We got a load of turnips from our farm share the other week, and since then they have been languishing on the counter waiting to be prepared. I knew I wanted to pickle them, lacto-ferment them to be exact, with some beets and Mediterranean flavors, but until this evening the chore was not at the top of my to-do list. After a trip to the grocery store, though, I had the beets and I had the time, too, and so I set to prepping the vegetables for their bath in the brine.
As soon as paring knife touched turnip, I was transported to June 1990. It was my first day working as a cook in the flight kitchen of United Airlines. A child of the airline industry, I had been working in kitchens for 4 years, and when I saw the ad in the paper it seemed like a natural fit. Sure, I was dismissive of the quality of food I might be cooking, but the flight benefits and regular hours were definitely tempting. Imagine my surprise then, when at my interview I had to take a pencil and paper test about cooking techniques. I thought it went pretty well, but after the interview, when the executive chef, Hans, hired me, he explicitly told me that I was lucky to get the job. Evidently, my knowledge was spotty, but my attitude was spot on.
So there I was, on my first day, standing in a cavernous warehouse-sized space behind a row of 10 stainless steel benches and in front of a bank of 8 convection ovens, two 100-gallon steam kettles, three flat tops, and a 12 burner range. Hamid was my trainer and my first task was to carve 100 turnip tournees. He quickly demonstrated with his beak-nose paring knife-- in six quick cuts, he had a perfect little football of a turnip. And when I finished those? I was to move on to potatoes and carrots. These were for the business class meals on the British Airways 747 flight to London. United had the charter for all the BA food out of Dulles, and every morsel of it, along with all the United transAtlantic meals, and transcontinental business and first meals, was prepared from scratch.
The kitchen was a classic European brigade set-up. In addition to our German-born executive chef, we also had two French-born and one Chinese-American sous-chefs, a Thai lead cook nick-named Jimmy. Then there was Hamid, who was Iraqi, Derrick (Jamaican), Roger (French), Park and Houng (Korean), Suzy and Rudi (Indonesian), Miguel (Filipino), and Sherri and George, who were American-born, like me. All the meals we were responsible for were cooked according to classic French recipes created at UAL headquarters in Chicago-- meat, sauce, starch, and buttered vegetable.
Hamid went off to make 200 omelets or something and left me with a pile of vegetables and a gallon of water to toss the finished tournees in. I got out the smallest, sharpest knife from my roll and picked up a turnip. He had quartered his first, and I did the same, but after that I was lost. I tentatively made a couple cuts, but ended up with a chunky-diamond like thing. Even so, I threw it in the water, hoping it might pass. I struggled on like that, sweating in my new white coat and unfamiliar paper tocque, until at last Derrick came by and without a word turned one of the turnip quarters and handed me his paring knife.
It took me 40 turnips and until lunch time to get 100 usable tournees. By the end of the task, I realized that to be successful, you had to look past the side right in front of you and cut without hesitation.
That was my last professional cooking job, but even though I left the field to become a teacher a year later, it's a lesson that has had many applications over the years.
