Madeleine Barowsky: LINE COOK • Cleaver Magazine

Madeleine Barowsky
LINE COOK: A LOVE STORY

For this task, your tools must be hot. They must be cold. They must be bone-dry or slick with hot water. Cold water. For this task, the item should be room temp. It should be completely frozen. It should be partially thawed, and I learned that lesson the hard way, goat cheese shattering with a ferocious bang of the knife. Be sure the plate does not have any hint of heat. Be sure it is still warm.

The buns should be sweaty and puffy. If the cheese is sweaty, it has sat too long. Bake them till they’re golden-brown on top. If you bake the fitascetta until they show color, they will be rock hard, unusable. Keep a constant tension on the chicken breast with the palm of your hand so it doesn’t shred as you cut. The trick to slicing loaves is a kind of looseness in the shoulder. Go as slowly as needed when streaming sugar into egg whites. Add sugar to the yolks as quickly as possible.

Lose yourself at the cutting board. Forget your body except for the hands, unfold an entire universe in the moment. Blink past individual vegetables and measure progress by the level in the big tub. It goes faster if you concentrate. It goes faster if you think of nothing at all.

During prep for dinner service, we mentally rehearse the hours ahead. Ready ourselves to be upstairs in the heat and action, feeling the flow, the push, the squeeze. You can love a thing and be afraid of it, like the roar of a freight train in close proximity. Brace for impact.

We stay busy until midnight sometimes. Saturday nights on the line are like a domino cascade that just keeps falling. The worst rush will feel like the world is ending, but the way out is through. Time passes. Do your best and time passes. Some days I do nothing but fail. I strip off my dirty whites and leave them stinking in the linens bag.

The night sky after twelve hours in a kitchen is like coming up from water for air.

Madeleine Barowsky is a software engineer and line cook who lives and works in Massachusetts. Her writing has twice been named Notable in Best American Food Writing. Madeleine’s flash nonfiction piece “Line Cook: A Love Story” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 Flash Contest.