Cooked

    It’s clear to me now what convict-turned chef Jeff Henderson’s problem was, and it had nothing to do with drugs: his problem was that his father was a lousy role model and his hard-working mother got no credit. The boy’s mother was a welder, and if you think that’s a cool job (if not a man’s job) then you’re right. Only problem was that his mother’s coworkers treated her like shit, and even if they didn’t, the people in his neighborhood hated the people that worked. As for his father and grandfather, they taught the boy that it was okay to steal. Young Jeff learned that hard work was for suckers and real men helped themselves to whatever they wanted.

Cooked is not so much a book about a chef as it is about proving yourself in work. The guy goes to jail right out of his teens, never had a real job, and learns to cook in a prison kitchen. Fresh out of jail, he finds that his father has pilfered the money he’d given him for safekeeping, and the “tough black guy” attitude won’t work in a kitchen. The restaurants in California are heavily staffed by Mexicans, and tough or not, he’s all alone while on their turf. But the Mexican cooks are only in it as a job to make money. Jeff Henderson intends to turn it into a career, so as you guessed, he quickly moves up the ladder and on to other restaurants.

I guess you could say that a big theme in this book is career change. You go from a place where you’re the top dog to being on the bottom and starting again. Henderson, in his role as the lowest ranking cook, finds that his coworkers are nasty and they don’t want a Black man there. He makes the mistake of telling off an inept female colleague, and the retaliation is swift. The light at the end of the tunnel is that the boss can see that he’s doing all the work, and after learning all that he can, on he goes. You can’t steal their money, or their tools, and probably can’t steal their clients. But you can steal their skills.

Henderson doesn’t say much about his personal life, except for one important anecdote. Soon after his marriage, his brothers-in-law move into their apartment and proceed to sponge off them. He has to give his wife an ultimatum that either they leave or he leaves; she agrees, and orders them out. I found this to be important to the story, because as a child he sees his father do stupid things and his mother get treated badly. He says to his wife “I’m on parole and I can’t have marijuana in the house.” He’s finally grown up enough to put his foot down.

Cooking in restaurants is probably a great job for kids who can’t sit still. Unfortunately the training has to be paid for and few public schools have a really good culinary program. Henderson got his for free, but unfortunately he had to be in jail first. Marcus Samuelson got his free of charge, because in Sweden there are great trade schools. Here in the USA, the trade high school got killed by political correctness. Tell a kid he should forego college to become a chef, and his parents will scream bloody murder.

Something tells me that if Jeff Henderson had pursued a career in cooking while still in high school, he would never have gotten into drug dealing.