Miles Collins

The worst shift in Southern Germany

Back to 1992 again and I am all things German, I sweat in German, swear in German, get shouted at in German and eat spatzle like a German. The summer is all but over, I am running the entremetier section and things are begining to look up, until I get the sunday shift that is.

Sundays are annoying in any kitchen regardless of the country, maybe it’s because it is a day of rest for everyone but catering staff, maybe it’s the inevitably cheaper menus, simpler dishes and bus loads of diners who would never eat in your restaurant on any other day. In England it is all about prawn cocktails, roasr beef and gateaux. Everyone wants to eat at two o’clock, the exact same time as your shift is supposed to finish and your paid work definately does.

Back to Germany and sundays meant a straight shift for one unlucky chef, normally a straight shift in a kitchen is akin to winning the euro lottery; something you dream of but never get, in this kitchen it was like losing the winning ticket.

At first I never had to do them, the chef liked to sleep in the afternoon and knowing I was in the kitchen armed with a knife and a cronic lack of German vocabulary wasn’t conducive to a peaceful sleep. As time went on and my Schwabish dialect improved and my German grammer slowly disintegrated I was dealt the 9-6 shift.

After a culinary battering at lunchtime the 9-6′er had to finish off the late desserts so the pastry chef could go home for two hours. In between the desserts the entire cooking area of stoves, ovens and bain maries had to be stripped and scrubbed. Above was a canopy which housed the extraction filters and these had to be removed and scrubbed whilst dancing on top of the red hot solid tops. This was grease and sweat personified, by 4.30 you looked like a Victorian lamplighter and the smell wasn’t much better either.

Before you started on the cleaning there was the small matter of making the spatzle. First of all you had to make the mix, I forget the measurements but it was something like sixty eggs, four big shovels of flour, a handful of salt and four jugs of milk to bind the lot together. Mixing it by hand was agony, I had arms like a Bavarian waitress after nine months of spatzle making. You would be up to your arms (literally) in this batter/wall paper paste when the waitress would bring a check on for a schnitzel or steak and getting the paste off your hands and cleaning the sink afterwards took longer than cooking the steak.

Traditionally you cook spatzle by putting the paste on a board and flicking it into boiling water with a scraper, the Schwabisch serve them as noodles rather than as dumplings so we had to push the mix through a mincer placed over a boiling bratt pan. Once the mix started to feed through the mincer you had to go like hell, the paste had to be cut at the right length, once in the water it musn’t be undercooked nor overcooked, once cooked it had to be shocked in ice cold water then transfered to another container and refrigerated. Whilst you were cutting the paste with one hand and scooping the cooked noodles out with the other, the bloody schnitzel cooking on the other side of the kitchen needed turning and Petra has forgotten to write the green salad on the last order. Meanwhile the clock is ticking, the filters need putting back and chef will be awake soon, I am so busy I cannot stop to admire the lovely Marie, a French beauty studying for a degree in mathematics in German. What a girl, I seduce her with my ability to boil edible glue and clean a splash back panel at the same time. I give her my moody James Dean look, I wipe my forehead with carbon covered hands and say ‘bonjour’, she’s never seen a French speaking Al Jolson before and runs off.    

Five past five and the chef is back, tired and grumpy. He inspects the filters, canopy, bain marie, the job lot. “Oh, you have missed a bit” he liked to say, just to see me get back on the stove tops whilst he turned them on full and watched my shoes melt. You had to stand to attention whilst he checked the lot, he and everyone else knew you were going straight to the pub so he made you sweat first.

Spatzle wasn’t all bad, I used to eat it every day, lunch and dinner. I would lift weights at the local gym and my Mr. Olympian diet of spatzle and beer saw my weight rocket, I went from Mother Theresa to Lou Ferrigno in nine months and never looked back. The extra bulk would come in handy for my next move; a lions den set in the tranquility of the English Lake District…..