Very quickly I came to understand what T1 meant about the five minutes. Jobs like cleaning soft-shell crabs or trimming artichokes both took more than five minutes of any veteran cook’s time, but the point was that proper hustling addled the brain, causing a thirteen-hour day to fly by like a six-hour one, and each thirty-minute block to feel like five minutes.
The kitchen operated on a bunch of these different clocks, only one of which corresponded to Greenwich Mean Time. The synchronized cooking of each dish for each table was coordinated by shouting out the minutes to plating. Once a table was fired (“Fire Table 22!”), the meat roast cook called out his requirement (“Five away on the venison!”) and we all counted down from there. “Two on the squab!” the guy to my left shouted. “Two on the dorade!” answered the fish cook. These minutes did not correspond to the exact ticking seconds but to a shared feeling of the same imaginary descending time line. Nightly, fights sprang up over the accuracy of a cook’s minutes. (“Serge, dude, your two is more like six!”)
The point is, if you cook on the line for long, your personal time signature will change. It took about three months for my internal clock to flip over, but when it did, the time I spent cooking on the line slowed down and everything before and after sped up. My free time outside of work narrowed to a sliver—and even then, on the street or in the grocery store, I no longer just walked: I beelined, I took the turns tight, I dodged to the right, I foresaw the road ahead. Because once you’ve taught yourself to shave seconds off every task in order to be the most efficient, quickest cook you can be, it’s hard to stop. Like saving precious moments of life, that’s how essential it feels.
To me, time in the kitchen was like a loophole, a bubble, a cure. Once I found it, I crawled inside and told myself I never wanted to leave.
1
MY KITCHEN AFFLICTION
The place from which I’d come before cooking at Danube couldn’t have been any more different if I’d imagined it—and sometimes I think I did.
To trace my journey to that kitchen in backward fashion, you have to climb up into a twelve-foot U-Haul truck with me and my boyfriend, Aaron, a truck whose broken-down starter requires us to park each night on a downward-facing slope that will flip-flop-flip-flop the starter to life each morning and keep us driving…up, down, and around the tight hills of upstate New York; then along the thick blacktop artery that clings to the southern coast of Canada, stopping periodically—without cutting the engine—to pick up foam clamshells of fried perch-and-chips in the finger of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; across the stubby swamplands of Minnesota through ghostly towns called Ball Club and Remer and Federal Dam on thinning two-lane blacktop; all the way to the dead-end, minimum-maintenance road that leads us back to the house Aaron built in the Two Inlets State Forest. This tall, one-room log cabin was best known to others for what it lacked—running water, electricity, all modern amenities—but was to us our scrappy home of the past three years. This humble place of origin, whose housekeeping hardships we generally ignored, gives you a pretty good idea why it never occurred to us to return a rental truck with a nonworking starter.
Aaron and I hadn’t just driven a few thousand miles from northern Minnesota to Brooklyn; we’d also jumped forward a good hundred years. Our early life together was nothing if not a creative use of the time machine. At the house in the woods, we pumped water by hand from our own sand point well and hauled it into the kitchen in plastic jugs. We kept our meat cold on blocks of ice, lit oil lamps for light when the sun went down, and showered outside in the breeze. On the hill jutting out into a swollen creek, home to a crew of honking swans and a natural stand of wild rice that separated us from neighbors for miles, we basically lived on an island of the 1880s within a sea of the late 1990s. I liked to think of it as our own private epoch, but looking back, I’d say we pretty much lived in our heads.
I admit, when we first started dating—at ages twenty-four and twenty-one, respectively—and Aaron told me about his house I thought the whole enterprise sounded a little suspect. But that was before I came to understand his pragmatic optimism, his gift for turning flamboyant fantasies into realities that parade around the room as common sense.
Before we dated, I’d known of Aaron vaguely for years. He was my childhood friend Sarah’s unusual older brother, one of our hometown’s only ratty-haired punks, the sequin-caped lead singer of a glam rock band, and a sculptor. By the time I met him, he had graduated from art school in Minneapolis, was recently divorced from his high school sweetheart, and had moved back home to Park Rapids to build his house in the woods. He thought of himself as an old man and mockingly referred to himself as “retired”—a joke that hid a key shift of perspective. Going against the prevailing wind that nudged all artists toward backup plans, he reacted by throwing himself a retirement party and signing up for AARP. Making art would not be a secondary pursuit for him, but plan A.
And the new retiree was looking for a cheap retirement outpost. By building an off-the-grid house out in the country, he whittled his expenses down to nothing so that he could afford to work on artwork full-time.
That was the public story.
Privately, he also built the house because he was convinced that he was going to die. Only twenty-four years old but plagued with a bunch of mysterious physical symptoms (foggy thinking, odd blood tests, an unusual new tremor in his rib cage) he thought would kill him, he figured he’d better build the house he’d always dreamed of out on his family’s hunting land.
Later we’d find out this wasn’t just run-of-the-mill hypochondria talking, but instead the first bubble of a sedimentary anxiety—the artist’s malaise—to burst to the surface. His sensitivity was largely spatial, ticklish to place. Sprawling big-box stores with thrumming fluorescent lights, suburban houses with overly wide hallways, and blinding expanses of Sheetrock—those were bad. But a small, low-lit house with high ceilings and lots of head space out in the middle of the woods felt right.
Fortunately, his health problems faded as his house rose up. Without any power tools—just a shovel, a cordless drill, his grandpa Annexstad’s old Swede saw, and his own young back—he built his place right where his ten-year-old self had thought it should go: on a far hill overlooking the creek, miles away from the nearest electrical box, at the eighty-acre plot’s most scenic, most inconvenient spot. When he was done, he dug out a garden and planted a few lilac bushes and thought of it in the future tense, as a homestead—in the evenings, a dreamer’s somewhat lonely homestead.