Это предварительный просмотр рецепта "Over the hill at 30: Hungarian Goulash".

Рецепт Over the hill at 30: Hungarian Goulash
by Marla Nichols

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, David Chang and Anthony Bourdain "... emphatically agreed that if you’re over 30 and are just walking into a restaurant kitchen for the first time, you’re too old." In fact, they used the word "grandpa".

My parents were both college-educated and assumed that their daughters would follow suit and find work in a white collar field—for women of those years that meant teaching or nursing. By my third year in college as an English major, I wanted out—I loved reading and writing but teaching!? I gratefully married.

I was thirty-two when I started cooking in a restaurant and sure enough, I was older than anyone on the staff. I walked in to Sound Food because I needed a job and on Vashon Island in the 1970s, my choices were limited: I could sand skiis, press apple juice or work in the nursing home. I knew nothing about restaurants: seldom ate in one, knew no one who owned one, never thought about spending twenty years working in one. But within a few weeks of my starting day, I felt as if I'd come home.

In 1982 when Bob took a job in Los Angeles and moved south, I somewhat reluctantly followed. I loved Sound Food, considered the back kitchen to be my home and the staff to be my family. In 1982 as I walked up and down the side streets in Westwood looking for a job, I didn't realize how different these new restaurant experiences would be. Sound Food was always busy, had a large staff, and made almost everything in-house but LA restaurants were run by business men, staffed by competitive professionals, and filled with critical eaters.

The stakes had changed; what had not changed, was my age. Once again, I was the oldest person there—not only the oldest, but often the only female. But I had no career-directed agenda and posed no threat to the pecking order—I just needed a job. I quickly learned to keep my head down, my knives sharp, and work as hard or harder than anyone else. Eventually, I could have run any one of the kitchens I worked in. But then again, so could any hard-working dishwasher or ambitious prep cook. Due to the frequent swinging door exits of CIA-trained cooks, anyone who remained working long enough to learn the system, the management, and the menu could rise like tiny bubbles to the top of the glass.

At the end of the shift when the kitchen staff headed out the back door, I was the only one who didn't participate in "beer bowling" (chug one at the end of each frame), salsa dancing, the hot dog line at "Pinks", or an old-fashioned, LA-style carousing. Restaurant workers have a storied, well-documented ability to drink as hard as they work. How they got to work vertically the next morning was always a mystery to me. Anyways, I managed to work as hard and as long as the twenty/thirty year-olds, due in large part to my after work recovery period—quiet and at home.

Eventually gravity, bone loss, and common sense led me to turn in my kitchen towels. In memory of those over the hill years, here's an old, dated, but still worthwhile recipe from the 1953 edition of the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook.

Hungarian Goulash

Brown beef in hot fat; add onion and cook until golden but not brown. Stir in flour, salt, and paprika.

Add remaining ingredients. Simmer gently, covered, until meat is tender, about 1 1/2-2 hours.

Remove Bouquet Garni. Serve goulash with hot noodles.