Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (31 page)

“I will say,” he continued. “I saw some really nice apples in the walk-in. Come here.” He led me to the walk-in and we went inside. He pointed to a pan full of Empire apples. “What do you think?”

“Yeah, I think I want to do apple pie.”

“Good, great, beautiful. Peel them, cut them up. Do what you can to make the pieces even. We’ll make a syrup with sugar—just a tiny, tiny bit of water to get it melted.” Speiss was lighting up as he walked me through the process. “Add some spice—a pinch of nutmeg, some cinnamon. Some lemon, but not too much. I want to taste apple, not citrus, right? Right. Then we bake it. And we’ll send it out to the faculty lounge later for their dessert.”

My classmates had been together as a group for a while, spoke in their own shorthand, and obviously weren’t sure how or if I’d fit into the dynamic. For the first few days, most of our interactions were on the level of, “May I have that flour when you’re done, please? Are you finished with this pan—can I take it to the dish sink? Is there any more room in the oven for this pie?” Polite, businesslike. When I was around, they were formal with each other. When I moved off, they reverted to a more natural state.

After about a week, I started to be included.

I stood at the dish sink one afternoon, scrubbing out a pan. Bruce was cleaning something next to me. He was a quiet, seemingly serious guy from Atlanta. He and I had nodded at each other but hadn’t had an exchange. He turned to me and asked, “Are you a Deadhead?”

“I love the Dead. How did you know?”

“I saw you pull into the parking lot in your truck and I saw the skull-and-lightning sticker on the back. I’m a Dead fan too.” We started talking about our favorite Dead songs (we both agreed on
“Wharf Rat”) then about our lives outside of school. He got excited. “I write too,” he exclaimed. “I’m really interested in comedy writing. That’s what I do when I’m not here.” We talked about Woody Allen and Larry David. I was surprised, because he had come off as so serious; when he smiled, his lips barely seemed to move. We wound up doing routines from the
Chapelle Show
for each other.

Gabrielle, or Gabi as she liked to be called, was one of the four people on my team. She was a pretty, slender woman from Queens, and we had spoken briefly to each other about New York City. She sang to herself as she worked. One day, she sang something over and over. I liked the melody and asked her what she was singing.

“It’s a song from
Wicked
. Do you know that play?”

“No, not at all. But you have a really nice voice.” From that moment on, she was friendly and talkative.

But no one was more talkative than Leo. He was twenty years old, from Mexico, and irrepressible. Within the span of sixty seconds, Leo might burst out into song—often Sinatra—then ask anyone in range what they thought of Sinatra, then what they thought of his singing. He’d free-associate words and say them aloud. He bounced from one worktable to another, hugging people, asking them what they were doing, how they were feeling. He’d yell out a question for Speiss, interrupt the answer to ask an unrelated question, and then ask Speiss how he felt about Sinatra. He just never stopped.

At first Leo had kept his distance, but his curiosity seemed to win out. He began addressing me as “Jonny” and, for days, fired question after question at me: Where was I from? Did I like Lee Marvin? What about Charles Bronson? Had I ever studied martial arts? Do I like bread? What’s my favorite kind of bread? Do I prefer classic rock or metal? Did I think Carol was pretty? Gabi? Margot? Did I have a girlfriend? What was she like?

He began getting on my nerves. At most points during class, I could hear Leo’s voice somewhere in the room.

“Wow,” I said to Gabi. “That kid just never slows down, does he?”

For a day or two during our second week, I tried focusing on my
projects—rolling out croissant dough, making crème anglaise, shaping pretzels—but no matter my concentration, Leo’s chattering would seep in. It became something akin to a toothache. One afternoon as I was trying to shape a baguette, his attention shifted to me.

“Jonny—I need to know which you think is the best
Star Wars
movie. Which one does your girlfriend like? Where did you live in New York City? Which restaurants did you like to go to? How far is Brooklyn from here? I have a thousand friends on Facebook. Have you ever seen
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
?”

“Leo, I’m trying to work. Can you interrogate me during dinner?”

“Jonny, I want answers. My favorite drink is a martini—”

“Leo …”

“One time, in Mexico, I used to play soccer—”

“Leo—”

“Yes, and there was this opossum—”

I exploded. “Leo, do you ever shut the fuck up?”

“What?”

“Leo, do you ever stop? I am getting this new vision of hell and that vision is being trapped in a car with you for a really long ride. Why are you talking to me about opossums?”

“I have ADD. But also because the opossum bit one of my teammates, and so I got a tennis racket and put on cleats and …”

“Okay. No more. You must stop.”

“We will talk about the opossum during dinner, yes? Tell me you love me, Jonny.”

He had worn me down. I started laughing to myself in disbelief, wiping my hands together to get the flour off.

“Will you hug me, Jonny?”

“No.”

“Yes, you will.” Leo swooped in and hugged me. “Jonny, will you be my Facebook friend?”

I noticed two things as Baking class progressed. One, we actually did a lot more work than was apparent. It seemed as if most of our class time was spent watching our recipes cook through the glass of the
oven doors, but Speiss, in all his placidity, influenced us through a number of different tasks every day. We had our main project—rolling out the croissants, for instance—but he might suddenly hand you a recipe for biscotti just twenty minutes before dinner and with his quiet enthusiasm have you scurrying to mix it together, all without any resentment. One day, I worked on croissants, made chocolate biscotti, did a crème anglaise, rolled up a strudel whose patina of dough stretched and tore in about six different places, helped twist together a dozen challah breads, and piped whipped cream on a few dozen plates of desserts. Others in the class did just as much and more. If Speiss asked you to do something, you did it because you really couldn’t stomach the idea of disappointing the guy. When things went wrong, you felt bad.

Most of the goods we baked and desserts we made got sent out to the Banquet and Catering dining room, or to the dessert table in the cafeteria. If we screwed something up—like when the strudel dough split—Speiss wouldn’t send it out, he’d stand next to you, looking down on your baked mistake, wordless until his hand went on your shoulder and he said, “You weren’t careful enough when you were stretching it out. Remember how I showed you? But it’s okay, Jonathan—we’ll just eat it ourselves. Why don’t you cut it up and we’ll put some out for everyone to try?” I remembered as he said it to me a time when I was little and broke a favorite lamp of my mother’s, purely by accident. She didn’t yell. “It’s okay,” she said. “You didn’t mean to do it.” But, on a very low frequency, her face broadcast her distress. Speiss was like that.

The second thing I noticed was that by the middle of the second week, everyone was excelling. It was rocky, at first, for a lot of the group, whose culinary experiences were centered around sauté pans and open flames. Bread dough had gotten overkneaded until the gluten gave up and died, starters wouldn’t start, ice creams had turned out rock hard, and the kitchen would often be permeated by the smoky odor of goods being baked until black. Stephen, a Texan whom I recognized from some of my L-Block classes, and whom I really liked, had, I
think, been born under a bad sign. If he walked through a room that was completely empty except for a glass in the far corner, Stephen would somehow find a way to accidentally break that glass. On the second day of class, we had sat down for Speiss’s lecture and Stephen pulled out his notebook and his pen. He uncapped the pen, began lowering it toward his paper, and the pen exploded in a pool of ink. The third day, he stood in front of one of the Hobart mixers staring forlornly into the mixing bowl. I arrived next to him and started pouring ingredients into the second mixer.

“Hey, Jonathan, how’s everything going?”

“Good, Stephen, and you?”

“I can’t figure out why my dough is doing this …”

I looked into the bowl. The dough was splotched with different shades of tan and looked like soft wax. “I’ve never actually seen dough act like that,” I said. Speiss happened by.

“Stephen, what did you do to that dough?”

“I have no idea, Chef.”

Speiss stared at the mass as it turned and the motor buzzed and whined. “I honestly have no idea either.”

But by the middle of the second week, Stephen’s unlucky streak had ended; he was making great focaccia and fantastic biscuits. Jacky, a sweet, offbeat kid born in Hong Kong and raised in New Jersey, who had been constantly knocking things off the counter, scorching his crème anglaise, or burning caramel into a searing epoxy, turned quick and efficient. Margot, who always wore the expression of someone who had just screwed up and was about to have to answer for it, was making these perfect pie crusts, and her croissants were delicious. Everyone—Sammy, Rocco, the rest of the class, including me—had bloomed, and quickly. It might have been unfamiliar territory to all of us, but we grasped it in a way that I hadn’t seen occur in other classes before this.

I understood why as I walked to class that second week, having arrived early for no other reason than I wanted to get into class; it was my day to make ice cream and I planned to add crumbled-up Kit Kats
to it. We had bloomed because no one had to duck and cover; no one had to be on the defensive. None of us worried about covering our vitals in the face of an attack from a loud, abrasive chef. It wasn’t a vacation in Bakeshop 8—we worked. We had the same two hours to get things done as we’d had and would continue to have in other classes. We got everything done on time. I’d gotten lucky for the most part when it came to my instructors. No one had ever taken me completely apart. But there was always the threat that your next instructor might be one of those chefs who did have a reputation for relentlessness—Turgeon, Roe, Pardus, on and on. And threat contributed to a constant case of anxiety. It was just floating on the air of the campus, like an incredibly pervasive pheromone. But with Speiss, you knew you weren’t going to be eviscerated, so you could focus—really turn your faculties like a laser—on what you were doing and why you were doing it. I felt as if I were truly learning under Speiss’s charge.

I was on a small upswing at school. There wasn’t a ton of time left, either in Speiss’s class or of classes, period. I resolved to ride it out, to enjoy what remained of Baking, to try and take the most I could out of my remaining classes.

I
T WAS THE NIGHT
before the Bocuse d’Or finals. Twelve American teams would be competing to see who would go to the actual Bocuse d’Or in Lyon, France, in 2011, and the CIA was hosting the event in the school gymnasium. A prestigious competition, with all the noblesse of the Olympics, this event is taken pretty seriously in the culinary universe. Teams from around the world compete biennially in Lyon; each team is notified in advance of what fish and which meat they’d be cooking with, and they spend months concocting menus, refining them through practice, refining some more, practicing some more, and then meeting for the actual competition. Here at the CIA, the competing chefs had two and a half hours to get their dishes done the day of the competition (they got three hours the day before to get the grunt work accomplished), and their dishes would be judged by
renowned chefs—like Keller and Boulud—grading on presentation and taste. Also, each team could earn a significant number of points if the Kitchen Supervision Committee saw those teams working cleanly and hygienically. I didn’t know who was on the Kitchen Supervision Team, or who chose them, or what their criteria was, but I found the concept funny. I kept thinking of the Taliban’s Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

I got ready for bed a little earlier, the alarm set for 5:30. I told myself that I would see all of the competition the next day, from beginning to end. My journalist training was kicking in—it seemed like the sort of event that begged to be experienced that way. Some of the best cooks in the country would be at work tomorrow, judged by a few of the best chefs in the world. The ones doing the judging had once been just like those doing the cooking, who had formerly been just like those attending the school. Some of those best chefs had literally been like those of us currently going to school. Grant Achatz is an alumnus of the CIA, as is Eric Ziebold, and both were French Laundry alums. I’d been taught to sauté in just the same way as they had. At some point, that knowledge began working differently for them than for most others with the same education. I wasn’t sure that it was strictly a matter of experience, although that certainly helped. I wanted to see what people did tomorrow. I wanted to see all of it. I wanted to compare movements, gestures.

I arrived at 7:50 because the gymnasium began letting people in at 8:00. I’d been thinking the whole ride over that there would probably be lines and crowds and mayhem, but at that hour, the parking lots were empty and I didn’t see anyone. The Rec Center was still dead. I sat down in the second row of the bleachers, right in the middle, settled in, and began watching. All six kitchens were occupied with a competing chef, his or her assistant, and then a third helper, a
commis
, who lent a hand wherever needed. Many of the commis were CIA students—they wore their uniforms—and I wondered how they landed the job. For a second I felt a brief flash of envy—it would have been kind of cool to be that close to the action—but within a blink, I
began thinking that I would never want the gig. What if one gaff on my part caused a break in the action that the cooks could never recover from? How could those kids handle that responsibility?