Mise en place: a French phrase meaning “everything in its place.”  As any competent cook knows, it also describes a time-honored culinary technique. Sounds fancy, but really, it isn’t; it is just common sense. In the kitchen, or anywhere else, you should know what you’re planning to do and have everything logically arranged in advance to ensure a smooth process and ultimate success. Otherwise, you lose your timing, invite catastrophe, and end up with an unwelcome mess. 

     Long before I ever took any culinary courses, and really before I hardly cooked at all, I learned what eating well really meant when I moved to New York City. My mother, bless her, was not a great cook, but she was a great single mother with a demanding professional job who took care of both her mother and me. Except for her meatloaf and her potato salad (recipes I still make now), we ate out or took out most of our meals. And in the South Texas town where I grew up, those meal choices were pretty much limited to Mexican food, barbecue, and hamburgers.

     When my husband, a New Yorker, asked my mother for my hand in marriage long ago, she answered that while I had many admirable qualities, domestic skills weren’t among them; in fact, she added without any sense of irony at all, that I “couldn’t even boil water.” We married anyway and moved up East. It was there as a newlywed living and working in the City that I learned what really good food was about, all kinds of good food. From roasted chestnuts on the street to loaded  sandwiches at a Jewish deli, from authentic ethnic dishes in immigrant neighborhoods to fresh off-the-boat seafood at South Street Seaport, to traveling way uptown for “uptown fine dining” at the Four Seasons or La Cote Basque, New York had it all — and I think I ate most of it!

     One blustery autumn evening on the way home from work, I stopped at a corner newsstand and discovered a copy of Gourmet Magazine. And the rest, as they say, is history, in this case the history of someone who learned how to eat well, then learned how to cook well, and then learned how to appreciate the centrality of food in culture and history and nature and almost everything else! As award-winning chef and World Central Kitchen humanitarian José Andrés said when asked about the importance of food writing,  “The connection of food to everything; national security, climate, immigration, dignity.” ( New York Times Book Review, 5/11/2025)

     Ultimately, it was Gourmet Magazine that began my real education into food significance and preparation, though the recipes I found there were not easy, especially for someone who didn’t cook. They demanded considerable study and cultural curiosity, and lots of  planning ahead. You could say that I discovered the technique of mise en place out of sheer necessity before I even knew what that term meant. Putting “everything in its place” was an absolute necessity when trying to navigate a complicated and difficult recipe. Now, almost 50 years later, one of those early challenges has become one of my “signature dishes,” one of which I am most proud. 

     The recipe is for Roast Pork à l’ Orange with Braised Onions (photo from the original magazine above) and it was printed in an early 1970’s issue of Gourmet. It involves 28 different ingredients and takes a minimum of 6-8 hours to complete (including at least 4 hours to marinate the pork), along with an initial hour or so to mise en place. The end result of all the work is well worth it; it is a showy, beautiful dish, ideal for a dinner party and easily adaptable for family leftovers, and it is delicious. (And yes, it gets a easier with practice.)

     As taught in every basic culinary class, mise en place involves five basic steps. The first, of course, is to thoroughly read the recipeall the way through. In cooking, one step logically leads to the next. Carefully reading the recipe allows you to review the list of ingredients, the methods of preparation, the necessary equipment, and the amount of time involved. It also alerts you to any unfamiliar words or phrases in the instructions, such as beurre manié or bouquet garni, that could present stumbling blocks once the cooking is underway. In cooking, as in life, you need to anticipate surprises and know where you’re headed before you begin.

     The second step is to gather all the necessary tools and equipment as well as ingredients,including even the most ordinary things like measuring cups and spoons and sharp knives. How many pots have boiled over on the stove while the cook is frantically looking for a misplaced utensil! Once again, as in life serendipity is one thing, but careless oversight can spell disaster.  

     Your work gets really serious in the third step, especially if the list of ingredients is long. This is the crucial step where you wash, brush, and rinse, chop, dice, and mince, steep, peel, and grate, and otherwise prepare and precisely measure ALL the ingredients exactly as the recipe instructs. Once all this is done, then you set up your workspace, making sure that all appliances are working and that all your tools are clean and organized. 

     And then it’s time for step four, the real marching orders of mis en place!  Line up ALL ingredients, each in its own place in dishes on trays or along a counter, each readily accessible in the order in which it is to be used once you start cooking. Once you are underway,  you will need to incorporate the fifth step, which is to clean up as you go — and not just by throwing dishes in the sink. Anyone who has attended a hands-on culinary class knows how insistent chef instructors are about this last on-going step, not only for safety concerns (sharp knives buried under dishes or cutting boards contaminated by raw meat), but also because some items may have to be used over and over again in the preparation. Besides, mess means chaos and in cooking, as in life, chaos means confusion.

     I have always been a compulsive planner, one even determined to plan ahead in situations like sudden illness or natural disaster where planning is almost impossible. Yet, cooking has brought me consolation and imparted lessons in life even in the most dire situations.  The whole concept of mise en place speaks both to my natural impulses and my common sense. Would that the concept could be understood and embraced by those in authority who are  “cooking up” more than just dinner.

     Note: the Four Seasons Restaurant closed in 2019 and La Cote Basque closed in 2004. Gourmet Magazine ceased publication in 2009 and, while I have the original copy of the Roast Pork from an issue (the photo above), I cannot find an on-line complete recipe for that exact dish to link for you. Sorry.