The Knife’s Edge

At the age of seventeen, Zac, a young criminal from Melbourne, Australia, has the alternative choice of leaving the young offenders institute and becoming a student of the Cook School, based far away on a farm in the Australian countryside. In the rehabilitation scheme, Zac chooses to say goodbye to the delinquent life of yesterday and decides to become the cook. This novel gives the how-to trajectory of the practice and mispractice of the dream of making haute cuisine food, including the hope of making money. To create the alien jargon, habits, and customs of culinary etiquette, the monologue tells in Zac’s teenage speak of the sheer passion, dirty concerns, and selfish motives. The motto of the Cook School is “Power through service,” meaning that “[b]y subjugating ourselves we become strong.” As a servant in the kitchen, Zac must obey the undisputed authority of the Head Chef, represented by the Sous Chef Fabian, in order to become a great chef one day. This cool novel changes into hot fiction, sharpening the bloody knife of the cook’s ambition.

Sous Chef Fabian acts as the absolute chief concerning what happens and does not happen in the grotesque scenes of Cook School. He bewilders the young criminal Zac with the recipes of gastronomy. The students of the Cook School are “only thirteen now all boys no girls,” because it seems that “girls don’t make good chefs.” Fabian starts with the cultivation of the vegetable and herb garden. The cook’s activity is a return to real nature. Sous Chef interprets this return in the simplest and crudest way of killing “the beasts of the earth and the birds of the air.” For example, preparing the Niçoise salad, beyond the canned tuna, the cook collects in the garden plot the tomatoes, lettuce, and avocado. Making chicken soup means slaughtering and plucking the real bird itself from the chicken farm. Sous Chef Fabian’s choice of menu starts with “saltimbocca,” “carré d’agneau à la bonne femme,” or “lambs’ brain au beurre noisette,” and ends with “a fillet of fresh-caught rainbow trout wrapped in salted quail skin on a bed of slow-braised fennel in a lemon thyme consommé.”

The images on the cover page of The Cook show that bits of bacon, ham, spareribs, lard, or other pork cuts do not come from packets in the supermarket. The pork must first be slaughtered with the cutting edge of the kitchen’s knife. Zac and other students deal with the violent outburst of hunting, killing, skinning, and preparing the lamb, pork, cow, or rabbit, taken alive from the cattle outside to be killed in the kitchen. Imagine the first lesson of Cook School:

Terry [kitchen worker] untied the rope and lifted the lamb like a kid with a new puppy two arms under the belly out of the ute. He handed the rope to a guy called Daniel pale and twitchy that guy’s had drug troubles for sure. Take it for a walk said Terry go on walk it up and down. He made us all do this take the rope walk the lamb we all knew what was coming we weren’t stupid. Terry took out a knife from the front of the ute the blade all worn how many lambs must he have killed with that? Bring it here he said to Luke the dumb-faced kid the last person with the rope bring it over here he was pointing to a spot on one side of the shed we could see the ground stained with old blood. He had a dish like the ones to drain sump oil into he set it on the ground. Over here he said and he took the rope the lamb knew what was coming fear in all the genes it started pulling twisting its head digging in its heels.

Come on little fella said Terry which only made it worse some of the kids were thinking about their baby brothers or sisters I was thinking...