Heat (12 page)

Four.
Once the ribs are cool, you discover that the bones have loosened themselves from the meat and come right out. You also discover that what’s left is really quite ugly. It consists of two parts: a muscly tendon of some kind (the texture is not unlike a baseball catcher’s mitt) that is smooshed, by way of a fatty sinew, to the meat. The two parts can be pulled apart by hand. The bit that looks like a catcher’s mitt is, in addition to being very ugly, entirely inedible. With great pleasure, you throw this away. The other bit is quite yummy, although you need to trim it into a rectangle, eliminating any fatty goo. But, curiously, mixed in with your good short ribs are a number of mutants. In these, for some reason, there is no distinction between the two parts, the bad and good bits (that is, catcher’s mitt and dinner). They’re all mushed together, and you can’t pull them apart without tearing the thing to shreds, which is what you do: tear the thing to shreds to find some something, anything really, that Cesar can use to make the family meal with.

Five.
Assembly. Your meat is now arranged like so many dead toy soldiers, neatly tidied up. The sauce has been skimmed of fat and reduced to something that could be described as the food equivalent of most male movie stars: dark, rich, and thick. Everything is ready. Next you want to put it away in a fashion that allows you to retrieve it quickly, blast it in an oven, and serve: say, six short ribs in a half-hotel pan (which isn’t a pan, either, but a tray, and is half the size of the full hotel not-actually-a-pan-but-a-tray pan, or in normal life what you cook brownies in), pour some sauce on top to keep the meat moist, and bundle the whole thing up first with plastic wrap, then with foil, tightly, tightly, so that, once stacked on the floor of the walk-in, it can be stepped on (and in the frantic rush of service, things happen—they always happen) without short-rib juice squirting out and adhering to the bottom of your shoes, leaving a disgraceful track to the toilet when you finally get a chance to go. What you now have is a wholly typical restaurant preparation, in which most of the work is done long before the dish is even ordered (and if a restaurant can do it, why can’t you?). It keeps for a week.

These steps—brown meat, make a liquid, cook meat in it, remove it, and reduce the liquid until it’s a sauce—are the same for every braised dish everywhere. Lamb shanks are done this way; so, too, are lamb shoulders, veal shanks, wild boar hams, venison shoulders: it’s all the same.

Then, on December 2, 2003, a modest proposal, with potentially historic implications, was made by the Babbo meat supplier, Pat La Frieda. He asked Elisa if she wanted to experiment with chuck flaps.

“What’s a chuck flap?” she asked.

“It’s like a short rib without a short rib,” he said.

“A short rib without a short rib? You mean, you don’t have any ugly ones that you have to throw away?”

“Exactly, it’s like the perfect short rib—the dream short rib, the short rib from Heaven, the Platonic ideal of a short rib—but without a short rib.”

And so, for the first time in five years, on the following Thursday, the Babbo winter menu didn’t have short ribs on it. It had chuck flaps. The dish was still called “Brasato al Barolo” (why change now?), and, to my palate, there wasn’t a lot of difference in the taste, although I’ve since wondered if the sauce, without the short rib bones to enrich it, hadn’t lost some intensity. Of course, nobody knows what a chuck flap is or where it might be located. Even so, Tom Valenti liked it. Not long after Elisa’s menu change, he dined at Babbo on his night off and was particularly taken by the chuck flap. Who knows?

And so the short rib ends with a new beginning. Or so I thought. But recently I happened upon an account, published in 1979 by the English cookery writer Jane Grigson, of her efforts to re-create dishes cited by Proust in
À la recherche du temps perdu.
The second volume of Proust’s novel begins with a dinner featuring
boeuf à la mode,
what Grigson describes as a slowly braised secondary cut of beef served in its own jelly. A secondary cut is anything not fancy, and several of them work in the dish. Grigson prefers one that’s shipped to her by Charles MacSween & Son in Edinburgh. This is how she describes it: “The special cut is the long lean muscle from the inside of the blade bone, known by many names, principally as the shoulder fillet, but also as the salmon cut or fish tail. I first saw it in our butcher’s shop in France, and cannot understand why English butchers do not provide it.” A long lean muscle from inside the blade bone? I went to Benny, my butcher, and asked if he had a name for such a cut. “Well,” he said, “there are several possibilities. It could be a mush steak or a flat square or even a Scotch tender. Then again, it might be the chuck flap.” A chuck flap? The implications are interesting: Babbo’s Brasato al Barolo is not only made neither with Barolo nor in Piemonte: it’s French.

T
HEN, WORKING ALONGSIDE
Mario one evening, I boldly asked a question that would change my life. I recalled a suggestion he’d made, that at some point I might try being a line cook. When can I start? I asked him.

“What about now?” He addressed the grill cook. “Mark, move over. As of tonight, you’re training a new person.”

L
INE
C
OOK

Imagine a large kitchen at the moment of a great dinner. See twenty chefs coming and going in a cauldron of heat. Picture a great mass of charcoal, a cubic meter in size, for the cooking of entrees, and yet another mass for making the soups, the sauces, and the ragouts, and yet another for frying and for the water baths. Add to that a heap of burning wood for four spits, each one turning, one bearing a sirloin weighing forty-five to sixty pounds, another with a piece of veal weighing thirty-five to forty-five pounds, and another two for the the fowl and game. In this furnace, everyone moves with speed; not a sound is heard: only the chef has a right to speak and at the sound of my voice everyone obeys. Finally the last straw: all the windows are closed so that the air does not cool the dishes as they are being served. Thus, we spend the best years of our lives. We must obey even when our strength fails us, but it is the burning charcoal that kills us. Does it matter? The shorter the life, the greater the glory.

—ANTONIN CARÊME, 1833

Cooking is the most massive rush. It’s like having the most amazing hard on, with Viagra sprinkled on top of it, and it’s still there twelve hours later.

—GORDON RAMSEY, 2003

9

T
HE GRILL STATION
is hell. You stand at it for five minutes and you think: So this is what Dante had in mind. It is in a dark, hot corner—hotter than any other spot in the kitchen; hotter than anywhere else in your life. Recently air-conditioning was installed in the kitchen, but there is none over the grill during service: how else can it maintain its consistent hot temperature? The light is bad, for no sensible reason except that there isn’t enough of it, reinforcing a feeling of a place where no one wants to be—too greasy, too unpleasant. What light there is seems to come from the flames themselves: they are lit about an hour before the service starts and remain burning for the next eight hours. I hadn’t thought through the implications of learning the station. I never projected myself into this corner, doing its tasks. Mario said go there; I went and crossed the wall of heat I’d once erected in my mind, feeling the sudden rise in temperature as a crackling sensation on my skin. Close up, Mark Barrett, who had been told to teach me the job, reminded me of a person from another era. His hands had a nineteenth-century griminess. His fingernails were crescent moons of black cake. His forearms were hairless and ribbed with purple burns. His eyes were magnified—he blinked distortedly behind big-framed glasses—and his nose, still bandaged from being broken, was streaked with sooty streams of grease. He could have been a nearsighted chimney sweep. He smelled of sweat.

Mark described the station. There were two cooking devices besides the grill. An oven was to your right to finish the cooking of large items, like a three-inch-thick steak (first on the grill, then in the oven), and a flattop was to the left for preparing the
contorni
—the accompaniments, the rest of the stuff that went on the plate. Mark gestured behind him, at a display of nearly a hundred different small trays of food: herbs, green beans, artichoke hearts, beets, and who knows what else—lots of red and green and yellow. I took them in and thought: never in my lifetime. I looked back at the corner. I was hemmed in by heat. “Watch your jacket,” Mark warned. “If you have your back to the grill, the threads melt and stick to your skin.” He proposed dividing the duties: he’d do the plating, and I could run the grill. He added that dividing them was the practice of most restaurants, anyway.

I was thrilled. Didn’t this mean I would be cooking
all
the meat in the restaurant? (Didn’t it also mean I wouldn’t have to learn the contorni?)

Mark explained the drill. Because meat needed to rest, it was cooked the moment an order came in, even if it wasn’t needed for another hour. (Later, when the order was “fired,” the meat would be rapidly reheated and plated.) Orders were called out by the expediter, which was Andy five nights a week and one of the sous-chefs, Memo or Frankie, on the other nights, and the person at each station shouted them back in confirmation. “Two Chinos,” Andy would say, the kitchen shorthand for the pasta-tasting menu, and Nick would answer, “Two Chinos.” Or Andy would say, “Followed by Love, Sweetie, Butt,” meaning that the next course was a pasta called love letters, an order of sweetbreads, and a halibut, and the pasta chef would answer back, “Love,” and Dom, the sauté chef, would answer, “Sweetie, Butt”—a sequence of words which, if listened to with any detachment, seemed to constitute a narrative in their own right. Or: “Bar loser, tender,” which meant that there was a person at the bar alone (the loser) who had ordered a pork tenderloin.

I shouted back and removed the pork from a “lowboy” refrigerator underneath the display of contorni. Everything was designed to minimize movement, so you could pivot like a basketball player on your planted foot. Raw meat went onto one tray, where I seasoned both sides with salt and pepper. Once cooked, the meat went onto another tray, to rest. The idea was that, at any moment, I should be able to see everything that had been ordered, cooked or not. On the floor was a large plastic bucket of hot soapy water. “Your hands will be covered with oil and fat, and you need to dip them in water to prevent food from slipping through your fingers,” Mark said. “Unfortunately, it’s usually too busy to change the water.” After an hour or so, the water was neither warm nor sudsy. Actually, after an hour or so, the water was not something I wanted to look at, and I closed my eyes when I dipped my hands into it. By the end of the evening, I stopped: my hands seemed greasier after I washed them.

The branzino, which was regarded as the simplest item on the menu, was my first nightmare. The fish (a Mediterranean sea bass) had already been cleaned by someone in the prep kitchen and stuffed with fennel and roasted garlic. The difficulty was the cooking.

The grill was the size of an oven top, with flames coming up from long gas jets, and the fish was put on it at an angle. The angle was important: in the beginning, the fish pointed to the right-hand corner. This was the practice for the meats as well—cooked on the diagonal, always pointing northeast. Once it had cooked, you turned it ninety degrees, which gave it a crusty skin and a grill’s crisscrossing hatch marks. This also helped you to know where your meat was at any moment. Stage one: pointing to the right. Stage two: pointing to the left. Stage three: flipped over, still pointing to the left. The last stage, pointing back to the right. It seems obvious, but when the grill gets busy you need the obvious. With the branzino, you did the crisscrossing turn with a pair of tongs, by slipping one tong into the opened cavity and pinching the fish with the other tong from the top (not unlike grabbing a shoe from a fire, although I hated doing it at first, feeling irrationally that I was hurting the fish). Once one side was done, you gently rolled the fish over to cook the other side. The tricky part was the last stage, when you grabbed the head with a towel, slipped one of the tongs underneath the tail, and lifted it to get the final hatch marks. Three things could go wrong. If done lurchingly, the fish broke in half. If done too soon, the skin stuck to the grill. And if done too slowly, your arms went up in flames.

On my first night, a lot of branzino was ordered. By seven o’clock, the hair on my arms had disappeared, except for one straggly patch by my elbow, which had melted into black goo. I broke many fish. Mark’s calculation was that twenty-one had been ordered, but thirty-nine had been cooked. For some reason, I couldn’t get the hang of diving into an open flame and grabbing a fish by its head. I panicked. I did it too slowly. Then I did it too fast. There were bits of fish flesh everywhere. Before I could go home that night, I was told to walk around the kitchen holding a branzino in my tongs. This made me feel stupid. Everyone else was very busy, and I was walking in circles with a raw fish. But by the second night I seemed to be getting it—such is the miraculous pedagogy of relentless repetition. After fifty or so branzino, even
I
figured out how to cook one.