The Slaying of the Yabbies

BY LUCY FRIEDLAND

The author overcomes repulsion and trumps her fellow students.

I have no business being in culinary school. I’m slow, clumsy, uncoordinated. Not chef material. Here I am anyway, slogging through a Commercial Cookery course in Sydney, Australia. We’ve covered soup through dessert in just ten weeks, skipping over the main courses. But now the party’s over. No more frilly stuff like canapés and Chantilly cream. We’re in the throes of the Fish and Shellfish module. Crustaceans are on the menu, and we’re staring down a tub-load of live yabbies.

So far, the seafood module has been less distressing than the previous one, Hot and Cold Desserts. By and large, fish dishes don’t collapse, as do soufflés and Bavarian creams. The slumping mounds I presented as Bavarois Rubane didn’t earn me top marks on the desserts exam. I have yet to master gelatin. Tricky stuff—gelatin.

For most of the modules, we’ve had no time to make anything more than once, but during the Fish and Shellfish module, we’ve practiced filleting in a few consecutive classes. I’m more skillful now, using the slender filleting knife to glide along a fish’s skeleton, neatly separating flesh from bone.

I’m apprehensive, though, about the crustacean portion I’ve spent enough time around prawns to know I don’t like them. After backpacking in Asia for a year, I found myself in Malaysia apprenticing with a Chinese chef. Grilled tiger prawns were one of his specialties. That apprenticeship lasted all of two months.

Prior to coming to Sydney, I had “volunteered” on and off at other restaurants in Malaysia. Mostly off. In order to get a decent—and legal—restaurant job, I would have to earn a chef’s qualification. I visited a couple of Malaysian culinary schools. One of them wouldn’t enroll a foreigner, and the other required non-Moslem cookery students to take a course in Moral Studies. I couldn’t stomach that, so I decided on a culinary school in Sydney instead. Why a Sydney school? As they say in Malaysia, it was cheap and good.

The Australian yabby is the subject of today’s shellfish class. Yabbies are a type of crayfish that grow to roughly six inches in length, with longish tails and claws. I’m hoping they’ll be less nasty to prepare than prawns. After only five minutes of peeling prawns, my fingers start to itch. Mantis shrimp are another nightmare. They have grasping front legs that clasp at their chests, like praying mantises. In my book, prawns and shrimp are the roaches of the ocean, gobbling up refuse that more dignified sea creatures wouldn’t touch. I’ve come to loathe their wiggling legs and waving tentacles. Live or dead, shrimp give me the willies.

The teacher, Chef Richard, begins the yabby demonstration as a dozen students in white jackets and toques gather around his stainless-steel worktable. He’s standing beside a large plastic tub he just removed from the refrigerator. Reaching into the container, he grabs one of the critters by its back and holds it aloft.

“What we have here, class, are live yabbies. They’re like miniature lobsters, but they live in fresh water. We are not going to drop them headfirst into a pot of boiling water. No, no, no. Some chefs kill them like that; they drop yabbies directly into boiling water. But if you do that, you lose all that good yabby flavor. No, no, no. Place your chef knife between their eyes and push down hard, one time. Slice neatly through their brains before cooking them. It’s much more humane that way. They die a quicker death.”

The chef puts four yabbies on his chopping board. Snicker-snack, he makes a quick cut through each of the heads and slices each body in half from head to tail. Crunch, crunch. He scoops out the guts with a spoon. Once all our yabby bodies are halved, we are to sauté them for a couple of minutes, extract the meat from the shells and use the shells to make a cream sauce.

“I don’t want to see you boys torturing these animals,” added Chef Richard. “If you do, it will make me very angry.”

“Oh, no, Chef,” I tell myself faintly, “the torture is all mine.”

I’m thunderstruck. I had prepared for the day’s events by reading carefully over my lesson, as I do for every class, but nowhere in the terse description does it say we have to slay the yabbies. The recipe merely reads, “Cut the yabbies in half and discard the sac from the carapace.”

Despite my thorough investigation of the chef’s profession, nothing prepares me for tasks such as these. It’s dawning on me that just because I love to eat, it doesn’t mean I love to cook. And if you want to be a chef, you have to love to cook. You’re on your feet toiling away, for too many hours at a stretch, for too little pay to do it otherwise. In interviews, celebrity chefs claim to love what they do. At least the Western chefs do. All the Malaysian chefs I’ve met say they cook, not out of passion, but to survive. “Must cari makan, lah,” they say, which literally means, “Must search for food,” but with the broader sense of “earning a living.” Whether or not you enjoy killing or cooking live animals is irrelevant. Your livelihood may depend on it.

Storing the yabbies in cold conditions had put them in a sedated state, but when Chef Richard took the tub out of the fridge, the beasts had awoken from their slumber. The yabbies remained tranquil for the chef, but by the time I come to collect my yabbies from the tub, they’d revived in the warm kitchen air. They’re starting to panic. They’re doing their yabby dance of fear, curling and uncurling their tails and flailing their claws. What a horror show. It’s like a Chinese dragon dance; only these dragons are live and lunging for fingers, not pearls.

The chef gingerly picks up three and puts them on a plate for me. He starts reaching for more, but I say, “That’s O.K. That’s enough, Chef, thank you. That’s enough!” I take the plate over to my chopping board and look down at the yabbies kicking and flopping. Suddenly, I start to scream. As soon as I hear the noise coming out of my mouth, I shut myself up. It’s too late. I’ve humiliated myself.

I run the crawling plate back to the fridge and shove it inside. I slam the door shut so hard the fridge starts rocking. To steady the tall silver box, I spin around and push my back up against the door, my arms fully extending from both sides. I stand there quaking, drawing and expelling huge breaths. The fridge door is the sole barrier between those monsters and me.

Where did I get the crazy notion I could even be a chef? Somewhere in India. After a twenty-year career in publishing, I became restless and quit my job in the States to travel. During the trip, it had seemed that I wasn’t traveling so much as eating my way around Asia. Sightseeing was secondary to finding good food. If I found something delicious to eat for lunch or dinner, then the day was a success. Food was my true calling. In India I met a couple of Western chefs who had it made. They were in demand. They could choose when and where to work and take time off to travel in between cooking gigs. They were happy and free.

Couldn’t I do that, too? I had never shown the slightest predilection for cooking, but maybe I had never given it a fair shake. As a child, whenever I would wander into the kitchen to see what my mother was up to, she’d say, “Get out of here. Go read a book.” So I would. The kitchen remained terra incognita to me.
I should have known early on that cooking isn’t my forte. At age sixteen, I was fired from a deli for failing to cut the signature strawberry cheesecakes into twelve even pieces. When my first Malaysian chef stopped speaking to me, I found other, more patient chef-mentors. Even under their tutelage, I can’t say I’ve improved much.

Now, it’s halfway through the semester, and I still have grave doubts about my culinary aptitude. I don’t advertise the fact that I have restaurant experience. If I did, my classmates would wonder why I’m so poky. I bring up the rear in nearly every class. During the exams at the end of each module, I complete my dishes a good fifteen minutes after everyone else. I sweat out my last presentation, racing back and forth between my stovetop and workbench, as the other whitecoats finish cleaning the kitchen around me and sashay out the door.

I imagine that the other students have the right stuff. They must’ve been cooking since they were old enough to peek over the edge of a chopping board. They probably wielded huge cleavers in their chubby little hands and mastered precision cuts quicker than most humans learn to use a remote. Before entering culinary school, they probably hosted gala garden parties for their families and friends. They would have heaved whole pigs onto spits to roast, while stirring great gallons of barbecue sauce in enormous pots. Their sated guests would have run their thumbs around uncomfortably tight waistbands, leaned back in their chairs and declared, in whatever language, “That kid sure has a bright future ahead of him.”

Most of my classmates are from Asia and Europe. I’m the sole North American and twenty years older than almost everyone else. The largest contingent is the Chinese Indonesians. There are three of them. They break off into jovial huddles, cracking jokes in Indonesian. I envy their camaraderie. I can’t relate to the sulky German woman who’s the only woman in the class besides me. David—a Jewish, white South African—offers moral support when it’s painfully obvious I’m lagging behind.

Unlike me, most of my classmates already have part-time restaurant jobs in Sydney. Robi, one of the Chinese Indonesians—and the tallest Chinese guy I’ve ever met—is the most accomplished cook. He’s been apprenticing at an Italian restaurant for three years. Tareq, a Bangladeshi, works fast and smart. He’s a commis cook for a yacht club. Pachi, from the Canary Islands, is working front-of-house, as a waiter and a maitre d’, but he’s a natural in the kitchen and never loses his cool in class.

As I stand there trembling, splayed across the refrigerator, I suddenly remember I’m not alone. How are these culinary prodigies handling their yabbies? I quickly scan the kitchen. Despite my outré behavior, no one is looking at me. Most of the whitecoats are looking down at their chopping boards with impassive expressions. Some are already at the stovetops with their extinguished yabbies, firing up their saucepans. No one is screaming or gesticulating wildly. No one is storming the exits. Peace prevails in the room.

Where the hell is Anica? Where is that miserable German girl? How is she coping? Recently, she announced that she detests commercial cookery and that next semester she’s going to switch to Web design. She’s only eighteen, but she has more sense than I have. She’s not here. She’s conveniently absent on Crustacean Day.

I can’t get out of the slaughter. No one comes to my rescue. Chef Richard doesn’t say, “That’s O.K., Lucy, you don’t have to do it. Ask one of the boys to kill them for you.” I fight to regain my breath, realizing I have to go through with the deed. A real chef would not waver. A real chef would do it and do it fast. I push back my revulsion, turn and open the fridge door. I won’t look at them. I just won’t look. I grab the plate and rush it back to my cutting board. I had thought that if I put them back into the fridge, they would settle down. They’re still riled, but a little less so than before.

I run over to the paper-towel dispenser, yank a few sheets and run back to my cutting board. I cover one of the bodies with a paper towel, leaving its head exposed. I pick up my chef knife. My hand is shaking so hard, I might as well be clutching a chainsaw. I bring the knife down over and over, until I make mincemeat of the head. Then I quickly cover the next body and whack at the next head. Then, the third. Paper towels off. I sever the remaining bodies in two while they’re still convulsing. It takes the rest of my will power to keep from bursting into tears.

I’m way behind everyone else—as usual. I run the mutilated yabbies over to the stovetop, slap them into a pan with sizzling butter and fry their still twitching bodies until they turn pink and die for good.
The weekend comes and goes, and my composure returns. We’re back to fish for the next couple of classes. At lunch break, I make a point of heading over to the canteen to find my classmates. Usually by the time I clean up my workbench, I don’t have enough of a lunch break left to buy food at the canteen. I’ll eat a sandwich I bring from home in the quiet of the women’s locker room. But, today I have to find out if there’s any fallout from the yabby debacle. Robi, Pachi, Jimmy, and a couple of the others are seated at a picnic table in the courtyard outside the canteen.

I join the table, unwrap my sandwich and ask as casually as possible, “Hey you guys, what did you think of Friday’s class?”

“What was Friday’s class?” asks John-Paul, the Dutch guy.

“You know...the yabbies.” I look around at their faces. They glance at each other and shrug.

At last, David, the South African, turns to me and says, “Once you put those yabbies in the fridge, I never thought you’d take them out again. I don’t blame you. Killing those things was distasteful. Then again, I don’t like seafood, any seafood.”

I check out Robi. “What about you, Robi? How’d you do?

“No way, I had Pachi do mine.” Pachi? How’d he get away with that? I look at Pachi. He purses his lips together and blows out a pppfft of air.

“Nada, No big thing.”

“How many did you kill?” I wonder if he had killed the yabbies for all four students at his workstation without Chef Richard noticing.

“I don’t know, lots of them.”

I let it drop. Later, after class, I mull over Robi’s confession. Astounding. A Chinese couldn’t go through with the slaughter. Aren’t the Chinese second only to the Japanese in their fetish for fresh seafood? Aren’t Chinese chefs famous for yanking whole, live fish out of tanks and butchering them to order? A Chinese with three years restaurant experience—O.K., in an Italian restaurant—couldn’t kill a puny yabby? At least I didn’t hand off my yabbies to someone else to kill. Does this mean I have the mettle to be a chef, after all? If I do, then why am I such a nervous wreck in the kitchen? This whole cooking venture has been more harrowing than gratifying.

If I give up on being a chef—if I throw in my tea towel—I’ll spare other living creatures, and myself, further torment. Maybe I can be a vegetarian chef someday. I have a better rapport with plants than animals, anyway. There’s no chance of exploring that now. The Meat Butchery modules—beef, veal, pork, and lamb—follow in the wake of Fish and Shellfish. I’ve been dreading those meat modules. For lamb butchery, we have to hack apart a whole side of lamb.

I console myself that at least the lamb will already be dead.

Lucy Friedland abandoned her brilliant surfing career (see Travelers’ Tales Australia) for another dubious career as a cook. She did finally earn her Commercial Cookery Certificate I in Sydney, Australia. She returned to Malaysia and worked for three years at a South Indian vegetarian restaurant as a kitchen helper. She also assisted with the startup of Ecco Cafe in Penang, which specializes in homemade pasta and pizza. She has since quit the kitchen and spends her time writing, editing, and eating.

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