Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (7 page)

Adam, Mike, Gio, and I started eating our meals together after that. I found out more about them. Brookshire had moved to New York from California. He’d married pretty young—at twenty-three—and his wife accompanied him to Poughkeepsie, a few minutes off campus. She hated it here and, according to Mike, they did nothing but fight. Whatever rancor stormed inside their home, he brought it to class.

Adam was, thus far, the most ambitious person I’d come across. He knew exactly what he wanted and had plotted out each step to get there. Attending the CIA was something, he said, that he knew he’d do from the time he was eleven. After graduation, he wanted to immerse himself in Asian cuisine, become executive chef at a few restaurants, pass the Certified Master Chef test before he was forty, and then come back to the CIA to teach.

I found out Gio was from Rochester.

These guys were the older students in my classes, and by older I mean they were all twenty-three or twenty-four. None of them had ever done a research paper without using the Internet. I kept skirting the issue of my exact age, but every once in a while, something would slip.

We were talking about music and bands we’d seen. I told them that Jane’s Addiction was one of the best live bands I’d ever witnessed. Someone mentioned that he’d wanted to see them on their reunion tour in 2001, but he was too young and his parents wouldn’t let him go.

“I saw them on that tour too,” I said. “They sucked, so you didn’t miss anything. I’m talking about how good they were with their original lineup.” I realized at that second that I had started seeing the band’s original lineup in 1988, at which point these guys would have been four or five. There was a silence.

“How fucking old are you?” Brookshire asked.

“Pretty old,” I answered. Then I changed the subject.

A few others would join us from time to time. Michael Lombardi was usually at the table, an intense guy from Connecticut who never really said what it was he wanted to do, but talked a lot about self-improvement. He seemed to be obsessed with rules. Before a class would officially start, when we were all seated in the classroom, and the second the instructor walked in, Lombardi would begin quieting us down. His clothes were immaculate. His pencils were always sharp.

Carlos sat at our table a lot. He was seventeen, had been taken under Lombardi’s wing, and was spastic and kind of obnoxious.

Carlos and I had been seated together at a B&C table for dinner one night. He was complaining about how much drinking and drug use went on in the dorms. He said, “I fucking hate it—all they do is drink. I just don’t get it. Drinking is for idiots.”

“Hey man, I drink any practical chance I get,” I said. “In fact, as soon as I get home, I’m having a really big scotch.”

“And I totally respect that,” he said without missing a beat. “Look, don’t get me wrong—I like to have a good time. But I do it clean.”

It was at lunch that I also met Don and Trevor. Don was nineteen, a red-haired kid from Florida, stunningly cocky, with the worst table manners I’d ever seen. When he’d sit with us, I couldn’t look at him; he’d eat with his mouth open so wide you could chart the progress of his food with each chew. He’d fallen in with Trevor, eighteen, barely out of high school, head shaved to the scalp and skin smoldering with pimples.

The first day I met Don, he was seated at a table with the others, leaning back in his chair, legs spread wide, gnawing a toothpick. The topic was
Iron Chef America
, a favorite television show of almost everyone you talked to on campus. Don was of a different mind, however. He said to us, “I can’t watch
Iron Chef
. Bobby Flay just makes me laugh. If I’m a better chef than you, then I’m not going to waste my time watching you on TV.”

None of us knew what to say.

Trevor, at another lunch, told us in passing, and without flinching, that back home in Iowa, he’d been an executive chef. An executive chef is in charge of every aspect of a kitchen. He or she oversees every aspect of a restaurant, approving vendors, paying the bills, maintaining quality control over the food made in the kitchen. He or she outranks everyone. It’s typically his or her vision that fuels the menu. An executive chef is a restaurant’s driving force.

We listened to him. After he left, we had a single question.

“Executive chef? Did he really just tell us that?” Adam said.

“He must have run that lemonade stand with a really tight grip, for those few hours between history class and curfew,” I conjectured.

“What sort of restaurant would he have been at?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m just imagining the phone calls: ‘Mom? Could you please pick me up? The sous-chefs hid my car keys again.’ ”

At another lunch, Don told us about the plan he and Trevor were hard at work realizing.

“What we’re going to do is, we’re in class Monday through Friday, but we’re free Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. We’re looking around to try and find a restaurant space, and we’re going to set it up and open just on the weekends. We’re going to see if we can do our externship there. Trevor’s going be executive chef because he’s already done that. He’s an awesome line cook. I’m not that good a line cook, but I’m the
bomb
prep cook.”

“I can’t see you having any trouble at all getting investors for a plan like that,” I said.

“Oh, yeah—that’s no problem,” Don informed me. “Trevor’s dad might throw some money in, and I think my grandmother might want to invest.”

Our last class before the summer break was on July 2. When we returned at the end of the month, we’d have three more weeks of academics and then begin the meat and fish butchering classes.

Nelly and I spent just a few more days in Rhinebeck. We were set to move into the house she’d bought in a tiny hamlet in Saugerties on the
fifth. There wasn’t much for us to do until then, as the two stoned, aging hippie restorers worked their way very, very slowly across the hardwood floors. We decided to make dinner for her parents one night, and we went to a Stop & Shop right up the road for ingredients. The produce section spread itself out right inside the door—a few dozen square yards of fruits and vegetables. None of the signs or labels indicated that these came from anywhere nearby.

Not very long ago, I’d still seen the supermarket’s stock as almost tyrannical—
This is what we have, tough luck, you’ll have to make do. Not up to par? Too fucking bad and, since this is the same stuff that we have shipped in from all the same places, all year-round, how would you even know the difference?
But I had new eyes now. I picked up a cantaloupe and it smelled of nothing; there were light swaths of green all over it. The peppers showed some almost imperceptible wrinkling at the top, near the stems, something I wouldn’t have looked for or noticed just a few weeks prior. The cut stems of the broccoli looked okay, but the flowers on the crown were loose and dry. The fennel’s fronds were limp and sagging. There wasn’t much here that seemed to have ever had a relationship with soil. It was all like a harvested equivalent to a jar of Prego. We left with some herbs and some lettuce, and a compact watermelon that looked nice.

The new house was just a stone’s throw from the Hudson. There were train tracks running a small distance away and we loved the sound of the freights rolling by. From the porch, we could see the crests of some of the Catskill Mountains. I found myself not missing Brooklyn.

I spent my mornings painting the walls, moving room to room and listening to Black Flag’s discography from start to finish, over and over, singing along, painting at a quicker and quicker pace. In the afternoons, I’d read some of the books I’d borrowed from the library just before school ended: M.F.K. Fisher; a biography of Carême; an account of the case of Bernard Loiseau, who caved to the pressure of maintaining his Michelin stars and killed himself; a history of Chez Panisse in Berkeley.

I always had a strong interest in sources and genealogies. Transfixed by the Rolling Stones as a kid, I discovered Muddy Waters, and after him, I found Robert Johnson and from him worked back to Son House, and then to Charley Patton. From Dylan to Johnny Cash, from Cash to Hank Williams, from Hank Williams to Jimmy Rodgers and Roy Acuff.

When I’d study contemporary cookbooks—
Zuni Cafe, The Elements of Taste, The French Laundry, The Art of Simple Food
—the affect of old-style French cooking was obvious. And on one hand, these were the echoes of the dishes people like Anne Willen wrote about in
Regional French Cooking
or
French Country Cooking
. On the other, some of these recipes stretched back to Bocuse and the Troisgros Brothers, and back through Fernand Point, and to Escoffier before him. I grew fascinated with the breadth of the lineage. Keith Richards plays like he does because he was dyed in the antique blues. To cook well, one should walk the same sort of reverse path. I began religiously poring through classic French cookbooks.

I went out shopping one day at local farm stands and a butcher store up the road. When I got back, I made bacon and eggs with fried tomatoes for lunch. As I ate, I realized everything on my plate had been grown within four miles of our house, and much of it had been gathered that morning. And it tasted that way. I was knocked out by the realization. I was blown away by the food itself. Each bite of the eggs, the tomatoes—these perfect foods—this was the cornerstone of everything I was doing. Each technique we’d learn going forward, each piece of information, was to be put to use in keeping intact the integrity of food just like this.

I had spent a lot of leisure time paging through those high-end cookbooks, often in amazement, sometimes incredulous over how fussy and particular the methodology was. But I understood right then why, when you had ingredients like this—a tomato that wasn’t going to get any more perfect—a person would be so ridiculously painstaking. You do not want to dilute perfection. It would be a betrayal.

It was like taking acid; my perceptions widened. On my thirty-eighth birthday, Nelly invited some people we knew in the area and
some friends from the city over. I grilled chicken with a cherry barbecue sauce I’d made. I found my focus turned entirely on the food, aware of what the chicken was doing at each moment on the grill, the progress of the color of the skin while it cooked, the feel of the chicken as it got more and more done. The chicken was free range and local; I’d brined it for an hour or so before drying it off and putting it over the heat. I waited a long time before applying the sauce, knowing it would burn easily otherwise. I began understanding that cooking was an assemblage of small steps. It was obvious, I guess, but mind-altering all the same.

Ten days after my birthday, school started up again.

When the kitchens opened for lunch, it was usually futile to try and get anything from the Asia kitchen. The line was invariably down the hall, whether it was for the Vietnamese street food on a couple days, the curry sampler on others, or sushi on different ones. The Mediterranean kitchen was still crowded, but a safer bet. I’d had some really good gnocchi with duck ragu there, and some surprisingly great thin-crust pizza, as well as nicely executed suckling pig. The Americas kitchen was the fallback. It was reliable, frequently pretty damn fine, and often the least crowded, except on fried chicken day. A few days after being back, a bunch of us had hit the Americas kitchen and were taking our plates back to the dining room. There were eight of us at a table, and most had ordered the duck with raspberry sauce and scalloped potatoes. We began eating. It was dreadful. The duck had been destroyed with heat, and then destroyed some more. It was desiccated and leathery, flavorless and tough. I watched as the others ate and screwed up their faces into expressions of complete distaste.

I took another bite, then sawed at the duck, and started getting pissed off.

“Whoever did this,” I said, “is a jackass.”

“Yeah,” Adam said. “This is pretty shameful. I can’t eat this.” He pushed it away.

“I agree,” Lombardi said. “What would happen if you took it back to the kitchen and told them it sucked? Would they give you another
entrée or something? Isn’t that actually the responsible thing to do in this case? Shouldn’t they know how bad it is?”

I took one more bite. I started gathering steam. “Fuck that. How could they not know? But seriously—what were they thinking? What were they doing?”

“Fucking it up, obviously,” Brookshire said.

“Okay, listen—” I started. I heard Brookshire mutter,
All right, here we go …

“No—listen. Consider a duck—”

Someone said, “Consider that you’ll be screwing up the duck in a few weeks, so don’t throw stones too hard.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “Who doesn’t love a duck?” People at the table next to us turned to look. “They’re cute, they’re cool to watch. They’re tasty. And—damn—this duck once walked around. It was happy. It enjoyed itself. And look at it now. This creature truly died in vain. A pointless, useless death.”

T
HE ACADEMICS WERE DONE
. I’d gotten an A– in Gastronomy, an A in Culinary Math, an A in Food Safety, and a B+ in Product Knowledge.

I stood in the hallway outside the dining room, talking to Adam. He had been appointed—no one was quite sure how—interim group leader. This meant he was the liaison between the instructors and the rest of us—about fourteen or fifteen—who’d be in the morning meat class—the first class where we’d get our hands dirty, the first in which we had to be in uniform. Depending on the group and the disposition of the leader, the job could also mean that Adam functioned as a motivator, a counselor, a giver of instructions. This is what Adam wanted. His appointment as group leader was, however, only temporary; there’d be an actual election when the basic skills classes started. Adam was breaking this down for me when he stopped in midsentence and gestured with his chin toward a man in the school’s instructor’s uniform coming toward us. The man stood over six feet, capped with a head of white hair. His hands, you noticed immediately, were massive. His face was weathered and kind. There was something weary, or sad, at play around his eyes. He looked like a fairy-tale grandfather. As he passed, he nodded and smiled at Adam.