Here at The Institute we pride ourselves on the wholesome, nutritious meals we provide our employees and the occasional guest. After all you can’t have productive employees if they’re half-starved, or worse, lying about writhing in ptomaine induced agony. That’s why we maintain the strictest regulations regarding food handling, cleanliness, and the washing of hands. You come into this kitchen you’re washing your hands, right now, no exceptions. It doesn’t matter if you’re just there long enough to deliver the DDT we use for insect and rodent control. We don’t care if you are Giada Di Laurentis, Bobby Flay, or even Rachel Whats-her-name, your hands are going right into the wash pot and getting a good scrubbing with Lye soap. Well there is one exception, Mario Batali, we don’t check him he always washes his hands. Mario Batali is to Italian food what Bill Clinton is To Truth, wait, wait, wait, I meant what Hillary is to Truth. NO, I meant what Leonardo is to Art, that’s the one  I wanted. My mistake Mario, I’m sorry I even linked those two with your name. Bill and Hillary shouldn’t even be in this post I was saving them for another post about people who lie a lot. Sorry.

The image above shows the section of the kitchen reserved for the creation of meals for our interns. We have 1100 to as many as 2200 interns at any one time working here at The Institute and it takes a high production kitchen like this one to turn out the number of meals we must produce every day. It shows the state of the art facilities we maintain for them and although it differs somewhat from the stainless Steel Über-kitchen we have for the paid staff, where it’s gleaming surfaces require sunglasses to even enter the place, it’s a darn good place to cook food. This kitchen has a homier feel more suited to the type of interns we wind up with. Some of them are still at the stage where most of the food they consume is done with their fingers. We withhold utensils to cut down the numerous dispensary visits we have due to fork/eye injuries, malicious use of spoons etc.

It takes a special cook to be able to excel in a kitchen like this one and we have the perfect person for the job. Award winning Clifton Malliuse Bertane, newly arrived from a halfway house in New Orleans where he was classically trained in the art of Rustic, Life-Sustaining, Seasonal Foraging style of cooking as performed for the various chain gang and other places of vicious incarceration. There he had been the head chef for the last 14½ years until his conditional release to us. Since his arrival he has transformed our kitchen into the unique place it is today.

 He arrived here with a few special kitchen utensils, mostly large wooden spoons, a tattered but stained apron and his bible as he calls it, the cookbook titled “Fun With Lard”. In many places lard has fallen out of favor with chefs and even some consumers but not here. Here we have a healthy robust Lard infused cooking that draws comments from anyone that tastes it. There is always a 25 pound tub of lard sitting next to the cook stove and it is used constantly, from frying those eggs in the morning, to deep-frying lampreys and other items you don’t want to eat boiled. Over the years Chef Bertane has found many other uses for lard.

First and foremost is its primary function as a cooking oil or paste but it also can be used for leather renewal, a wadding or chinking when mixed with ashes and clean dirt to chink the walls when necessary. It is a remarkable gel to put on unruly hair if you have to work out in the wind for any length of time. One large dollop rubbed into the scalp will lock that hair down tight, we mean tight, against your scalp. It is a well-known lubricant for anything that needs lubing. In fact it has so many uses we regularly run contests for the most unusable uses you can think of and you can bet we get some real doozies. First place wins a week of meals without lard for the most ingenious suggestions. We get literally thousands of them. This just shows how much people have come to love our lard based cooking.

In the near future we will show how the other half lives. You’ll get a peek at our staffs newly remodeled stainless Über kitchen, the dining hall with its art gallery, and our newly acquired Matisse. The personalized wait staff, three to each guest that consists of interns that were trainable and less violent than their peers. Plus many more eye-opening delights. Stay tuned.