Memories have been triggered lately by smells wafting from pots, escaping from fridges or carried across the wind. The memories have given me pause to look at how my time spent traveling, working in kitchens, working in the NYC fashion industry, growing up in rural Maine, living on couches, traveling on public transportation and years wrought with trepidation about the future has led me here.
I have been indulging in memories as I prep letting my hands work as my mind wanders. I recall the subtle details of the moments of smells and stop motion images that play like a flip book in my mind. I have spent a large portion of my week bent over the stainless steel fish sink and a cutting board butchering fish. My hands frigid and pink and my forearms covered in splatters of guts and scales. Boxes of large lemon sole with perfect lilywhite bellies and far away crooked eyes, pounds of Barbue with their raspy white teeth and their large scales and large pink prawns wait to be gutted, cleaned and portioned. The smell of the sea lingers in the sink and the counter well after I’m finished, even after I have cleaned all the stainless steel with warm soapy bubbles. These smells conjure the summer I lived on a tiny island off the coast of Maine nestles in a confetti of islands a couple of miles offshore. I lived in the attic of a tiny red cabin made of plywood with a large yellow heart shingled on the roof surrounded by tall conifers. It was within earshot of lapping waves on the seaweed covered rocks and the constant diesel hum of lobster boats going out to haul their traps.
I was at the time focusing my creative efforts on jewelry making as well as my tentative teenage romance with an island boy. I had moved out to the island at the beginning of the summer to work as a part time apprentice at a jewelry studio as well as work at a restaurant on a neighboring island half a mile away. It was a tourist destination and a haven for the likes of Martha Stewart and the New England elite. The restaurant was on the end of long deepwater dock, a New England style building flanked by the classic graying cedar shingles aged by the sea. It’s doors painted a dark blue gray, the color mirroring the water lapping beneath. Next door to the restaurant was a locally run lobster coop that at times was as busy as a Harlem bodega. The fisherman would bring their lobsters, bi-catch and other larger fish to the coop to sell and unload. The catch would then get processed, packed and then shipped all over the world. Being a restaurant positioned right next door to a fisherman’s coop, we had the pick of the litter of fresh seafood. Most of the time the fish, shellfish and crustaceans we got were so fresh they were still alive. They hadn’t been weighed, tagged and banded for more than 3 hours before they were in our kitchen.
I cooked lunch, feeding the fisherman daytime tourists and locals out to catch up on gossip. I was 19 pretentious, tan and totally unaware of the can of worms I had just opened by entering the crazy culinary industry. I had been working in kitchens for the last couple of summers but the responsibility had never been placed on me to be in charge of the line and all its prep. I was flying solo and I remember the high I felt the first time the board was full of tickets and I was humming along. As the summer rolled on I was given more leeway with the menu. I made fish tacos, Vietnamese fish soup loaded with scallions and ginger, double layer chicken sandwiches with pesto mayonnaise, crab cakes with spicy remoulade sauce and steamed muscles laden with shallots and white wine.
I was hooked addicted to the buzz I caught from the adrenaline and the instant gratification, but I was caught in the middle of my own conflict of ease and expectation. My own deep slicing self-criticisms of my life’s trajectory had reared its ugly head. My drive was to be an artist it was my identity. I told myself over and over that cooking was just a fun and easy way to make money to fuel my artistic endeavors. But through out this I continued cooking. I realize now that was the beginning even though I didn’t know it and even though it took another eight years, culinary school and constant support from the people closest to help me to comprehend and accept that cooking was my art. It was the beginning of scars, of a knowledge base of taste memory, the beginning of my evolution. I will never forget what really fresh halibut tastes like, how short you really have to cook mussels so they open and display their plump yellow gems and opalesant broth, or how incredibly stupid I felt after an argument with the owner in the middle of a rush left me fired.
Tonight it is 8 years later and I am standing at the pass of the restaurant in the Château in France and cooking won.
I have three beautifully cooked lemon soles to be de-boned and plated in front of me. I handle them gently, carefully lifting one side and then the other off the bones placing them on the plate. They get little to no garnish and are whisked away almost as soon as my spatula leaves the plate. I scrape the remaining flesh from the bones and scoop it into my mouth it is so tender and fresh with just a hint of the sea still lingering on its flesh. I get caught in a momentary tangle of the past as the flavor of the fish lingers on my tongue. The moment passes and I come to feeling honestly content standing here hot tiered and smelling of fish.
