Plenty of people are already on the job at five in the morning. Cops, breakfast cooks, diner waitresses, transit drivers… it is far from an exclusive club.
On the other hand, very few people start their workday at said inhuman hour in a vast and empty commercial kitchen with a fourteen-inch knife in their hand staring down the gutted carcass of a wild Alaskan salmon the size of a full-grown schnauzer.
Don't ask me why a schnauzer as opposed to some other like-sized creature. I just like the sound of it and it conveys the point that this is a big goddamn fish, so big that it overhangs the cutting board at both ends. At five AM, with nothing but the hum of fluorescent lights and the cycling of refrigeration units to keep me company, I have to fight the twinge of an incipient bad-trip feeling like the bugger is going to reanimate on me and start flopping around the table looking for its missing entrails. Harsh thoughts before my second cup of coffee, but I suppress the image long enough to hook the fish with my thumb through the gills just forward of its left pectoral fin and find the sweet spot where the end of its severed spine protrudes slightly from the surrounding muscle. I put all the weight of my arm and shoulder behind the curved blade and separate the filet from the rest of the fish in a single unbroken motion, pin-bones giving way to the knife with a slight popping feel like the teeth of a sticking zipper or the string pulling loose from the mouth of a burlap sack. I flip the fish over so that the exposed skeleton rests on the countertop and repeat the motion in mirror image, leaning into the knife so hard that my right foot lifts slightly at the midpoint of the stroke. I am left with two glistening slabs of deep pink flesh and a gape-mouthed head connected to a distant tail by nearly two feet of perfectly denuded backbone. The frame goes into the garbage and I set about the more tedious work of deboning, skinning, and portioning what remains.
My longtime culinary mentor Patrick Dore used to hate it when he had to start a day with heavy butchering. The man was an animal at the bench, capable of knocking out more work than anybody else I have ever known, but he liked to ease into the day with tasks that were easier on the senses. Picking basil leaves was a favorite, or even peeling spuds. Cooking pasta, making sauces – anything that didn't involve blood under his fingernails and the inevitable slickness of protein on his hands. Later in the day he could French out lamb racks and clean tenderloins with the best of them, but before lunch service he would put his energies elsewhere.
For me, butchery and fabrication have always been among my favorite aspects of the profession. I am good at it, and I enjoy it. Breaking down animals into usable pieces requires a certain degree of raw technical skill that comes only with careful observation, repetition and practice. Mistakes with meat are generally expensive mistakes, which is why in so many kitchens only the chef and maybe the sous-chefs end up handling the product. In a singular inversion of the usual division of labor, the messiest and most elemental tasks fall to the most senior personnel. Interesting. If you see a line cook cutting portions without a scale or direct supervision, it means that he is damn good at it and has earned the right to do so.
In order to take something apart, you first have to understand how it is put together. This applies to a salmon or a side of beef just as readily as it does a clutch assembly or a brake caliper. Trying to prevail with brute force invariably leads to heartache; you need to find the natural seams between muscles, the layer of sliverskin that lies against the bone, the natural weakness in a joint. I can render a chicken into eight servable parts in about ninety seconds, because I know instinctively where to find the gap between leg and thigh, and how to trace the inside curve of the wishbone with the tip of a boning knife. I can pop the remaining half of hip-joint out of a ham using sharpening steel for leverage, and strip the delicate loins from a rabbit's ribcage without mangling them at the point where the spine doubles in width. I can reduce a fifty-pound halibut into seven-ounce portions, and I have converted whole strip loins into more New York Steaks than I could even begin to count. Each of these tasks entails a methodically scripted process tempered by awareness of when to back off the knife or change your angle by a few degrees.
Likewise machinery. In tearing down an engine, the mechanic follows a carefully proscribed set of steps, applying the correct tool with the correct amount of force to the proper point of contact. Impatience and overexuberance result in stripped fasteners and broken parts – don't ask me how I know. Ruined metal is just as expensive as ruined flesh and unlike meat it can't find a home in the stockpot. When I approach a mechanical component for the first time I work slowly and tentatively, feeling out the weaknesses, referring to the diagrams, taking one careful step at a time. By the third or fourth time around I can proceed with greater fluency, and the more frequent tasks devolve into second nature. I can set the valves and ignition timing on my bike by feel and intuition before my coffee gets cold, and I don't hesitate to pull the slide and needle from a recalcitrant carb in a far-flung parking lot should circumstances warrant it. I know how these systems work, have spent hours mulling over how the pieces intersect and have struggled in the past to get them right, much as I once fought unsuccessfully to butterfly a lamb leg and wound up instead with an expensive pile of stew meat. The learning curve is steep but rewarding.
The difference of course is that machinery, in the end, becomes whole again. The meat, however, continues its journey down the food chain in smaller and smaller pieces until its very molecules are scattered, and the chef or butcher moves on to the next unsullied carcass to begin anew.
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