Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (6 page)

On other days, we attended the Food Safety class. We learned the rudiments of sanitation and proper temperatures—and exactly what happens to you when you get food poisoning or eat contaminated fish. Most reef fish, for example, weighing more than five pounds, are likely to harbor ciguatoxin, which leads to ciguatera. Ciguatera will keep you sick for years. At the onset you will vomit uncontrollably, and your gastrointestinal system will betray you. Your fingers and toes will tingle. Later, and for a long, long time, your nervous system will reverse the sensations of hot and cold.

We also learned at exactly what temperatures and under what conditions bacteria will multiply. We discovered that all sorts of toxins, viruses, and bacteria lurked on or around our food. Listeria can cause miscarriages and death. E. coli can make you dead. If you stuff a turkey at Thanksgiving, and the temperature of the stuffing does not hit 165 degrees, you are creating a place where salmonella can thrive and be fruitful. At the onset of anaphylactic shock, when a person allergic to nuts accidentally eats, say, a filbert, they will experience light-headedness and swelling of the face, hands, and feet. They will begin wheezing, be stricken with cramps. Their throat will close and their blood pressure will drop. They will lose consciousness and then die. We came to understand, in essence, that food can hurt you.

Gastronomy class was polarizing. It was devoted to the theory and aesthetics of dining, and the reading assignments were sometimes dense tracts full of postmodern jargon and references to Foucault and Lacan. We were introduced to some of the great culinarians: Antonin Carême, the father of haute cuisine; the godlike Auguste Escoffier,
who codified the essence and details of French fine dining in his book
Le Guide Culinaire
, upon which the entire curriculum of the CIA is based. A lot of the students were bored out of their minds, unable to get their heads around the idea they were required to learn so much that had absolutely no connection to actual, physical cooking. They’d perk up at the mention of someone contemporary—Keller, Grant Achatz, Ferran Adrià—but an invocation of Fernand Point or Paul Bocuse or Joël Robuchon—people I found fascinating, worthy of awe—left eyes glazed over.

One day in Gastronomy, we were called to the front of the room for each of us to pick up a paper plate with a selection of light and dark chocolates. The first and last chocolates were pitch dark, with a dozen chocolates in between, moving in a color continuum from light to increasingly brown. The instructor asked us to eat the first piece and write down our reaction to it. It tasted disgustingly bitter, inedible, and it took some effort to keep from spitting it into my napkin. I reported as much on my comment sheet. The next piece was cheap milk chocolate; it was cloying and I could almost feel my pancreas twitch. The next had a slightly darker hue and contained less sugar. We moved through the plate, each piece progressively less sweet until we came to the final one. It had an alkaline quality to it and felt metallic on my tongue, but it also had a complexity that I hadn’t recognized in any of the others. It turned out that the first and last pieces were the same, and it was to demonstrate how the palate could be manipulated. The progressive bitterness primed the tongue as it went, until what was initially terrible revealed its nuances. I thought the experience was kind of profound and dramatic; a bunch of the kids thought it was bullshit. There was, as far they could tell, no practical application for this knowledge. I suspected that this thinking was also the reason why the library was never crowded.

The other academic class was Product Knowledge, taught by a local farmer and former football coach, Darryl Mosher. Mosher was a big, serious man with a tight crew cut who didn’t laugh very much. He
was a formidable guy and charged with teaching the students how to identify vegetables and to select the best examples of them. I imagined him as the Vince Lombardi of produce. He was a constant presence at the Rhinebeck farmers’ market, and I always envisioned him going through his stock, discarding a too-large zucchini or an overripe tomato, saying, “There’s no room for second place at this farm stand.” This was a class that everyone agreed was essential. It was also a ton of work. We all knew what broccoli was, obviously, but differentiating between a dozen varieties of apples was challenging. It wasn’t always easy telling five kinds of cooking greens apart, or keeping track of twelve or thirteen species of mushrooms.

With every piece of produce, Mosher informed us of how to recognize when one was fresh or perfectly ripe. He offered tastings of just about everything we were shown in class, and because it was summer, there was a lot of produce to study. Everything was to be committed to memory. Apples, berries, cherries, and lemons won’t ripen off the vine, but melons, pears, avocados, and bananas will. Tomatoes will ripen but not become more flavorful off the vine, so often, Mosher told us, they are picked while green, gassed with ethylene until red, and shipped to the supermarket where they arrive tasting of nothing. If, at the beginning of the course, you had a hard time identifying the herb savory, or telling the difference between oregano and marjoram, Thai and regular basil, or a selection of various mints, you had better get things straight.

You can tell a piece of broccoli is fresh by looking at the cut at the bottom of the stem; if it isn’t cracked or doesn’t have the slightest brownish tint to it, if it is pale green and moist, it is pretty fresh. The flowers on top—the green stuff—should be tight and vibrant. It should feel heavy in the hand.

A cantaloupe should have a strong cantaloupe smell. It too should feel heavy, and its “belly button” should be smooth, inverted, and round. The webbing should be raised and distinct, dry, with very little green. A honeydew should feel waxy and tacky, with a little give where
it was cut. Tomatoes contain three acids: malic, glutamic, and citric. Dark tomatoes are high in acid; yellow or light tomatoes are lower.

Three days a week, for two hours a shot, we were bombarded with fruits and vegetables. We were to test what we learned by making regular trips to the CIA’s storage room—a dark, refrigerated area where all the produce was held before being distributed to the kitchen classrooms. Everything was labeled so you could go through and handle, smell, and squeeze a thousand different herbs and vegetables.

We had two classes for a total of four hours every day. The rest of the time I spent in the library, doing homework and studying. But sometimes, I’d get on the computer and look at the course guides, recipes, and syllabi for the classes I’d be taking down the road. In the Skills Development III folder, I found a document called “Methods,” which listed the basic techniques to cooking a piece of fish
en papillote
(in parchment paper), making a dozen different sauces, and pureed soups among a score of others. I found recipes for Green Chili Stew and Bori Bori Soup in the Cuisines of the Americas folder, recipes for potato gnocchi with duck ragu and a hundred different tapas dishes in the Cuisines of the Mediterranean.

I really immersed myself in cookbooks, especially after I’d spend some time rooting around in the folders of upcoming classes. I’d pull a few of my favorites down from the shelves—
Bouchon, Babbo
, Michel Richard’s
Happy in the Kitchen, Le Guide Culinaire, The Zuni Cafe Cookbook
—and look at the more elaborate recipes that I once thought I’d fuck up irreparably if I ever tried them. I’d feel bright and optimistic, like the future had open arms, that all these methods and techniques would be within my range, that this was where a demarcation got drawn, one between the legion of home cooks and the professionally trained.

I was outside one afternoon, two weeks after school started, reading Escoffier on a bench. A young, uniformed woman walked straight toward me, holding a Styrofoam container in her hand.

“You’ve got to try this,” she said. She reached out and crammed something into my mouth. I could feel her fingers on my teeth. I ate it, and it was delicious. After I swallowed, I asked: “What was it?”

“Rabbit crepe,” she said, wiped her hands on her pants, and walked away.

I
T’S A NICE PIECE
of synchronicity that farther down the river there’s another citadel on a hill: West Point, the United States Military Academy. I came to believe that the CIA had swiped some of the Academy’s ethos.

All around the school, I saw signs and bulletins glowering down from spaces in the kitchens, hallways, and administration offices, almost all of them beginning with phrases like “You must” or “You are required to” or “It is prohibited for students to” or “You may not” or “Students cannot.”

The CIA dress code informed us that students in kitchen classes must wear “Institute-issued cleaned and pressed chef’s checkered pants of proper fit, neither pegged nor cuffed. Pants must be hemmed above the natural heel and below the ankle.” It went on: “White undergarments are required for both men and women” and “one plain ring and one watch are the only pieces of jewelry permitted.”

Furthermore, men must be “clean-shaven, with sideburns not exceeding the middle of the ear. Beards are not permitted” and “mustaches must be neatly trimmed and may not extend below the corner of the mouth.” Failure to adhere to these codes could result in demerits, which dogged your CIA permanent record until death. This sort of stuff extended into the kitchen operations too. I saw a list of regulations for one of the Skills classes, the bedrock basic foundation courses that signaled the real beginnings of everyone’s cooking education. It read:

• Plates presented not hot enough or too hot will reflect 1 point deduction from your professionalism grade.
  
• Each food items [
  sic
  ] presented
  not hot enough
  will be subject to a deduction of 1 point.
  
• Plates presented with
  smudges
  will reflect 1 point deduction from your professionalism grade.
  
• Plates presented
  dirty
  will reflect 2 points deduction from your professionalism grade.
  
• Plates presented with
  poor presentation
  or
  not reflecting chef’s demo plate
  will reflect 1 point deduction from your professionalism grade.
  
• Not having a pencil #2 for the scheduled quizzes and tests and/or a calculator for the costing exam will reflect 2 points deduction from the quiz/test/costing grade.
  

One day, I watched, horrified, as a student had his sideburns measured with a ruler in the hallway by one of the chefs. He was told to leave the building immediately and not to return until he had shortened them.

“I understand that when you’re dealing with a bunch of kids who still have wet dreams, you need to be a hard-ass,” I said to Nelly, who was in disbelief after reading all that. “But I’m almost thirty-eight. I’m not here to fuck around. I’m not here to waste time. Enough with the rules and regulations—I’m here of my own volition, I’m not being supported by Mom and Dad, I’m taking it seriously. Just teach me something and I will learn it. I don’t need to be threatened.”

I’d been eating most of my meals by myself and was doing so for another lunch when Adam Walker materialized at the table and sat down, accompanied by two more students I recognized from one class or another—Culinary Math, I think—and they sat too. One’s name was Mike Brookshire, and the other was an utterly silent guy by the name of Gio. It took a minute, but I recognized him: He had been at a table in the B&C dining room one evening. Gio had not spoken a single word. There had been only one other person at the table, some diminutive idiot from Long Island who was running through his tough guy act, telling us, “I’ll tell a chef straight to his face, you respect me, I’ll respect you. But don’t you fucking disrespect me—I’ll cut you. Just don’t do it. I won’t put up with that shit.”

During the guy’s long rap, Gio had stared at his plate with a weird
quarter smile twisting his lips. After the guy finally left, Gio left too. He nodded once by way of good-bye.

Adam remembered my name and introduced us all.

“What’s your story?” Brookshire asked.

“I’m from Brooklyn.”

“That’s it?”

“No. I used to work at Martha Stewart before I came here.” I deliberately left the teaching part out—it seemed like it was going to put more distance between me and everyone else; for me, my age was always a shadow, and I didn’t want to darken it any further. Plus, whenever I dropped the Martha Stewart thing, it was always a conversation piece. No exception this time: “Holy shit? Are you serious?” Adam said.

“Yeah, I’m serious. It was one of the most miserable stretches of my life. Every day, I prayed for the sweet and final deliverance of death, but it didn’t come. Eventually, I just got canned.”

“I’ve got to say,” Brookshire said, “you do not look like a Martha Stewart kind of person.”

“I was not a Martha Stewart person. Hence the getting canned.”

“What did you do there?”

“I was a writer.” I had to make the admission, even though I preferred not to. It caused exactly the reaction I hoped to avoid.

“So you’re one of the food writer types? Like you’re gonna go work for
Gourmet
or something?”

I’d felt invisible a lot of the time, but I still paid attention. I listened to a lot of conversations. My restaurant experience was a lot more limited than almost everyone else’s. A lot of these people had been line cooks during high school. I hadn’t. And this was a sort of dividing line. Other students took you more seriously if you’d had that experience; it meant you were authentic, the real thing. They seemed to think that it signified a good bedrock for everything we were about to learn. I can’t say I totally disagreed.

“I’m sure I’ll always write, but—hey, just like you—I’m here to learn to cook.”

“The industry needs writers, too.” Adam said. “You guys are a necessity when it comes time to write the cookbooks.”

“Man, give me a fucking break,” I said. “I’m here to cook. I’m not here as a journalist.”

“Okay, hey, whoa, easy does it there,” Brookshire said. “No need to get prickly.”