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conditions, in an often fly-by-night industry with uncertain futures, catering to a fickle and capricious clientele in an environment in which you can do everything right and still fail. This environment tends to breed a clannishness, a tribal subculture, a tunnel-vision view of the world where "there's us —and there's those like us" and screw everybody else. We have to cook as best we can for them, but that doesn't mean we have to be them.
    So all those hours scraping carrots, scrubbing oysters, pulling the bones out of pig trotters, tourneeing turnips, in the end, pay off. In addition to becoming expert, presumably, at those valuable tasks, you are asserting your reliability, your toughness, and your worth as someone whom an overworked chef de partie or sous-chef or chef might want to take under their wing, invest a little time and attention actually teaching, helping you to climb out of the cellar and up to the next level. You are also coming to an understanding—a real understanding—of what the hell it is that we really do in this business, meaning, we transform the raw, the ugly, the tough, and the unlovely into the cooked, the beautiful, the tender, and the tasty. Any cretin can grill a steak after a few tries. It takes a cook to transform a humble pig's foot into something people clamor for. This is the real story of haute cuisine, of course: generations of hungry, servile, and increasingly capable French and Italian and Chinese and others, transforming what was readily at hand, or leftover from their cruel masters, into something people actually wanted to eat. And as the story of all great cooking is often the story of poverty, hardship, servitude, and cruelty, so is our history. Like the shank of beef that over time becomes a falling-off-the-bone thing of wonder when slowly braised in red wine and seasonings, so too is the prep cook transformed—into a craftsman, an artisan, a professional, responsible to himself, his chef, his owners, his coworkers, his customers.
    A stressed, badly rested, overworked three-star chef is not going to take time out of his or her very busy day training some young commis to clarify stock properly if there's any doubt whether that commis will still be around, still focused, and still motivated in three months. The very real need for dreary, repetitive functions like squid cleaning serves a secondary purpose in weeding out the goofballs, the people who thought they wanted to be in The Life—but don't really understand or want that level of commitment. If some of these budding culinarians feel that they are not, for instance, comfortable with being
    a commencement address nobody asked   for
    spoken to harshly, or dismissed with an expletive in a moment of extremis, then they usually lack the basic character traits needed for a long, successful run in this greatest of all businesses.
    Much is made of the emotional volatility, even the apparent cruelty, of some of our better-known culinary warriors. And to the casual observer, the torrent of profanity likely to come the way of an inadequately prepared poissonier can seem terrifying and offensive. And there is a line not to be crossed. Bullying for its own sake, for the sheer pleasure of exerting power over other, weaker cooks or employees, is shameful. If I verbally disembowel a waiter during a busy shift for some transgression, real or imagined, I sincerely hope and expect that at the shift's end, we will be friendly and laughing about it at the bar. If a cook goes home feeling like an idiot for trusting me, working hard for me, and investing time and toil in pleasing me, then I have failed in my job. Good kitchens, however hard the work, and good chefs, should breed intense loyalty, camaraderie, and relationships that last lifetimes.
    Most reasonably coordinated people with hearts, souls, and any kind of emotional connection to food can be taught to cook, at some level or another. It takes a special breed to love the business. When