I dropped out of culinary school the quarter before the bakery rotation. Some students called it the “bacation” because it was comically chiller than culinary. Nobody yelled, there were no ticket times, and you ate cupcakes. I could have used a good bacation. I had started resenting a lot about school: the culture, curriculum, and classmates. Seeing those happy, cupcake-filled pastry students irritated the hell out of me. So, like a balm on my burns, I started calling them pastry babies. Never to their faces, just in rage texts to the few friends I kept in touch with back home.

I would soon eat my words.

One of the first things we learned in school was the brigade system, the holy hierarchical structure gifted to the culinary world by a god risen from the French military. I was an easy convert. I took my soldiering very seriously and wanted to be seen as a hard worker dedicated to my craft. If I did as I was told, I knew I’d be regarded as a great chef one day.

Not everyone felt this way, though, and it drove me insane. Classmates showed up out of uniform, questioned our chef’s method for cooking steak, skipped online quizzes, or forgot their knives. I was constantly frustrated with their lack of discipline and how it disrupted the class. We’d devolve into chaos so often that we had to skip entire subjects and cooking demonstrations. We had only so many hours in the kitchen to organize ourselves into cooks cooking things before we had to wash our scorched pans and get upstairs for lectures about sustainability or social media.

Culinary and pastry students attended afternoon lectures together. The pastry students would always sit in a cozy cluster, brown bags and boxes stacked and spilling over their desktops. They baked baguettes and boules daily and took the extra misshapen ones home for themselves. More than once, they had full cakes in tow or were forking pieces of pie or tarts into their faces as I brushed past to take my seat. They had their chef whites unbuttoned and their hair down, fully unbothered and relaxed after a day of rosette piping and sugar dusting. The skin up to my elbows stung and cracked from sanitizer chemicals, and the high collar of my sweaty chef coat pressed uncomfortably into my throat. The agitation kept me awake in the darkened room while we rolled through slide after slide of food-safe temperatures and proper handling procedures. One by one, the pastry students folded over their desks and drifted off to sleep. By the end of one of these lectures and the pastry students’ sugarplum dreams, I had decided to drop out of school.

I was bent on not wasting another minute of my time, and a fine-dining restaurant was hiring brunch cooks. The property had Michelin keys and the restaurant James Beard awards, and they were eager to hire me. Line cooks just weren’t sticking around, and they needed someone solid. It felt serendipitous. Finally, someone would see how capable I am. However, my vindication for leaving school was extremely short-lived.

There was constant yelling. The expo, sous chef, tournant, or lead line cook was always shouting something vile at me, either for popping yolks, being a minute late, filling out the prep sheet wrong, or not echoing the expo. No one taught or mentored me to be a better cook. I had to learn through their verbal abuse what to do and what to definitely not fucking do. Randomly, the head chef would join service and just silently look over our shoulders, stir pots, or study our board. He once spotted me tossing a wrapper greased with butter remnants. “No, no, no,” he chastised me. He reached into the trash and locked me in his cold, dead stare as he scraped a gram of butter off the wrapper.

“We buy the expensive butter here,” he said.

Every shift, I was either spat at or iced out with silence. I finally gave up and gave my notice. Two days into my two weeks, the sous chef kicked me off my station for good. I had left a plate warming in the oven for too long but plated it up anyway. She nearly dropped it to the floor when grabbing it from the pass. I apologized and started to replate, delicately tipping the eggs. Furious and impatient with me, she ripped both plates out of my hands, chucked the eggs on the new one, and sent the slop into the dining room. I froze in a final defeat. Another line cook shooed me into the walk-in to cry out of sight.

I was sent to prep to cut carrots until the head chef arrived for evening service. Roll cut after roll cut and existential thought after existential thought, I was quietly interrupted by someone’s tattooed hand extended out over my cutting board. We shook, and she invited me to talk outside.

She was the pastry chef, but we’d never met before. The pastry department was in a separate building, and I’d only ever seen glimpses of the chef or cooks when they wheeled in a speed rack of croissants and desserts before service. They were always quiet, had green hair, and wore horror movie merch. I awkwardly avoided eye contact at the picnic table outside. Her warmth and openness made me squirm. I didn’t know how to act in the absence of hostility. Instead of quitting, she offered to transfer me to the bakery. I told her I didn’t know anything about pastry and that I had dropped out of school before I had the chance to learn.

She leaned in and said she’d teach me.

The bakery was a tranquil dream compared to the line. It was surrounded by rose gardens and fountains and guarded by peacocks and geese. All day, we listened to indie pop, drank iced lattes, and ate misshapen chocolate croissants. We were a small team of misfits and worked independently on the pastry requests from the kitchen: lemon curd, semifreddo, brittle, truffles, chocolate sauce, cream puffs, caramel, pistachio croissants, ice cream, meringue, quiche, granola, jam, crackers, shortbread, and scones. They were excellent cooks, teaching me why my caramel crystallized and my croissants were over-proofed, the difference between a wiggle and a jiggle, and how to fix lumpy pastry cream. I was encouraged to learn everything, and my spectacular failures were nearly celebrated; I’d get it next time. I often wondered how similar school bacation was to my job. Would I have enjoyed it as much as my job or become friends with the students as I have with my coworkers? Would I have admitted I called them pastry babies? Will I ever confess to my coworkers as much?

The bakery was modestly efficient. We shared a prep table and quietly danced around each other as we glided between our bowls, scales, and the flour bin. Some days vibrated with urgency to complete everything before dinner service, and others sang with the most unserious of conversations and laughter. A couple of months into my switch to pastry, we were staggered around the table, rolling truffles, cutting crackers, and whipping ganache. We had all just taken turns sharing what fruit we’d be when someone switched gears and asked us about the happiest moment of our lives. The question was asked lightly and joyfully, but we were each quiet with consideration before answering. Our lead pastry cook broke the ice with the time she bought her house; another cook shared the time her long-distance boyfriend surprised her. I could feel I was next. Earlier, I had confidently said I was a cherry, definitely a cherry, but I struggled to pinpoint when I had felt happy. I explained that I couldn’t really parse out my individual happiness in all my memories. I just kept thinking about the happiness I felt when other people were really happy, like when my sister had her daughter or when my swim team won the championship.

The cook who posed the question stopped cutting crackers and asked if I felt I needed permission to be happy. Words caught in my throat. I stammered my reply, saying that what would make me really happy is being seen and understood, and yeah, sometimes I feel like I need permission to be myself. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever been seen for who I was, if I’d been permitted happiness. I feared I had killed the mood. She smiled, unfazed.

“Well, you look happy here.”

The bakery went quiet. I cracked a smile and an awkward laugh. Her reply was a life preserver, thrown to me in the deep end of my feelings and worries. At once, I felt a glut of safety, laughter, kinship, and belonging covered in sugar and piped rosettes. I had once harshly rejected pastry, seeing it as a soft discipline for soft people with bleeding hearts. Standing in the bakery, I realized they were the only ones who saw me and appreciated me, who were as serious and as soft as me. I realized that all along, I was a pastry baby, too.

My eyelids stung from the salt of my tears. I stepped into the walk-in to cry out of sight. I leaned against the dairy shelf as my face flushed red. I grabbed two cold butter blocks—the expensive kind—and pressed them into my neck against the hot pulse of my bleeding heart.

Pastry baby

Stone fruit