Salt, Sweat & Steam Reading | Tuesday, April 28, 6:30 p.m. | Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh
Salt, Sweat & Steam: The Fiery Education of an Accidental Chef, a new memoir from Raleigh food writer Brigid Washington, opens with a crushing breakup that drives Washington to overhaul her life and enroll in culinary school at 26.
The rest of the memoir traces more extremes of experience: In one chapter, Washington and her classmates find themselves dancing on the tables of the Michelin three-star institution Eleven Madison Park while famous chefs spray champagne. In another, she loses a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity over a paperwork fluke.
Throughout, she fields a wide spectrum of feedback from her instructors at the Culinary Institute of America, where the book is largely set: Just as one professor offers Washington an approving nod, another calls her a “goddamn pirate,” a dig at her Trinidadian background, when she does a sloppy job of filleting a black bass. Many don’t seem to talk in a regular register—they bark, bellow, and huff.
Washington attended culinary school in the late aughts, before the industry’s recent referendum on kitchen culture that has toppled chefs like Noma’s René Redzepi and seen The Bear eclipse tyrant-glorifying shows like Hell’s Kitchen as the defining vision of restaurant life on screen. That backdrop is top-of-mind when reading Salt, Sweat, and Steam, which publisher MacMillan has billed as “The Devil Wears Prada for the ‘yes, chef’” generation.
That said, the memoir stops well short of condemning the school or the industry at large. Washington writes without much retrospective judgment and, in conversation, pushed back on the notion that the behavior of some school leadership amounted to a normalized culture of abuse.
Washington serves as vice chair of the James Beard Foundation Journalism Committee. She authored the cookbook Coconuts. Ginger. Shrimp. Rum: Caribbean Flavors For Every Season in 2017 and contributes recipes to Bon Appétit and the New York Times, among other publications. She got her first taste of journalism during undergrad at NC State, writing for the Technician; at culinary school, she became editor-in-chief of the student paper, La Papillote.
Ahead of Washington’s upcoming reading at Quail Ridge Books, the INDY spoke with the author about harsh teaching methods, life after culinary school, and where to eat in the Triangle.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
INDY Week: You describe some verging-on-abusive tactics from your instructors at the Culinary Institute. As you’ve gotten distance from the experience, how do you look back on the teaching methods?
Brigid Washington: I grew up in Trinidad, went to high school in Trinidad, and to answer the question, I have to answer it within the context of my formative education, which was based off the English system, where there was corporal punishment. I remember as a younger student, playing with an ink cartridge and getting ink all over my page, and my teacher was horrified. She took a ruler and whacked me a couple times on my knuckles. I remember exactly what she said: “It looks like a cockroach dipped in ink and ran across this page.” And then she gave me, pop, pop, pop, three taps on my knuckles. From then on, my penmanship was very neat and tidy.
Because that was my cultural touch point, I was better able to manage–I had the tools to manage this sort of education [at the CIA] because it mirrored what I knew. I don’t think it was 100% the same for everyone.
Do you have thoughts on how effective that kind of harsh, sometimes humiliating approach is as a teaching method, versus something softer? You write about a mix among the instructors at the institute.
I think it’s not either/or. It is very much a both/and. If it was too gentle, I wouldn’t have learned as much as I did. [There were] times when I thought I wanted gentle, and it would not have been good for me. [But] when I most needed gentle, gentle was there.
Where’s the line?
It’s hard to draw a definitive line with something that is truly unquantifiable. It goes on to somebody else’s experience. For instance, with my two children, our son, Luke, is very tough, very rough and tumble. If I look at my daughter a certain way, she will cry. When we have to reprimand her, it’s a very long process. I think that’s just a microcosm of the large experience. It’s an impossible line to be drawn, because literally every person has a different experience.
From a more systemic perspective, I think we’ve seen that when instruction is delivered in a volatile way, it can shape the kitchens that some of these big-time culinary school graduates go on to run. A number of chefs who came up under René Redzepi, for instance, went on to run kitchens with their own abuse allegations. Do you have thoughts on that lineage?
Temperament does not necessarily mean tradition. There’s multiple other factors that inform a culinary landscape other than the temperament of the chef instructors that taught a new bumper crop of chefs.
I wrote a lot about [a culinary school instructor named] Chef Le Roux. There’s a restaurant in Chicago from a former student, and he named his restaurant Le Roux because of how engaging and personable and warm our professor was. And the opposite is true, which I think is your question. But at the same time, we kind of pigeonhole, because culinary school has a very militaristic command over how education is dispersed. That does not necessarily mean those are how those restaurants are run. It’s kind of correlation is not equal causation.
And so it’s important to consider the nuance there, and to also consider the personality of the chefs. We could use Redzepi as an example, but there are hundreds of thousands of other chefs who are the diametric opposite of him, and that is part of what I wanted to get across in the book. … It’s very careful to delineate exactly why someone’s temperament is the way it is, and while it may inform how a restaurant is run, it is not necessarily the source of that.
You describe the curriculum as firmly rooted in the French culinary tradition, and you write that when it does venture beyond that, the treatment sometimes feels shallow. In the years since you were there, the industry has decentered the French culinary tradition—for instance, the Michelin guide is less dominated by French restaurants than it used to be. Do you have a sense of whether the culture or curriculum at the school has shifted?
I can’t speak directly to the culture. But I can say yes, the curriculum has, and that does reflect, as you said, a more robust cultural awareness.
But I think too, there is that formative element; if we’re studying architecture, I would imagine that a lot of the formative lessons would be tilted towards European design, because they’ve just been doing it longer. And I think similarly, the curriculum [at the CIA] followed that historical pattern.
After you graduated, did you spend any time working in restaurants, or did you go straight into food writing?
I actually did restaurant consulting. Joseph was working the 9-to-5, and I did not want to not see my new husband. I wanted to be able to be at home and not work on the line. There [was] a great little restaurant in our neighborhood called The Ginger Man, and I just was like, “What’s your biggest problem right now?” And they said, “This, this.” And this was like, “Okay, I think I can help you solve it.”
[There] was actually one story in the book that my editor and I took out, because the timing was wonky, but it’s a good anecdote: that restaurant, The Ginger Man, they had several cases of Opus One, which, I’m not sure if you know much about wine or Opus, but it’s a pretty expensive wine, a very good Bordeaux. They had several cases of it, and the owner was worried that people aren’t buying it because it’s about $300, $400 a bottle. The restaurant [was] celebrating a milestone birthday, and [the owner was] like, “How do we move this?” I remember I emailed my old wines professor from CIA, Professor Weiss, and he said, tell them to sell it by the ounce. Sell it at $10 an ounce. Because what happens is that people will buy one ounce, and they will buy three or four more. But if you put $50 a glass, no one is buying that.
The reason why I was disappointed that this didn’t make it into the book was because it showed that professors there are truly bought into their students’ success long after they graduate. The owner was over the moon; he sold out all of his cases.
When you were at NC State, you wrote for the Technician, and at culinary school, you became the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper La Papillote. How did those school publications shape your path as a journalist?
I think it’s really important that everyone, for whatever amount of time is possible, you do a job you love for little money at all. Because I think that really cements the “why am I doing this?” Writing for the Technician was rewarding. I appreciated the discipline. Things that I didn’t want to cover, like rush and frat week—it was like, you have to cover it. [So] in those moments, it was appreciating, okay, let me try to understand this history, let me take a step back. I think that it really gave me that bedrock of like, this is the importance of being socially curious.
Are there certain techniques or ways of doing things that you’ve retained from culinary school that you find yourself putting into practice day-to-day, when you cook at home?
Absolutely. How to properly sear, how to use a fond, how to deglaze, all of these very old school traditional French techniques, it’s still part of how I cook today. When I’m making a stock, it’s always a lazy bubble, because you don’t want to emulsify the fats.
What are your go-to places to eat in the Triangle?
Well, it’s different if we have the children with us. They love going to Five Star in Raleigh, next to the train tracks. When it’s Joseph and I, the chefs who are just exceedingly thoughtful and nuanced– I find that to be the case at Ajja, at Brodeto, Peregrine, and Bombolo. The work behind the work is very visible. You can tell when the food is underwritten with scholarship.
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