The Culinary Institute of America does not appear in many memoirs written by young Trinidadian women. Brigid Washington’s Salt, Sweat & Steam changes that, and the perspective changes everything.
Washington takes readers through America’s most elite culinary school with the eye of an insider and the distance of someone who knows she was not the intended student. She edits the school newspaper, interviews Jerome Bocuse, Daniel Boulud, Thomas Keller. She sweats the line.
Jessica B. Harris calls this book “a welcome addition to the list of coming-of-age tales,” and she is right, but it is more precisely a Devil Wears Prada for the brigade system — a book about what it costs to earn admission to a world that was not designed for you.
The perfect mise en place. In the kitchen and, eventually, out of it.
