Out of the Frying Pan

KITCHEN PRELUDE -- Pierre Hamp --Button ($2.50).

Pierre Hamp, proletarian (as opposed to propagandist) author, has had a queer and difficult apprenticeship in his profession. In Kitchen Prelude, the story of his youth, he tells what it was like to be a pastry-cook's helper in Paris, a chef's assistant behind such glittering faqades as Marguery's Restaurant and London's Savoy Hotel.

Hamp's father was a cook who liked his calling. Apprenticed in a Paris patisserie, young Pierre found the work hard and long, the food scanty. But he was a good worker, got ahead. Developing an understanding for the oven, he discovered that he could read while watching it and, un like King Alfred, not burn his cakes. When Anarchist Emile Henry's bomb exploded 50 yards from his cellar workroom (Feb. 12, 1894) it made Hamp begin to wonder whether he wanted to stay a pastry cook all his life.

He decided he did not, got a job at famed Marguery's Restaurant, and soon wished himself back in the patisserie. At Marguery's his principal job was shelling mussels to be used as trimming for the restaurant's specialty, filet de sole Marguery. When he got a chance to go to London and the Savoy, he jumped at it. His food and quarters there were so much better that he became discontented, thought again of Henry's bomb when he caught glimpses of the sleek diners in the grillroom.

When a Swiss fellow-worker bullied him, Hamp profited by the Anglo-Saxon atmosphere to take boxing lessons, bloodied the Swiss's nose. Hamp learned English, read whatever he could get. "I went through all printed scraps in lavatories--in fact, I owe a large part of my education to the w. c." The Dreyfus case, of which one of the results was a workers' free university at Belleville, gave Hamp his chance. He left England's kitchens, headed home towards a rosy future. "Dazzled by my imagination, I was heading for a poverty which would grow greater hour by hour, for I no longer earned my daily bread."

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