Work Clean by Dan Charnas Page A

of his office work was different; the values and habits would be just as transformative for his life. Can Jeremy become, in some way, more like Chef Pasternack or the cooks who work for him? Can he become, even though he is not an owner and entrepreneur, a kind of master—if not of the house, at least of his own space, his own schedule, his own work? What happens when you take mise-en-place out of the kitchen? What would the world be like if everybody had mise-en-place? And can you teach mise-en-place to people who aren’t chefs?
HONOR CODE
    Journalist and author Michael Ruhlman wished he were a better cook.
    Fascinated by the differences between home cooks and their professional counterparts, Ruhlman decided in 1996 to write a book about the process of becoming a chef. He convinced the administration of the Culinary Institute of America to let him enter as a student and follow most of the curriculum for the better part of a year along with a class of degree- and career-seeking candidates.
    In the book that resulted,
The Making of a Chef,
Ruhlman’s story built to a pivotal moment when a blizzard struck on the night before an important exam. Ruhlman lost control of his car on the snowy, icy drive back from school to the home he shared with his wife, Donna, and baby daughter. The next morning, snow still falling, Ruhlman phoned his chef-instructor Michael Pardus to tell him he thought the drive wasn’t worth the risk. He wasn’t a student, so he wasn’t obliged to take the exam. The chef replied with a civil but patronizing lesson about the difference between professional chefs and the rest of the world. His words answered the question at the core of Ruhlman’s quest:
Chefs “get there” no matter what.
    Mortified and indignant, Ruhlman started his car, drove through the storm, took his exam, and
aced
it. In that moment, Ruhlman reflected, he knew that he wanted to be a cook—not to forgo his career as a writer or make his living in a kitchen, but to live his life by the same
code
that cooks live by. In other words, to live by mise-en-place.
    After Ruhlman completed his reporting at the CIA and returned with his family to their home in Cleveland, Donna announced that they had only 4 months of cash left before they’d be, as Ruhlman says, “unable-to-pay-the-bills, lose-the-house, flat-out broke.” Ruhlman would only see money when he submitted his manuscript.
    Ruhlman had written books. Before his time at the CIA, he would have thought it impossible to finish one of this scope in 4 months.
    â€œBut I didn’t think like that anymore,” he says. “I had become a cook.”
    So Ruhlman began the kind of backwards planning he was trained to do at the CIA. His contract called for 90,000 words. He calculated that if he wrote 1,400 words, 5 days a week, revising on Saturday and resting on Sunday, he would have a book-length manuscript in 4 months.
    He stuck to his regimen at his desk as he would have in the kitchen—through holidays and illness and the daily challenges of marriage and childcare. And in the end he delivered the draft on time and secured his advance.
    â€œIt turned out to be a pretty good book,” Ruhlman says.
    Mise-en-place transformed Ruhlman’s life outside the kitchen. For a while he
ran
everywhere, trying to maximize every moment. But what Ruhlman retained from the kitchen was its sense of unrelenting honesty about time and space, success and failure. Good chefs and cooks feared and dreaded failure. Ruhlman determined that fear and anger could be healthy motivators, as they were a noble stand against laziness and entropy. Ruhlman worked in kitchens for a time after his stint in culinary school and saw people taking the path of least resistance every day, places where theydidn’t do things like they did at the CIA; where they boiled their stocks and let them get cloudy; where they put out sloppy plates and kept sloppy stations. If