Cheffin - From Potatoes to Caviar, An Irish Chefs memoir

Cheffin' - From Potatoes to Caviar, is a humorous story of an Irish farm boy who becomes a master chef while traveling and working in some of the worlds top hotels: www.brendancroninbooks.com

Prologue

Nothing could have prevented the waiter from catching fire. It happened in an instant, what you would call a kitchen accident – and it was my fault! I refilled the fondue burner the waiter just brought back from the guest’s table and did not see it was still burning as I poured more fuel into it. Flame shot out from the burner, fuel got on his jacket sleeve which caught on fire and now he was jumping around, screaming at the other waiters in a mixture of Italian and French: “Le chef veut me tuer!” – “The chef tried to kill me!” The kitchen was busy, the grill brimming with steaks, flame licking their edges, chefs calling out to me for main course pick-up times, more orders coming – two raviolis, one frog legs, one veal escalope. I had no time to mess around with this hysterical waiter in the middle of a very busy service time, so I poured a jug of cold water on his sleeve to put out the flame, gave him a new jacket, told him in very decorative language that he was a rotten idiot for thinking like that, and sent him back to his table with a new burner.

There was always friction between waiters and chefs in all the kitchens I worked in around the world. There is almost an ingrained expectation that one would hate the other, yet we depended on each other to take care of the third person in the equation – the guest. Guests are the very reason chefs and waiters get out of bed in the morning, the person we care about, kowtow to, strive to please and make happy, whatever it takes!

My mother taught me how to make guests happy with food. I saw how she took great care of the lodgers and tourists who stayed in our farm house in the west of Ireland. Guests always left our house happy; some even wrote thank you cards to her from as far away as America. When I was still a boy, she taught me how to cook the guests’ breakfasts, their dinners, and pack lunches. We made brown soda bread together, delicious black pudding, Christmas cakes, plum puddings, homemade butter, and of course, her delicious coffee cake. As time went by, she encouraged me to train to be a chef, an unseemly job for a man at that time in rural Ireland. Cooking was a woman’s job!