Back: To the Bakery! When I didn't know what to do after a stint in a fancy restaurant thirteen years ago, I strayed across the culinary divide to the world of flour and butter, where we proudly cut with dull knives directly on metal countertops because a baker's phallic symbol of prowess is a perfectly crafted baguette. My first bakery was (and is) a nonprofit that trained immigrant women of color to be artisanal bakers, with English and computer classes to boot. They came from Mexico, Bangladesh, Haiti, Albania, Guatemala, Pakistan, Morocco, as well as one quite memorable Englishwoman. Colorful accents abounded as we ladies meshed our wildly different experiences and personalities.
I've been thinking about those women a lot the last couple of weeks as I again quizzically search the faces of my coworkers for clues to the garbled words that drift elusively past my ears, like a school of a thousand fish turning away at the last second, evading apprehension. Certain practices I take for granted in kitchens out me as not just foreign but almost extra-terrestrial -- or so it feels from the marked French reactions. Actually, it's not just kitchen stuff, but cultural differences in general, which really do shock. For example, the unlevel playing field when meeting people. The first week I was greeted by no one, not a soul came up to tell me their name or ask mine. I concluded that that must be normal, if disappointingly unwelcoming. Week two, a bread guy walks up and says, "Hey, why don't you say hi in the morning? Wave to us, come to the oven and ask how we're doing? We don't bite." Well sure. Maybe if anyone ever did, I would?
The work itself is pretty basic: decorating tarts with fresh fruit, making meringue to pipe in curlicues and singe, shellacking flan with preserving glaze, breaking down endless cardboard boxes. Little by little I progress, suppressing my Midwesterner's anxiety over perceived conflict when people yell at each other (jokingly...?) about little things, and cry out with the frequency and singsong of roosters, "Oh WHORE!" which to be fair is the equivalent of "aww, crap."
