Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (34 page)

Perillo happened by. “And here’s Jonathan, still laboring over the hummus.”

I didn’t look up. “I would love to banter with you, Chef Perillo, but right now, I am very, very busy and you shouldn’t distract me.”

“Oh, Jonathan, how I’ve missed you.” He drummed his hands on the worktable and walked away.

I remembered reading that when making hummus, a very slow dribble of oil into the mix as it blends results in a smoother finish. I had my olive oil and began to drip it in, slowly, slowly, a thimbleful at a time, the food processor whirring and shrieking. I could smell the motor heating up. It took a while, but when I finally got the consistency I wanted, I turned the processor off. I tasted it. Before the texture, before the flavor of the hummus, the lack of salt and the need for some tartness hit me first. To leave some wiggle room, I added less salt than I thought I’d need, and then a squirt from a quarter of a lemon. I tried again. The earthiness of the chickpeas came through, the creaminess of the tahini; I could taste the ghost of the garlic on the back of my tongue, and the flavor of the cumin. A touch more salt, another two seconds of the processor. I called Perillo over to evaluate it. He picked up a spoon from a container Sammy and I had standing nearby, dipped it in and tasted. He dropped the spoon into a bin filled with other dirty spoons. Then he took a new spoon and tasted again.

“Man, that is damn good hummus,” he said. “I was dubious, but …”

“Dubious?” I said. “Oh, ye of little faith.”

He stared. “What can I say? I’m happy I’m wrong.” He took another spoonful for good measure and went on to make his rounds.

I wasn’t the only one doing well. I tried the falafel and it was great. The baba ganouj, too. The fresh-baked pita, the lamb dumplings with yogurt sauce in brown butter—everything was a success. And we were on time to open the kitchen at six. At quarter to, Sammy and I put a stack of eight sauté pans into a 450-degree oven to heat up so the shrimp and tamarind-tomato sauce would cook more quickly. We readied all the ingredients we’d need. When service started, Sammy pulled the sauté pans out from the oven and put them on a burner we weren’t using. He would sauté the shrimp when an order came in, and I would take care of the sauce. When the door to the kitchen opened we got two orders immediately and fired them up, passing them off to the students within a minute. I reached for a new pan and pulled it toward me. It had been out of the oven for barely sixty seconds. I felt a sensation that I described later as being “blue” and a scream run from my fingers up my arm. I tried to let go of the handle, but my skin stuck to it. I thrust it loose and looked at my palm. It was a gleaming red. A lot of skin was gone. It hurt so much, my eyes welled up. Sammy turned to look at me.

“What’s the problem?”

“I just fucking burned myself.”

“How bad?”

“Pretty bad.”

Perillo called out for three orders of shrimp. I wrapped my hand in a towel and kept cooking. The pain was grotesque. There were a series of refrigerators under our worktables and we had several metal bains-marie in ours. I kept reaching in and pressing my palm against the cold metal for relief. It would help for about five seconds.

I kept cooking. I didn’t quite get why; this was a student kitchen, not three-star dining. Who cared if the students didn’t get the shrimp as fast as they wanted it? Or at all. But I couldn’t walk away. All I needed to do was spoon some of the tamarind-tomato jam into the pan, shake it with butter until the mix was loose and flowing, and toss in Sammy’s shrimp. But I couldn’t concentrate on anything other than the blaring pain in my hand.

Perillo came over and said loudly, “Jonathan, your sauce is like mud. What the hell are you doing?”

I didn’t answer. I just kept going.

“Hey, come on—we need to fix this sauce!”

Sammy said, “I’ll do this. Just serve up the rice. I got it. Don’t worry.”

I gave up my spot at the stove and addressed myself to the rice. Perillo kept looking over. After about fifteen more minutes, we’d served all our shrimp—about twenty plates’ worth. I went up and told Perillo I needed to see the nurse.

“Is that why your sauce was so bad?” he asked, when I told him about the burn.

“I was on the verge of tears.”

“Why didn’t you leave?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s insane. Lemme see.”

I held my hand out to him.

“That, my friend, is going to hurt.”

The nurse debated whether or not to give me antibiotics, decided not to, salved the burn, wrapped it up, and told me to keep it dry. I went back to class; dinner service was long over. Family meal was finished. Everyone milled around, cleaning up. I did what I could with one hand.

I couldn’t do anything the next two days, except spoon rice onto the students’ plates. By the fourth day, the skin had blistered over, so I put on a latex glove and started cooking again.

But during that time, I was really impressed with how smoothly everyone was working together. Each night, there were a lot of dishes on our menu—six different entrées and about a dozen appetizers, in addition to freshly baked breads, everything to be prepared in two and a half hours. There were the usual problems: dropped pans, brief but vicious arguments over who got to use which piece of equipment when, the inevitable burned foodstuffs.

But in past classes, like in Americas, when something had gone horribly wrong—dropping a full sheet tray of eggplant Parmesan, for
instance—the problem got solved by eliminating it completely. The eggplant got wrecked? Fine, we didn’t serve eggplant that night.

Perillo wouldn’t eliminate the problem. If something went bad—a tomato-pepper jam that got dried out in the pot beyond repair—he made you figure out a way to fix it, to make sure that item was available on the menu with all the others. He moved as if on fast-forward, and when Perillo kept that pace up, the rest of us followed suit. A year ago, when we had tried to effect that sort of speed, we looked like the Keystone Kops, a wake of spills and breakage and cinders trailing behind us. Now the tomato-pepper sauce got done again, and on time.

It became apparent that we had been the recipients of a pretty good education. We’d been taught every technique we’d need and been given the opportunity to practice and refine them. When mistakes happened, it was almost always the result of carelessness, zoning out. It was never a matter of
not
being able to do something. A lot of the nerves and angst we’d all felt when we’d start a new class had eroded away. We were capable, and there was a lot less to worry about.

On the fourth night, we made a selection of tapas dishes. Sammy and I did braised oxtails; others made paella, cod fritters, fried monk-fish, tripe in a sauce of stock and wine, braised octopus, Serrano ham fritters, and at least six or seven more. Perillo was ecstatic with the results, and so we were too.

When I labored over an osso bucco one night, during each step, the past two years repeated itself in bursts and flashes in my mind. I thought of the trip to the CSA farm to dispatch the chickens when I was handling the veal, and as it cooked I remembered the duck. As I diced up onions and carrots and made a tomato concassé, I was retelling myself the story of Viverito and the blue bin, and also picturing the platters at the Bocuse d’Or. I tried to make every cut a model of exactitude. I tried to use every scrap. When I saw my cutting board getting littered, I remembered Tabla, and remembered it again when I’d look at the clock and see it pointing out the disparity between what needed to be done and the target time of 6:00. I’d taste my sauce and a phantom Coyac would arrive at my shoulder with bulging eyes; I worked for
perfection with the seasoning. I tried to hit a harmony of mind and action that let whatever dish I was working on come together from nothing into a aggregate of small successes.

Perillo had really bloomed too. He mused to us one day about how fascinated he was with history in general, how it made up the bulk of his reading, and he reflected it in his lectures. Italy, France, Spain, and the Middle East each has, to understate the matter, a substantial historical record, and Perillo got animated and intense whenever he’d talk about the spice trade, or the Inquisition, or which foods came from the New World, or the fall of the Roman Empire. He had a theory of history that was based on economic exploitation, and he’d grow angry talking about blood spilled in the name of money, shaking his head, pursing his lips, waving his hands.

Before dinner service one afternoon, a few days before the end of the class, Perillo took each of us into the hallway for a short conference on our progress.

“So what happened to you over the last year and a half? I’m watching you zip around the kitchen with more confidence—more
competence
—than I saw in you before. You’re really doing some cooking in here, and you’re putting up great food.”

“I don’t know. I sort of had a born-again culinary experience a little while ago. It’s a little hard to explain.”

“Well, hallelujah, then,” he said. He glanced down at the clipboard in his hand. “On the other hand, your sense of teamwork needs some help. You’re not communicating with others well. Part of working in a kitchen is keeping a dialogue going with people around you.”

“Okay. Fair enough. I’ll give you that one.”

“Thanks. That’s kind of you. Especially since I’m the one giving the grades. Just as an example, the night you burned your hand, I shouldn’t have to have been the one coming over to you and telling you how bad your sauce was. You and Sammy should have worked that one out.” He gripped the clipboard by its corner and started swinging it, signaling we were done. “But really—you’ve come a long, long way. Keep going.”

F
ROM
P
ERILLO’S KITCHEN WE
went to Banquets and Catering, seven days of cooking in quantity for the incoming students—around eighty or so each night—who crowded into the same room I’d sat in the first weeks of school. But before we got near a stove, we would spend seven days waiting on them.

Ezra Eichelberger, the hospitality instructor, was a short, smart, jolly guy with a broad smile and a mustache, and he jumped right into the fundamentals, teaching us the first day about how to carry several full plates at once, about setting the table, taking orders on our dupe pads, learning how systems of tables and seats worked in restaurants, and the fundamentals of dealing with people face-to-face.

It was easy to take in the mechanics. I already knew where knives and forks went on a table because my mother had taught me. Seat one at each table in the B&C room was at seven o’clock. When you said “table 45” that did not mean there were forty-five tables in the room, but that you were referring to the fifth table in the fourth row.

But I had a very hard time interacting with our clientele—the students. On the first few nights, some of them were very pleasant. They asked questions not about the menu, but about the program, about my experiences at the school, which instructors they should be hoping to get for their Skills or Asia or Mediterranean class. But that was only some of them.

My threshold for rudeness is low. Rudeness is an entirely unnecessary mode of socializing. Being polite is effortless. And what made it difficult for me—the
demands
for another glass of chocolate milk, the absence of
please
and
thank you
in our exchanges, telling me, “This table needs more bread. Now.”—was that it seemed like it never would have occurred to a lot of these kids to ask nicely for something and say thank you when they got it.

And, for culinary students, they were pretty unadventurous. Served a rack of lamb done to a very nice medium-rare, one table of guests looked horrified when Gabi and I placed their plates in front of them.

“It’s raw!” they marveled, incredulous.

One young woman pushed the plate away. “I don’t eat raw food.” Her expression indicated we were the worst sort of morons for trying to slide this incompetence past her. She looked at her dining companions and snorted derisively.

I tried diplomacy. “No, no—it’s not raw. This is when it’s at its best. Also, this is how you guys are going to be cooking this stuff in class. Try it. That’s why they have you coming here. This is your future you’re tasting now.”

“Well, this isn’t how
I
cook lamb.” Then she told me, “You can serve your other tables now.”

Gabi’s face looked as if she wanted to laugh. She kept looking from me to the students and back. I wanted to tip this girl’s plate into her lap. I said nothing.

Leaving the table, I passed Eichelberger. “I weep for our future,” I said.

“Oh, Jonathan.” He ruefully shook his head. “You have no idea.”

Eichelberger walked up to me on the sixth night. “Jonathan, I’ve been wanting to tell you all week that I haven’t had as much fun in a long time as I’ve had watching you try and keep your composure with the students. It’s been just hilarious. Thank you for that. And this is definitely
not
the career path you should be choosing.”

We finally moved into the kitchen, which had been placed under the charge of Paul Sartory. This was the last class he’d be teaching at the Hyde Park campus. He’d been transferred to the San Antonio branch of the CIA and couldn’t have been more excited.