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Today’s newsletter is the latest in my memoir series and I’ve honestly been looking forward to writing this one for months.

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Thanks for reading,

Wil

Part 21: Death of the Spiskrigare

It was in 2018 at a restaurant called Oaxen Slip that I first heard the word spiskrigare.

My Head Chef, a great cook and thoroughly hilarious man named Rune, was the one I heard say it. It became clear that this “spiskrigare” (speece-kree-guh-reh) was a person of some sort. And everything Rune said about him implied he was a near-mythic culinary entity.

But what is a spiskrigare?

The word itself is Swedish and simple to translate. Spis means kitchen stove. And krigare means warrior. A spiskrigare is, in as much, a “stove warrior”.

But just as a flâneur is more than a “stroller” or “loiterer”, so a spiskrigare is more than just the cook who battles through service from behind a stove. To understand what a spiskrigare really is requires more than simple translation. And, though spiskrigares certainly exist elsewhere in the world, since the Swedes are the first I know of to have created a distinct label for this group, it’s the Swedish term I’ll be using today.

Firstly, all spiskrigares are restaurant cooks. But not all restaurant cooks are spiskrigares.

It isn’t a ranking title such as Sous Chef or Chef de Partie. It isn’t a label someone can ever actively claim for themselves. And nor is it really something you’d ever call to someone’s face. There’s enough negative about the term for it to be of at least some offence. But since there’s something romantic about the term as well (for certain types of cook at least) in the same way “scoundrel” or “pirate” is, it isn’t entirely an insult either.

Philosophy of the Spiskrigare

Being a spiskrigare is a way of life. One does not wake up and decide to become one. It is the result of years of toil and hardship. Of disappointment and frustration. Put simply, the spiskrigare is a battered soul. They have been working in restaurant kitchens for years. They have seen their goals, if they ever had any to begin with, first go unmet, then given up on entirely.

This being so, the spiskrigare is normally at least in their late thirties. And for all the years he has spent in professional kitchens, the one he has at home is barely worthy of the name. He makes do with no more than a microwave, a toaster, and, nowadays at least, a food delivery app.

He enthusiastically covers whatever he does eat at home in ketchup and violently spicy hot sauce. Partly because his palate has been numbed by endless cigarettes and/or chewing tobacco. Partly because he simply wants to feel something other than loneliness come the end of the day.

Much as this writer passionately opposes traditional gender norms in the professional kitchen, the spiskrigare is almost certainly a man. You may have guessed that already though. And this is in part a consequence of his severely lacking inter-personal skills.

Relationships of the Spiskrigare

The spiskrigare naturally hates everybody. This extends to the annoying stagiaires and commis chefs who insist on asking him questions, all the way up to the restaurant managers, head chef, and, most of all, the restaurant owner.

In fact, he particularly hates the owner.

One reason he hates everyone so much is because it is these people that cause the one thing the spiskrigare loathes more than anything else: change. Having no long-term career goals, the only goal left for him is to get through the working day as quickly and easily as possible.

This is why the spiskrigare loves routine so much. But only his routine. When someone comes along to alter that which he has mentally prepared himself for, be it his prep list added to because a commis couldn’t find a potato peeler, a new special appearing on the menu because there was a discount on cod heads that week, or the owner deciding kitchen staff have to help serve dishes to create “an experience” for the guests, the spiskrigare considers it an unforgivable personal attack.

This is why he takes such pleasure in other people screwing up. The sight of a commis pulling a tray of burned hazelnuts from an oven for example or, even better, that of a pot of cream boiling over, is like Christmas and a birthday rolled in to one for the spiskrigare.

As long as it isn’t his stove the cream was boiling on.

But more than anyone the spiskrigare hates the customer. These are the people who really get in the way of his routine. If the spiskrigare had it his way, his entire job would be nothing but prep. All day every day would be spent ticking the same jobs off his long prep list.

To him, the restaurant guests with their “dietary requirements”, their “sauces on the sides”, their entirely selfish desire to “have a pleasant evening”, just gets in the way of his real work of prep.

Good, reliable, routine prep.

Skills of the Spiskrigare

For all that seems objectionable about the spiskrigare, no one can deny his ability. His many years of work and commitment to getting through the day as quickly as he can has left him a master of efficient cooking, with a range of pragmatic skills that any cook would benefit learning from to some degree.

A few examples of what you could expect from a spiskrigare:

• He always grabs the required butter straight from his butter tray with his fingers if no implement is available in the moment.

• He always cleans the customer’s plate with his charcoal-stained grill cloth before sending it from the pass.

• He only uses a food processor to cut his brunoise because, as he would gladly tell you, “it all ends up the same in the end”

• He has no problem giving the 10-year-old restaurant sourdough starter a “vitamin boost” of commercial yeast when he deems it necessary

• A split hollandaise is no match for him, a stick blender, and a cup of cream

• If an order for a well done ribeye comes in ten minutes before closing, he will happily ask “Chef Mike” to take care of it for him

  • Note: Chef Mike is commonly known as a microwave

• He always tastes with his fingers.

In fact, there is no tool like the finger for a spiskrigare. He certainly has no time for such things as meat thermometers, the use of which he considers “effeminate”. He prefers to rigorously prod and poke steaks, for example, to judge their level of doneness.

Despite his dated mindset (see two sentences ago), the spiskrigare is the one you go to if you need a solution on the fly. They have the experience and “out there” pragmatism to help get the job done when you or the rest of the team are “in the shit”.

I have a suspicion that such techniques as poaching things in a plastic bag (sous-vide), and cooking things in a low oven ahead of time before frying them for service (reverse-searing) must have all come from the mind of a spiskrigare following some unknown kitchen catastrophe that required a weird fix.

Lonesome Death of the Spiskrigare

In Down and Out…, the memoir in which George Orwell detailed his life as a kitchen worker in 1920s Paris, Orwell said:

“the conditions behind the kitchen door were suitable for a pigsty… The dustbin used to be crammed full by midday, and the floor was normally an inch deep in a compost of trampled food.”

The spiskrigare would feel at home in such a kitchen.

But Orwell’s kitchen was of the 1920s. And in my years as a restaurant cook, I think almost as much time was spent cleaning as cooking itself, even mid-service. And with the increasing sterility of the restaurant kitchen, the “spiskrigare way” has become ever more outdated.

In a world that demands dishes executed according to stringent guidelines, and even caloric limits, his laissez-faire pragmatism just no longer fits.

He is no bigot, he hates all equally. But in an industry striving for better representation, standards, and wellbeing, the spiskrigare will always be found a little wanting.

I share these words as neither lament nor ode. I simply hope they might be a record of what he was and what we might learn from him worth knowing.

And, if one thing more, I hope to remind you that somewhere out there, somewhere in the history of great meals you have enjoyed, at least some of them were made possible because of a tired and hopeless, loveless and unloved spiskrigare. A spiskrigare who went home that evening to a container of microwaved ramen that he covered in hot sauce and non-brand name ketchup.

With his time passed, I ask you to remember him.

Thanks for joining me this week. Please do click the heart/like button if you enjoyed our little journey into the world of the spiskrigare.

See you next time,

Wil