Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Army, short for 'army cook', or the classic but elegant shoe, short for 'shoemaker', are the perennial insults for a lousy or 'slophouse' cook.

is chopped parsley. Jiz is any reduced liquid, like demi-glace. When one adds whole butter to jiz, one is mounting, as in monter-au-beurre.

Cachundo, meaning 'piece of ass', might be applied to a particularly homely runner. Caliman, meaning 'strong man', is reserved for a weak cook, Rayo, or 'flash' to a slowpoke; Baboso, or 'drooling idiot' to, well, any drooling idiot. Any

Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London is invaluable. As is Nicolas Freleng's The Kitchen, David Blum's Flash in the Pan, the Batterberrys' fine account of American restaurant history, On the Town in New York, and Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel. Read the old masters: Escoffier, Bocuse et al as well as the Young Turks: Keller, Marco-Pierre

Assume the worst. About everybody. But don't let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off your back. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious and corrupt asshole shouldn't prevent you from enjoying their company, working

A cook might ask for an all-day, a total number of a particular item both ordered and fired, with temperatures, meaning degrees of doneness.

Red wine, beef, some button mushrooms and a few pearled onions, bouquet garni, maybe some broad noodles or a simple

Order!, when yelled at a cook means 'Make initial preparations' such as searing, half-cooking, setting up for finishing. Fire! means 'Finish cooking' and get ready for 'pick up'.

'Have you seen this foam guy's shit?' I asked, talking about Ferran Adria's restaurant of the minute, El Bulli, in Spain.