Word: sheehans
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...soldier son—learned this the hard way when she came to town earlier this summer to stir up her usual ruckus outside the former president’s new Dallas home. As Bush’s house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac, Sheehan couldn’t get closer than the top of the street, and the neighborhood’s expansive green lawns and wide driveways absorbed her group’s attempts at charismatic exhortation...
...rather haughty cooking-school diary (Katherine Darling's Under the Table) and the life and times of a pastry chef (Dalia Jurgensen's Spiced) - naughtier than you'd expect - but the best of them by a mile is by a former chef of no particular distinction named Jason Sheehan, now an extraordinarily good food writer. Cooking Dirty is his account of a career spent largely at what he calls "the low end of the culinary world": late-night shifts at diners, bars and neighborhood joints. Some of it is pure drudgery - like prepping a "literal ton of corned-beef briskets...
...Melting-Pot Kitchen Some of the stuff in Cooking Dirty beggars belief - like the time Sheehan accidentally stuck an 8-in. (20 cm) chef's knife right through his hand, pulled it out and went back to chopping - but so far there has been relatively little actual post-Bourdainian fiction. Possibly the first novel of consequence is Monica Ali's In the Kitchen, set in a hotel restaurant in London. The restaurant's executive chef, Gabriel, has clawed his way up effortfully from the working classes, but having done so, he is now, at 42, having a midlife crisis...
...wrote the celebrated Brick Lane, gets the kitchen just right: the crushing pace, the fistfights, the grills and griddles and salamanders, the guy who's always walking around with a leek hanging out of his fly. But her interest in it is somewhat different from, say, Sheehan's. For Ali it is - at the risk of sending you screaming back to high school English class - a microcosm of Britain, a country that is also, not coincidentally, having a midlife crisis. The kitchen is a strange crossroads zone where high culture and manual labor collide. It's radically globalized and borderless...
...Sheehan puts it, the restaurant kitchen is "the last true American meritocracy. No one cares about your past or what you do on the outside. Can you cook? That's all anyone cares about." Gabriel is a sympathetic and beautifully realized character, but one suspects he wouldn't last a night at the Waverly...