Heat (19 page)

Next, you add a flavor, an herb or citrus: orange zest for the tortelloni (or five sage leaves for the lune, or five scallions for the mezzelune—something strong but simple). You take the pan, which now looks pretty disgusting—a pool of cloudy pasta water, a lump of butter melting along the rim, some desiccated orangey twigs—and put it on the flattop and swirl. You check the basket in the pasta cooker: a few tortelloni have risen. You go back to the pan and swirl it. The contents have changed. With the heat and the pan movement, they are a yellow-orange soup (yellowish from the butter, orange-ish from the zest). You recheck your basket: the tortelloni are floating. You go back to the pan and swirl it again—almost ready, looking like a custard. But three more orders come in, you deal with them, and by the time you get back to the pan, just thirty seconds later, the liquid is mottled: still a sauce but a diseased one, very ugly, not something you want to eat. It is now broken. To fix it, you give the pan another tong flick of water (or perhaps a few tong flicks, until one lands) and return it to the flattop, and with one miraculous swirl the mottled texture melts away.

This is an emulsion: an agreement between two unlike elements (butter and water), achieved by heat and motion. If you get it slightly wrong—as when the sauce starts to dry out, destroying the balance between the fat and the liquid—the unlike elements pull apart and break up. Sometimes, during slow moments, I deliberately let my sauce get ugly, so I could witness its snapping back into condition with a small flick of water, like an animated chemistry lesson. Once, I was caught in mid-reverie.

I was making a mushroom sauce that illustrated two things that were characteristic of the station: how to use heat and how to stop it. Like most sauces, this one was prepared in two stages and used only a few ingredients: mushrooms (yellowfeet, although any wild mushroom works), some fresh thyme leaves, a finely chopped shallot, a little butter. To begin, you needed lots of heat. You put your pan on the flattop until it got really hot, until it darkened, until it seemed as though it might start melting, and then you splashed it with olive oil—the pan went smoky very quickly—followed by the mushrooms. Then: nothing. You didn’t move the pan until you detected the sweet wood smoke smell of the mushrooms caramelizing. The mushrooms now had a crunchy, sugary crust, not burned but on the verge of burning. You sprinkled the pan with the shallots and thyme, held it until they reacted to the high heat, and then shoveled in enough pasta water to stop the cooking: the pan hissed, steamed, and went quiet. That was Stage One: from high heat to no heat. Stage Two was when the order was fired. You retrieved the pan and made an emulsion: the butter, the swirling-swirling routine, until the mushroom water became a sauce sticky enough to adhere to a pasta.

The reverie occurred at the end of Stage One, when I lifted the pan off the flattop and sprinkled it with the thyme. What can I say? I loved this moment. For a few seconds, nothing happened. The leaves were on the hot metal of the pan, taking in the heat. Then, one by one, they swelled, barely perceptibly, and exploded, a string of tiny explosions, like minuscule pieces of herby popcorn. And with each pop there was an aromatic eruption of thyme. I closed my eyes and put my face into the pan, breathing in the exploding herb leaves. I don’t know how long I stood there.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

I opened my eyes. It was Frankie.

“What the fuck are you doing?” He was standing inches from my face. The others were staring at me.

“I like the smell of the popping thyme,” I said weakly. I was expecting scorn or a string of profanities, mockery at the very least. Instead, Frankie seemed surprised and didn’t know quite what to say. His face became soft and puppy-dog-like.

“Oh, well, then,” he said, finally. “That’s all right.” I think he was embarrassed.

I
N ALL THESE DISHES
was an ingredient you can’t get at home: the restaurant’s pasta water. At the start of the evening, it was perfectly clear—you could see through it to the shiny bottom of the pasta cooker—and very salty. (“Like the sea,” Mario always said, and then reminded you to keep dipping your finger into the boiling water, tasting it and adjusting it, until it evoked a childhood memory of your first trip to the beach, but I never mastered the quick dip or, for that matter, thought of my childhood—only that I’d just burned my finger again.) Midway through the service, the shiny bottom of the pasta cooker disappeared. This was the cloudy phase, about two hours before the muddy one, when the water ceased being normal water and became an increasingly thick vehicle for soluble starch: yucky-sounding (and yucky-looking) but in fact rather wonderful. By the time the water reached this condition it behaved like a sauce thickener, binding the elements and, in effect, flavoring the pasta with the flavor of itself. Even so, there was no escaping the fact that the water the pasta was cooked in at the end of the night was very different from what it had been at, say, six o’clock. (“I would never,” Elisa confessed once, “order a pasta after ten.”) Just how different was evident when you finally had to clean the “bitch,” as the pasta cooker was called when you finally got to know her—my task, and an indication of my position in the hierarchy. Later, it slipped out that, when I wasn’t there, I was known as the “kitchen bitch.” Nice touch, I thought, as I mulled over the relationship between my status and my end-of-the-day responsibility: the kitchen bitch, cleaning the kitchen’s bitch.

For all that, it was a straightforward contraption. After you removed the pasta baskets, it was just two sinks and a large, gas-fired heating element. The difficulty was in what you found at the bottom of the sinks—usually a layered expression of the restaurant’s archaeology, composed of, say, goat cheese (because the tortelloni always leaked), butternut squash (because the lune lost a little as well), and tiny bits of everything else, including shellfish (where did they swim in from?). Also, the cooker was hot—furnace hot. Even when the heating element was turned off, it remained very hot, and the green abrasive “scrubby” that you used to clean it steamed on contact, softened slowly, and eventually started to cook, like a piece of plastic ravioli. It’s not that you get hot, cleaning the bitch; you just don’t cool down. You’re already very hot and have been very hot for many hours. I have never been so hot. It would take hours before my body temperature started to drop. At four in the morning, when I finally went to bed, I continued to radiate heat, my insides a meaty something still cooking, my mind unable to stop the recurrent thought that this was my life: I’d become a sausage.

Why don’t more people use pasta water at home? Sometimes I thought it should be bottled, because there is no way that your home water could ever achieve the starchy viscosity of a restaurant’s. It would be cheap—being liquidy leftovers—and the jar should be very large, probably darkly tinted, like a wine bottle, because there would be no reward in looking too closely at what was floating inside.

The thought also made me curious about the moment in the history of American cooking when efficiency won out over taste and, instead of using a pair of tongs and pulling the spaghetti straight out of the pot, people started using a colander (an evil instrument) and letting all that dense, murky rich “water” rush down the drain. The practice is described in the original, 1931 edition of
The Joy of Cooking,
in its “Rules for Boiling Spaghetti, Macaroni, Creamettes and Noodles,” along with the even more alarming one of taking your colander full of spaghetti (rather mushy, since you’ve boiled it for an hour) or macaroni (easy to chew, after being boiled for twenty minutes) or creamettes (no longer a supermarket item, alas, but once the essential ingredient in a baked creamette loaf) and rinsing it in cold water—oh, heresy of heresies—just to make sure nothing is clinging to it. I hold the author responsible for the many plates of sauce-heavy spaghetti that, as a feature of my own American childhood, were prepared by my mother, who was born two years after the cookbook was published. To be fair to both my mother and the author, a plate of spaghetti with meat sauce remains an eternal comfort food, even if the meal was not about the pasta. Still, the cultural disregard for the noodle contributed to my ignorance of it. It also contributed to my prejudice about dried pasta, a prejudice that I finally overcame in an epiphany of sorts.

The occasion was an impromptu late-night family meal—two family meals, actually. The first was a gigantic pan of linguine alle vongole (linguine with clams), which Mark was making for the runners and dishwashers (each one took a plate and put a bowl on top to keep it warm, and then hid it behind a pot or underneath a towel—too busy finishing up to eat the food now but too mistrustful of others to leave it out). The second meal was prepared by me, a bowl of steamed cockles for the restaurant manager and wine steward: the executives in charge and entitled, by virtue of their positions, to be served at a table out front.

I’d become curious about the difference between cockles and clams. Historically, cockles are the larger of the two shellfish and found around the Mediterranean. Clams, which proliferate along the New England coast, tend to be everything else. Generally, if you’re perplexed by a shellfish, call it a clam. In practice, the two names are used interchangeably; at Babbo, they were interchangeable, because they were the same shellfish and came neither from the Mediterranean nor from New England but from New Zealand, every Monday and Thursday morning. These New Zealand “cockle-clams” were small, purple, and round, and prized for their uniformity: no variation in shape, no variation in cooking time, which, with your burner on at full blast, was exactly six minutes, a little less than the six minutes and thirty seconds it took to cook the linguine which, it turns out, wasn’t actually linguine, which takes nine minutes, but linguine
fine
(a thin, faster-cooking cousin). Frankly, I hated both shellfish dishes. The preparations were so fussy: one (“Ling!”) was started with garlic, red onions, and red pepper flakes; the other (“Cock!”) with garlic, red onions, and slices of a fiery green pepper. Green pepper? Red pepper? Do you think you’d taste the difference? One took butter, the other didn’t. One took white wine, the other tomato sauce. One finished with parsley, the other with Thai basil. Why Thai basil? Why does parsley work with New Zealand cockle-clams when they’re called clams and served atop pasta but not when they’re called cockles and served in a bowl without it? And, for that matter, why was I preparing cockles anyway? Where was the pasta? Why? Why? You know why.

By now, I had flash cards for all the restaurant’s preparations and lost a morning memorizing the supposed and, to my mind, wholly contrived differences between Ling and Cock. It wasn’t that I was having trouble remembering which was which—after all, it was the same shellfish in both dishes. I was having trouble doing that instantaneous, unreflected recall required by the pasta station. You got in trouble and fell behind if you switched your pan from your left hand to your right (it took too much time); you got in trouble if you had to look for your tongs (too much time); you got in trouble if you had to ask or wonder or remember, so you aspired to have everything memorized on such a deep level—like language or the alphabet or numbers—that you never found yourself thinking. Also, frankly, I didn’t get the point of putting shellfish in pasta. You can’t eat the shells, can you? And the eating was all so elaborate. You needed a bib, an extra plate, a finger bowl, an extra napkin, and an extra quantity of vigilance just to make sure that you didn’t stick a shell in your mouth. It seemed a hygienic exercise, like bathing—in any case, not dinner.

I had another realization that night, which arose from my noticing that, when it gets late, the cooking that matters is for the staff and not for the diners who have just straggled in. Around midnight, the kitchen was something of a demilitarized zone, meant to be closed but still serving food, owing to the insistence of the maître d’, John Mainieri, who sometimes accepted late seatings and was openly loathed by members of the kitchen staff as a result: they hissed at his appearance, whistled, and erupted in a braying chorus of posh-sounding “Hallo!”s (a distressing thing for me to witness, not least because I was fond of John). In general, it is possible to argue your way into a restaurant just as the kitchen is closing. But I urge you, the next time you find yourself trying to persuade a maître d’ to accommodate you—bowing abjectly and apologizing, citing the traffic, the crowds‚ a fluent stream of obsequious servility, a crisp banknote in your palm—to recognize that the members of the kitchen know you’re there. They are waiting for your order, huddled around the ticker-tape machine, counting the seconds, and heaping imprecations on your head because you cannot make up your mind. They are speculating—will it be something light, a single course, perhaps? (“That’s what I’d order,” someone says, and everyone else loudly agrees.) Will I be able to drain the pasta machine? Will the grill guy be able to turn off the burners? Or will the diners—and late ones are referred to simply as “those fuckers”—be so clueless as to order a five-course tasting menu? It happens, and the response of the kitchen—a bellowing roar of disgust—is so loud everyone in the restaurant must hear it. By now the kitchen is different. At eleven, beer is allowed, and for nearly an hour the cooks have been drinking. The senior figures have disappeared: Andy is downstairs doing something with a computer; Frankie is doing something in the walk-in. No one is in charge. The people remaining are tired and dirty. The floors are greasy and wet—this is when the walk-in door swings open and someone is suddenly airborne. The pasta machine is so thick and crud-filled that the water has turned purple and is starting to foam. Do you need more details? Let me rephrase the question: Do you think, if your meal is the last order received by the kitchen, that it has been cooked with love?

But then—in the rush to clean up, the washing, scrubbing, mopping; the search for one-quart containers (why are there never enough one-quart containers?); the crash of a tray; the speed with which you clear away the food at your station, wrapping up some, throwing away most, including the ingredients needed to cook that tardy, last remaining order (sorry, Jack, that’s what you get for showing up so late); the trash talk about the maître d’, who has returned to see if there’s a family meal; the persistent hunger of the dishwashers (they have nothing at home); the late-night, slightly blurry, slightly drunken frenzy of a kitchen closing up, wanting to be done, wanting to get out—amid all this, I got the point of pasta with clams.