When we left our heroine in San Francisco, she was in her kitchen at 1:00 am rolling out a pie crust, loving her job but beginning to regret her dating choice. And with good reason....
The butler did it. The madcap socialite and her husband were in Europe that summer and yes, I was dating the son. The butler didn't like opening the front door to the heir and coming downstairs to fetch the cook. This went on for several months with me laughing off the butler's increasingly stern reprimands and veiled threats. Until one night he did it. Fired me that is.
So I packed my bags and left, flew home to Michigan to lick my wounds but quickly returned. I was hungry for more food.
I thought perhaps my days of domesticity were over so I applied at restaurants for any kitchen position. I was hired, rather unwillingly, at a small French restaurant run by a Swiss chef. He wasn't hot on the idea of a woman in his kitchen, but he gave me a shot. Soon I was slicing 25 lb bags of onions, whipping gallons of cream, ( once into butter, oops) slicing off my fingertip into a 5lb basket of mushrooms ( and the ER was surprised I hadn't brought it in with me, mushroom slice, fingertip, who can tell). I was layering baking tins with slices of barding fat and making pate campagne.
During work we drank pitcher after pitcher of iced mint tea to assuage our thirst and after work we drank glasses of wine and ate slabs of my pate. We went dancing, camping and ate out together on Sunday nights. I once was lost in a ghost town in Arizona, now I had discovered my vocation, a new family and the reassuring presence of a knife in my hand.
Now if I could only get near a stove to start cooking....
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