Like a puff pastry, the recipe of How I Learned to Cook is a deceptively simple one: ask 40 legendary chefs how they learned to cook. Immediately, the answers break down into a couple of archetypes. While some, such as the stories of Hester Blumenthal or Chris Bianco, fit the "and that's when I realized what real cooking was" mold, by far the more interesting ones are those that capture the sheer insanity of a kitchen. It is from this infernal chaos that most chefs emerge.

Tellingly, when asked for their most formative moments, a large percentage of the chefs relate some variation on "grills gone wild": Jonathan Eismann found his cook holed up in the bathroom with "a lit crack pipe in one hand and his dick in the other" during a slammed dinner service; Michelle Bernstein fucked up her boss' dinner at the illustrious James Beard house; and Tony Bourdain tore a filet of salmon on national television.

Cooking — at least professional cooking — is a lot like martial arts; often, these epic errors take place at the foot of a master. Many, if not all, of these chefs have one particular sensei in whose kitchen they learned the ropes, and under whose stern and sometimes explosive watch they grew into hardened culinary warriors. David Chang sat in a darkened room in Tokyo for days, making noodles no one would ever eat while his master demanded absolute devotion. Fourteen-year-old Daniel Boulud trembled like a willow under the withering rage of legendary chef Paul Bocuse before opening his own four-star New York City restaurant, Daniel, years later.

For most of us, cooking is, and should be, a relaxing experience.  For the chefs in this book, to step into the kitchen is to step into a war zone, complete with the threat of disaster, the adrenaline of battle, and, most importantly, the joy of cooking.

-Joshua David Stein