The Idler

Crepe

As I reached 17, my parents thought it would be a good idea for me to start to learn to ‘pay my way’. I applied for a vacancy advertised in the Kent Messenger classifieds for holiday work at a popular tourist attraction, you’ll know it, a castle sharing it’s name with a Yorkshire city.

I was interviewed by the head chef - the job: to be a sort of trainee commis chef. In the kitchen pecking order, I was to be one up from the ’special’ kitchen porters - I use that word advisedly, as ‘needs’ must.

I must stress that, unlike many of your crap jobs, it wasn’t my colleagues that were a problem. The boss was great and the other chefs, apart from a particularly fascist sous chef, were great fun to work with. In this instance, it really was the job that was crap. How apt, as I was to be the crepe chef.

I was to make crepes using two hot plates, some dodgy batter mix and an implement that resembled a wooden window squidgy. You may have seen this set-up in Britain, but you are more likely to come across it on the continent. Those continental experts pour just the right amount of mixture onto a sizzling round hob, swirl the squidgy so that the crepe forms an exquisitely thin, circular, no mixture over the edges, crepe, then prepare another on the adjacent hob and then turn them, fill with fillings and fold. Simple.

However, being a crepe chef combines the perhaps contradictory activities of cooking - a private, personal experience with occasional mishaps - and spectator sport. I had to cook with an audience. First time out.

If you’ve seen crepe making made to look easy, a trip to Leeds Castle crepe van in the Easter of 1993 would have rapidly disabused you of that notion.

For three harrowing days I slaved in that van, my 6′4″, spotty, skinny, 17 year old frame, bent over two sizzling hobs for eight hours a day. Always with an audience. Always with some smart alec kid pointing out the tears (and occasionally tears) in my oval, batter balls that I tried to cover with cheese and ham or chocolate sauce and banana. Attempting to master the correct pressure on the squidgy to make the crepe thin, but not too thin, to swirl at the right speed so batter mix didn’t spray the front row (although I admit, a few particularly irksome customers were treated to my fulsome apology: “I am terribly sorry, it’s only my first/second/third day…”).

And then, mid-way through my fourth day of living hell, I could do it. I swirled my wooden squidgy with aplomb, I started to show-off, seeing how quickly I could make them, delighting the crowd, stealing the odd line from TV magicians (”If you want a crepe? Say ‘Yes, Paul’”), doing two simultaneously, one with each hand, I’d got ‘it’, the knack, the trick. I could work in France and still impress the punters.

Did it make up for my three days of hell? Did it fuck. I was still hot, uncomfortable, poorly-paid and on my feet for eight hours non-stop (there was no room for a stool - the summer holiday seemed endless.) But I think the taunts and jeers, the mob cynically casting a wary eye over my inedible produce changed me. It gave me a lot of confidence in front of an audience. So perhaps I shouldn’t look back, with such shit-tinted spectacles. But be thankful for my crepe job.

Ben Roome