Writing Sample

Introduction

“I don’t mind rushing into a burning building,” says Chase Wilson with a grin as she carefully sears a poblano chile over the flame of a gas range. “It’s putting dinner on the table for 14 people that gets my adrenaline going. That’s definitely the scariest part of the job.”

Chase, now in her third year as a San Francisco firefighter, is kidding, of course. But not entirely. When her monthly cooking shift comes up, she’s all business—her personal recipe notebook at the ready, her shopping list in order, the prep assignments doled out to anyone with time on their hands.

As she watches the chile blister and blacken, she runs through tonight’s menu. There’s a Mexican-style salad with a sour cream-cilantro dressing, slow-simmered pork in mole sauce, scratch-made black beans, Mexican red rice, and fresh, warm flour tortillas. And for dessert, she’s persuaded one of her colleagues to make a double batch of pineapple upside-down cake.

For some firefighters, kitchen duty can be fun. For others it’s a chore. Some see it as a chance to give something special to people they care about. And there are those—especially the first-year “probies”—who find it a little intimidating. But whatever else it may be, firehouse cooking is never taken lightly, and it is never just about feeding people.

After all, a firehouse isn’t simply a municipal institution—a garage for engines and equipment. It’s a house. And a house is a place where a family lives.

Sure, it’s a family of adults, some of whom may have just met each other. But it’s also a family of men and women who share a common desire to help people in trouble—a family that faces the possibility of unimaginable danger together every day. For a family like that, meals mean a lot. There’s no grabbing a yogurt for lunch or skipping dinner. Every day of the year at noon and 7:00 p.m., the firehouse family sits down around a single table. And at least once a day, if not twice, what they sit down to is an enormous, piping hot, deeply satisfying, home-cooked, special-occasion meal.

So what’s the special occasion?

“Look, you go out on a call, and you never know what you’re going to find,” says 25-year veteran Curt “Swoop” Nielsen. “So you live large, and you eat large. You want every meal to be really great, because any meal could be your last.”

And so it goes in thousands of firehouses all across the country, where firefighters generally work a 24-hour shift—a “watch”—from 8:00 in the morning one day until 8:00 the next morning. Three crews—A, B, and C watches—rotate in sequence with two days off between shifts.

Some days are slow, some insane. Some houses are sleepy, some intense. But there is one common denominator: During those 24 hours of working, waiting, sleeping, anxiety, boredom, laughter, and tragedy, there’s always lunch, and there’s always dinner.

Visitors are often surprised to learn that most fire departments have no official connection to the food firefighters cook and eat. There are no commissary kitchens, no professional cooks, no department policies dictating who cooks what and when. And perhaps most surprising of all, there is no budget for food. The firefighters pay for it out of their own pockets.

“It’s just like anybody going to work and bringing a bag lunch or dinner,” says fireboat pilot Bob Costa. “Only where we work, there’s a kitchen. Well, officially speaking, there’s a stove. Legally, that’s the department’s end of the bargain. The rest of the kitchen—and the food that goes in and comes out—that’s completely up to us.”

Most houses draw up a chart that assigns one person per watch the task of making both lunch and dinner for the crew on a two- to three-week rotation. That means planning menus, shopping, and cooking. Breakfast is strictly on-your-own and usually relies heavily on leftovers from the night before. Throughout the day, whoever has time on their hands helps with the cooking, and after meals, everyone but the cook does the dishes. At the end of the watch, the crew divides the grocery bill equally. Ten bucks usually covers lunch and dinner.

It’s about that simple, and it always has been. If you had a family of 14, you’d probably organize things in much the same way. And that’s what makes firehouse food so intensely personal, and so emotionally invested.

“What we do is nothing like institutional cooking,” says Trace McCulloch, a firefighter who used to work as a cook in several San Francisco restaurants. “It’s good home cooking, made with a lot of care, scaled up to feed a bunch of people.”

Of course, in San Francisco, “home cooking” has its own special meaning. After all, this is a famous food town. Between the star chefs, the high-profile restaurants, the specialty food shops, the year-round abundance of fresh ingredients, and the ethnically distinct neighborhoods—Hispanic, Asian, African American, Italian, Irish, Eastern European—cooking and eating around here can be pretty exciting.  And naturally, so is what goes on in the kitchens of San Francisco’s culturally diverse firehouses.

Walk into any of the city’s 42 fire stations, past the pristine engines and trucks, past the firefighters and officers filling out paperwork, answering the phones, working on equipment, studying for promotional exams, reading, working out, or simply hanging out. And as you reach the back of the house, the smells begin to surprise you.

There, in the open kitchen, amid the joking and ribbing and clanging of pots, you’re likely to find someone roasting whole heads of garlic; stirring tamarind paste into a pungent peanut sauce; slathering a whole side of salmon—a fresh chinook they caught the day before just outside the Golden Gate—with olive oil, lemon, and mustard; or pouring a steaming panful of polenta onto the counter to cool. Really.

It’s not unusual to see a fire engine double-parked outside the Liguria Bakery in North Beach, where, firefighters will tell you, you’ll find the best focaccia in the city. There are seafood wholesalers on the wharf, produce vendors in Chinatown, and meat markets in the Mission District that save the good stuff for their fire department regulars.

Sit down to dinner at a San Francisco firehouse table on a summer night, and you’re likely to be treated to grilled pork tenderloin served with spicy green beans with bacon. In the spring it might be prosciutto-wrapped asparagus, followed by cioppino, the famous San Francisco seafood stew, with chunks of Dungeness crab in the shell; or maybe Thai coconut chicken sprinkled with strips of opal basil, served over jasmine rice. On a foggy fall or winter evening, you might find a soulful skillet paella topped with steamed clams; or crisp-skinned rosemary-garlic roast chicken and red potatoes roasted with fresh mint. And any time of year, you’d want to be sure to save some room for desserts, which run the gamut from homemade cakes, pies, and cookies to Tiramisù.

Every San Francisco firehouse has at least one treasured recipe for Caesar salad (bottled Caesar dressing is unheard of) and at least one unique food tradition. Out at Station 12, near Golden Gate Park, the dinner table is set with a tablecloth and candles, 365 days a year. At Station 29 on Potrero Hill, the crew chipped in to have their old oven door enameled in fire-engine red with gleaming brass trim, by the same body shop that does the department’s trucks. The fireboat house, Station 35, perched on Pier 22 1/2 along the Embarcadero, is famous among firefighters for its succulent “Chicken in a Barrel,” slow-cooked in a custom-made smoker fashioned from an oil drum.

Firefighters may not always be able to tell you where these traditions come from, but they honor them religiously and with unabashed pride.

And why not? Food brings people together. And great food, served with pride, holds them together. Firefighter Mike Guajardo sums it up this way: “These are the folks you live, joke, and work with under all kinds of conditions, and for good or bad, cooking for them is a way to show them what you think of them. Sometimes the firehouse is a hectic place. Other times the down time feels like forever, and the meals are what we have to look forward to. So I say, make them worthwhile each time. Everyone worth hanging out with will always be in the kitchen helping. It’s a bonding experience, and at the end of dinner the compliments let you know no one would mind if you cooked the next watch, too.”

The recipes in this book come from people like Mike, Chase, Bob, Trace, and Curt. More often than not, they were slipped to us in secret, faxed from home, recounted in confidence out by the back door of the station. Firefighters aren’t big on basking in the limelight. Their pride in their work—and in their cooking—is invariably tempered with humility. Praise is always deflected, credit always shared. As Mike says, “It’s a brotherhood thing.”

These are generous, honest, forgiving dishes—easy to prepare, easy to understand, and really easy to enjoy. But what makes them so special is that they’ve all passed the same test. They’ve all made people feel happy and helped them connect. This is the food that turns a firehouse into a family.

Somewhere in every firehouse in America, you’ll find a copy of “A Fireman’s Prayer,” a poem written years ago by a now-forgotten author. Like a favorite firehouse recipe, it’s been adapted, recopied, and revised over the years. But its simple spirit of generosity remains unchanged. The last verse reads,

And if, according to your will,
I have to lose my life,
Bless with your protecting hand
My loving family from strife.

That’s the real inspiration behind firehouse food. It’s the food of loving families.

We thank the firefighters of San Francisco for that inspiration, and we hope their food helps bring your friends and family together, too.