BY DONNA COVRETT

The professional kitchen of any busy restaurant can be a grueling job, 12-18 hour days on your feet, multi-tasking at 60 mph in extreme heat. A trip to the bathroom becomes a holiday. You often arrive at work before your neighbor has made the stroll in his boxers to pick up the paper, and you typically return home long after he's said goodnight to the wife and Jay Leno. You either love this job or hate it: There's no middle ground. Fortunately, the culinary industry has a longstanding coping mechanism to deal with the demands of their exhausting jobs: juvenile humor.

I may be overstating when I describe it as juvenile. Most of the humor in kitchens where I worked actually hovered around pre-adolescent. For example, a certain well-known chef of a prominent four-star restaurant would strap a whole beef tenderloin in his pants (still in the shrink-wrap of course -- after all, he had to set good examples in hygiene) and casually work the line next to the newest member of the staff who wasn't onto him, hopeful of a sideways glance or two. That would lead him to innocently comment, "I saw the best movie last night! Lesbian Cowgirls Do Manhattan. Have you seen it? It's fabulous. I'm still hot thinking about it!"

His alternative approach was to fake a temper tantrum for some slight indiscretion, in the center of the kitchen where all could see. "You'll do it as I say because I'm the chef, and I have the biggest penis!" while theatrically swinging the tenderloin. Needless to say, we adored him.

My own form of stress-relieving juvenile humor doubled as a test for applicants for positions in our pastry kitchen. Central to this large, basement kitchen stood a behemoth, five-speed, 60-quart Hobart mixer used for massive quantities of bread doughs, cookie batters and the like. If you stood on the table next to this heavyweight appliance, you could hoist yourself up, lift a leg over and straddle it like a mechanical bull. Which was how we liked to use it. On the highest speed, "Iron Jack," as we fondly called the Hobart, would shake, rattle and roll, convulse, shimmy and groan under our "Yee-haws!"

Therapeutically speaking, it was like a giant vibrator: Even the wait staff would come downstairs for a quick ride on a stressful day. But Iron Jack's best function was weeding out the sissies when we were interviewing. Each job applicant was asked to take a ride as part of the interview process. Most refused, mumbling something about our mental condition or claiming to be late for a much more important interview. The few who did got the job.

I figured I could always teach someone how to melt chocolate or make croissants, but a sense of humor and fun is something you have to bring to the table yourself. With these qualities intact, you're more likely to cope when the kitchen gets hot.

E-mail Donna Covrett

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