At Six in the Morning I Light the Ovens in Someone Else's Bakery

The Keys on My Belt

I carry eleven keys on a ring clipped to my belt. None of them open anything I own. They belong to bakeries, a catering kitchen in Vaughan, and one small pizza place on Bathurst Street where the owner still calls me Mr. Engineer even though I told him years ago that I retired.

Most mornings my alarm goes at a quarter past five. My wife, Ruthie, rolls over and says something affectionate and unrepeatable about men who cannot sit still. I put on my coat, scrape the windshield if it is winter, which in Toronto means most of the year, and drive through dark streets to unlock a door that is not mine and switch on an oven that I will never bake a single loaf in.

That is the job. I am a mashgiach, a kosher supervisor. In plain terms, I am the person who makes sure that what a kitchen says about itself is true.

Thirty Four Years of Load Calculations

I did not plan this. For thirty four years I was a civil engineer with the city and later a private firm, mostly bridges and culverts, the kind of infrastructure you drive over every day without a second thought. My working life was about tolerances and inspections. Does the rebar match the drawing. Is the concrete cured. Has anybody cut a corner that will show up in twenty years as a crack.

When I retired at sixty six, I lasted about four months. I reorganised the garage twice. I took a course on Italian cooking and was quietly asked not to come back after I questioned the instructor about the actual temperature of his oven. Ruthie suggested, with great tenderness, that I find somewhere else to be between nine and five.

It was our rabbi who mentioned it, almost as a joke, at a Kiddush after shul. He said there was always a shortage of people willing to get up early, stand in a hot kitchen, and pay attention to boring details for hours. He looked at me and said, you were an inspector your whole life. You just did it with steel.

What Nobody Tells You About the Work

I had kept kosher all my life, as my parents did in their little house off Eglinton, but I had never thought very hard about how a box of cookies came to have that small symbol on it. I assumed somebody somewhere had blessed it. That is what most people assume.

The reality is much less mystical and much more like engineering. Before I ever worked a shift, I learned how a Kosher certification agency approaches a kitchen: ingredients checked and approved, suppliers verified, equipment examined, and then a person physically present to see that the rules are followed day after day. Not once. Every day.

The ovens are a good example. In certain kitchens, a Jewish person must be involved in lighting the fire for the bread to be considered fully kosher by many standards. So at six in the morning, in a bakery where the owner and most of the staff are not Jewish, I am the one who turns the dial. It takes four seconds. It means I had to drive forty minutes in the snow to be there for those four seconds. I have stopped finding that funny and started finding it rather beautiful.

The Baker Who Did Not Want Me There

Not every relationship starts warmly. The hardest one was a bakery in the north end, run by a Portuguese family who had taken on kosher supervision because a large grocery chain had asked them to. The father, Manuel, made it extremely clear on my first morning that he thought I was an expensive inconvenience in a yarmulke.

He was not entirely wrong. I was there to check his flour, his oils, his eggs, his margarine, his pans. I was there to tell him that the new vanilla his supplier sent could not be used until it was approved. I was, in his eyes, a man who had never kneaded dough in his life telling him how to run the bakery his grandfather had started.

I did what I used to do on difficult construction sites. I arrived on time, every time. I kept my mouth shut about anything that was not my business. I learned the names of his staff and asked about their children. And I never, ever let anything slide, because the moment you let one thing slide, the whole structure is suspect. That is true of bridges and it turns out it is true of cinnamon buns.

The Egg Story

About six months in, I was checking eggs, which is one of the less glamorous parts of the job. Each egg is cracked into a glass and inspected for blood spots before it goes into the mix. Thousands of them. It is slow and repetitive and, at five past seven in the morning, mildly hypnotic.

Manuel came over, watched me for a while, and then picked up an egg himself and cracked it into a glass. He held it up to the light. Then he did another. We stood there for about twenty minutes, side by side, not talking, checking eggs.

When we were finished he said, my mother used to do this. Not for any religious reason. She just did not trust the farm. He laughed, and something between us shifted. He started saving me the end pieces of the corn bread. I started bringing him the Portuguese newspaper my neighbour throws out.

What a Little Symbol Holds

I think about the families who buy from these kitchens more than they would ever guess. A young mother in Thornhill who has just started keeping kosher and is anxious about getting it wrong. An elderly man whose wife always did the shopping and who now stands in the aisle reading labels. A couple hosting their observant in-laws for the first time.

For all of those people, Kosher certification is a promise they cannot check themselves. They are trusting that somebody stood in the kitchen at dawn and did the checking for them. When I put it that way to my grandson, who is nineteen and has opinions about everything, he went quiet for a moment and then said, so you are basically a structural engineer for sandwiches. I have decided to accept that title.

Why I Keep Getting Up

People ask whether I get paid enough to bother. I tell them the money is not really the point. The point is that at sixty nine I am still useful in a way I understand. I can read a supplier's paperwork the way I used to read a load calculation. I can walk into a kitchen and see, within a minute, whether someone has been careful or careless. The Kosher agency I work under sets the standard. I am just the man who stands there making sure it holds.

Last month Manuel's daughter got engaged. He invited Ruthie and me to the party, and when we arrived he had arranged, without telling us, for a kosher caterer so that we could eat everything on the table. He walked me to the buffet himself and said, I checked it, but you should check it too.

I did check it. Old habits. But I also ate three of his wife's custard tarts without asking a single question, and Ruthie said that was the first time in forty years she had seen me trust a kitchen I had not inspected.

Tomorrow the alarm will go at a quarter past five again. There will be ice on the car. Somewhere across the city an oven is waiting for me to turn the dial.