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Cooking Dirty
A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen
Cooking Dirty By Jason Sheehan. Farrar Straus and Giroux
Everyone will enter the kitchen this holiday season a little bit differently after reading Jason Sheehan’s funny new book Cooking Dirty.
In Cooking Dirty, Sheehan provides us with a rollicking memoir of what really happens in kitchen’s around the country.
From his first job scraping trays at a pizzeria at age fifteen, Jason Sheehan worked on the line at all kinds of restaurants: a French colonial and an all-night diner, a crab shack just off the interstate and a fusion restaurant in a former hair salon.
Restaurant work, as he describes it in exuberant, sparkling prose, is a way of life in which “your whole universe becomes a small, hot steel box filled with knives and meat and fire.” The kitchen crew is a fraternity with its own rites: cigarettes in the walk-in freezer, sex in the basement, the wartime urgency of the dinner rush.
Cooking is a series of personal challenges, from the first perfectly done mussel to the satisfaction of surgically sliced foie gras. And the kitchen itself, as he tells it, is a place in which life’s mysteries are thawed, sliced, broiled, barbecued, and fried—a place where people from the margins find their community and their calling.
JASON SHEEHAN, the food writer for Westword, won a James Beard Award in 2003. His essay There’s No Such Thing as Too Much Barbecue was reprinted in This I Believe. His work has appeared in Best American Food Writing for the past five years.