it.

I am trying to change my ways.

Meanwhile, in deference to my aspirations toward order and my indifference to pesto, I do not make the sauce. My Cuisinart (that unassuming instrument of my mother’s destruction) stays mostly in the kitchen cabinet, where it can do no harm.

I recently picked up Anthony Bourdain’s first book, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, after seeing Roadrunner, the film about Bourdain.

Origin stories in general rivet me, and Bourdain’s is no exception. He was, by his own admission, insufferable as an undergraduate at Vassar College. One summer during college, Bourdain went to work in a Provincetown restaurant only to find himself completely changed by the experience. In the restaurant kitchen, Bourdain discovered his milieu, his tribe, a group of similar misfits.

The scenes Bourdain recalls in that restaurant kitchen are vivid, the characters, colorful, fueled by alcohol, drugs, and the drive to do their job well. There is high drama, to be sure, and Bourdain had a front row seat to a show with characters reminiscent of those only Shakespeare could mint. The props of this drama are deadly— knives, flames, boiling pots and sizzling grease. Bourdain, who saw himself primarily as a bad boy, auditioned for the cast, and ultimately landed himself a station.

Before working in Provincetown and eventually New York, Bourdain experienced an earlier turn in his life’s path. In Kitchen Confidential he recalls the family trip he and his younger brother made with their parents to Europe in the 1960s. On it, Bourdain embodied the role of a bored and unhappy pre-teen being carted around Paris and other parts of France on a culinary tour by their foodie parents, the two youngsters insisting upon a steady diet of hamburger and ketchup, until, that is, the parents left the boys in the backseat of the car while they dined for hours at the world’s number one culinary destination of the time. Bourdain was smart enough to know that he was missing out on something terribly important, and from that point on, he was out to seize the moment when it came to culinary adventure, never again to miss out.

When his father’s uncle invites the family out on his oyster boat during that same vacation, only young Tony is excited at the prospect, volunteering to eat the creature raw, as the gruff old man harvests it over the gunnel of the boat. Bourdain’s thrill borders on the sexual. Young Tony is off to the races as far as pursuing food as his passion.

My mother worshipped good tomatoes. Her idea of a perfect meal was a tomato sandwich slathered in Hellman’s Mayonnaise, on thinly sliced Pepperidge Farm white bread.

No white bread in sight, but that tomato would have brought my mother and Anthony Bourdain, any food lover for that matter, great joy.

In Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain references mise en place, the chef’s ritual of having all cooking ingredients prepped and in place, ready for action. The implied order of mise en place is no doubt a concept my mother understood but most definitely rebelled against,

The other day, I cut into an heirloom variety from the farmers’ market. There was no white bread in sight, but I made do with a bagel. Afterward, I even managed to tidy up. Order in the kitchen always feels so mise en place.