3/100 - Meez
“Mise-en-place is the religion of all good line cooks. Do not fuck with a line cook’s ‘meez’ — meaning his setup, his carefully arranged supplies of sea salt, rough-cracked pepper, softened butter, cooking oil, wine, backups, and so on.”
Within 20 minutes of coming up with this idea for a blog post while cooking my lunch, I listened to an episode of Seth Godin’s podcast Akimbo when he brought up the idea of mise-en-place as an example of how to use placebos on yourself.
Mise-en-place isn’t a placebo. Have you ever been in the shit as Anthony Bourdain and countless others have called it? You are a cook in a restaurant kitchen, the exhaust fan over the french top is broken. The Algerian Chef de Partie is threatening to kill the French head waiter. Within the next hour and a half, you will have to prepare appetizers, soups, and desserts for 75 covers.
If at that point you realized that you forgot your mise-en-place and had to start chopping onions and parsley, you would be in the shit.
That was a description of my first job in England by the way, and I lasted less than a week.
So for a cook, perhaps having mise-en-place isn’t a placebo as much as a necessity. But maybe for a writer who isn’t about to have 75 people send in explicit orders for what you need to write, maybe it is.
What is your ‘meez’? A fresh cup of coffee or tea is typical for writers and artists the world over. Or something stronger. A sharpened pencil? A locked study where you spend each morning, as Thomas Mann spent his as I read in Florian Illies book 1913: The Year Before the Storm. I think developing a mise-en-place that is specific to what I need to do could help me work better in a lot of ways.
Is this your 'meez’?
this?
or maybe this?
Preparing your mise-en-place as a cook works so well because it fulfills so many functions. You are practically preparing for the days most busy period, but also tidying and cleaning your workspace. It is a warm-up of your knife skills similar to a musicians warm-up of practicing scales. It is easy. You have time. You can succeed because it is a necessary and achievable task. And if nothing else, at least you know where to begin.