To the Bone

by Paul Liebrandt

  Scottish Wild Wood Pigeon, Oyster Leaf, and Caviar

  This woodsy dish—in which a farce is fashioned from the liver of a wood pigeon and set between the two breasts, with a chestnut in the center, then slow poached to create a warm ballotine—evokes my first days at L’Escargot with its classic technique. The oyster leaf is from Scotland, and its salinity, along with the creaminess of the caviar, offers a perfect foil to the ballotine. The vinaigrette on the side is made from wood pigeon carcass, slow roasted with red grapes and Banyuls vinegar, and reduced to a delicious syrup.

  But his most urgent and lifesaving guidance was technical. If, for example, I was assigned the farce, or filling, for the mushroom ravioli, he’d see me standing there, lost, and demonstrate. He’d show me how to salt raw chicken to help it break down in a blender, then add egg whites and half the cream, process it, and gently fold in the remaining cream. He taught me that holding that final cream portion until the end kept me from overworking the mixture, allowing it to achieve an impossibly silky texture. Then he showed me how to pass it through a tamis (a fine-mesh sieve sometimes called a drum sieve for its shape) and how to do a test cook of the filling, to assess the flavor and texture and determine if any corrections were required. He showed me how to make the endive tarte tatin we served alongside our pigeon dish—halving and coring the vegetable, slowly caramelizing the halves in an olive oil–slicked pan, then separating the leaves and layering them in a mold, with chopped truffle in between, topping it with puff pastry, and baking to order. He showed me how to cook a sweetbread properly and how to fillet a red mullet. And he was the guy who straightened out my tragicomic foie gras deveining technique, or lack thereof.

  In a harsh and unforgiving environment, Simon showed me some human kindness. I’m not sure why he singled me out for such lifesaving attention, but I like to think it’s because he saw something in me—that chef within, that I went beyond “Oui, Chef” and asked how and why certain things were done—that indicated ambition or at least seriousness to him. In time, he became something of a big brother to me. He’d invite me to join him for the short break between lunch and dinner, and we’d grab a coffee together downstairs. When there weren’t pressing technical issues at hand, he’d recount his own professional history, telling me about his three years in France. (This was before the rise of Spain, when France was still considered the only place to go for “finishing school” as a cook.)

  Occasionally, my insouciance would betray me, as when he mentioned that friends of his had worked for Joël Robuchon and I replied, “Who’s that?”

  Simon looked at me with unmistakable horror but quickly masked it with a supportive tone.

  “He’s the best chef in the world,” he said.

  “Right,” I said, looking away sheepishly. We both laughed.

  Simon’s coolness was only magnified by his ongoing battle with the chefs, who would berate him for insisting on salting everything—from pasta water to stocks—with fleur de sel (sea salt), which they believed should only be used as a finishing agent. Though he’d been admonished many times not to do it, he would surreptitiously continue the practice when nobody was looking. “In France,” he’d tell me, “they season everything with sea salt.” Today, as a chef-owner in my own right, I see that he and his higher-ups were both correct: the gentle salinity of sea salt is almost always a better choice, but the expense requires that one pick the times when it really matters to use it. In hindsight it was my first lesson in the decisions foisted on us by the intersection of cooking and commerce.

  Another constant reminder of that delicate balance was the restaurant’s nonexistent family meal—industry-speak for the nightly staff meal. While respectable employee meals are de rigueur in most upscale restaurants today, at L’Escargot, they were an afterthought. Often, a cook would be sent to a market around the corner, then return with Snickers bars that he dispensed to the rest of us, to fuel us for the long service ahead. (I’d often supplement these after work with a carbo-load of Walkers potato chips.) Here, too, Simon taught me a trick: we’d help ourselves to pieces of bread that nobody would miss from the waiters’ station and dip them in the pot of tempered chocolate at the pastry chef’s station. It wasn’t much, but it was better than a Snickers bar, warm and sophisticated, and it had the extra benefit of annoying Bernard, the pastry chef, who’d often return to his station to find bread crumbs in the chocolate.

  As a cook, a working student of the plate, Simon was an inspiration to me, somebody who I wanted to emulate and impress. And the example he set went beyond the culinary: understanding the path he’d taken, from L’Escargot to other restaurants and back again with new knowledge, was crucial to me understanding the path I’d need to take. There’s no one way to become a chef. Yes, there are cooking schools, but the real things are learned on the job, in restaurants, cooking under pressure. And there’s no set amount of time to be at any one job—some guys work for years under one chef, while others move along to the next adventure every twelve months like clockwork. Both approaches can work. The thing is to know what you’re after and when and where you want to go to achieve it.

  But such decisions were a ways off for me. For the time being, I was at L’Escargot and, as time marched by, I got into the rhythm of the working day and week, arriving at a point where I could hold my own and start to learn things about who I was as a cook. I realize now that my predilection for visual, graphic food was already present. The chefs’ little foie gras and duck terrine glazed with a gelée made from Sauternes lodged in my memory (today I serve a foie gras that’s coated with a hibiscus-beet gelée). The beautiful pastries that Bernard turned out, such as a raspberry soufflé and lemon tart, spoke to me with their brilliant colors and precise shapes (you could set a level atop his soufflé and have it register as perfectly straight). From afar, I admired much that went on at the hot station as well—especially the skilled, precise butchery and cooking of fish, such as rouget, watching as the cooks took the fillets off the bone, gently trimmed the fish, removed the pinbones, then very delicately cooked the fillets, skin side down, to achieve an almost glass-like finish on the skin.

  As my culinary aptitude swelled, I began to develop predilections, not for things I liked to eat (because, ironically, I still scarcely got to eat anything) but for things I liked to cook. One of the first things I came to love making, almost from the first time I did it, was pasta. The tactile pleasure, the downright sensuousness of making the dough, kneading it, then rolling and cutting it—I loved the entire process and was able to lose myself in it entirely. (No wonder I’d been so taken with the woman preparing wontons years earlier during family trips to Chinatown.)

  One of the first pastas I made was a sweetbread and morel ravioli. The satisfaction of starting with a handful of ingredients—flour, egg, sweetbreads, morels, butter, herbs—during the groggy, early-morning hours, and dispatching the finished dish during dinner service never got old. Decades removed from that kitchen, I could prepare it for you perfectly today because the steps are emblazoned in my mind and muscles. First, you sauté diced morels with minced shallots, garlic, and picked thyme leaves, then set the pan aside, off the heat. Quickly, you take pinky-size bits of sweetbread, dust them in flour with a pinch of curry powder, and sauté them in foaming butter just until bronzed. You add the sweetbreads to the morels, along with some chicken mousse, and fold them together to bind them; then spoon the mixture onto a ravioli circle, set the top on it, and crimp the two together. Amazingly, we made the ravioli to order, and the dish was rounded out with a quick glaze of truffle butter, some sautéed morels, and spears of turned asparagus, and finished tableside by a spoon-over of asparagus “cappuccino.”

  It was also about this time that I began to realize a curious thing about myself: I was a bit clumsy with the cooking basics but had a natural aptitude for more complicated technical work. Ask me to fry an egg, and the results would be inelegant. But ask me to make some tortellini, and I’d pick up on it in a snap—fil
ling, folding, and twisting the little parcels with the efficiency and consistency of a machine. The chefs suspected I must have been trained to do it in Italy, but I had never made them before in my life. The same went with pastry, which figured in to some of my hot-appetizer preparations: where most young cooks take time to develop the tactile memory to make perfect dough, my fingers picked it up all at once.

  I came to believe that, while I wasn’t sure I had a special gift for cooking, I was born with a certain feeling for food, a unique way of perceiving it and a natural affinity for working with it in certain ways. It’s not an intellectual or thought-related skill set, but rather a simple animal attraction to the tasks that appealed to my senses, that pleased and calmed me, that gave me the same feeling of being close to a loved one, of being at home.

  I was an anonymous worker bee, but I was developing the pride of a chef in certain dishes every time I put one up on the pass. It’s worth mentioning, however, that becoming a true chef, while it was my inspiration, was the furthest thing from my mind. Here again, I come to the military analogy: a fine-dining environment like L’Escargot teaches you to cook, and that’s it. You are not there to think for or about yourself. You are a cell in an organism, a member of a team, and it’s the kitchen and the food—the mission—that counts, and nothing else. Seeds for future dishes may have been planted in those days, but I wasn’t thinking about what my own style might look and taste like, or anything of the sort. I was interested in only two things—survival and learning my craft.

  Not only did an attitude like this teach me well, but it trains the overwhelming majority of cooks for their careers. I’m fortunate to have ultimately become a chef, but simple mathematics dictates that most people who cook for a living will spend much of their lives as just that—cooks, not chefs—and that’s fine.

  One of the aspects of life at L’Escargot that I came to be most fond of was the one that so horrified me initially: the barracks, which I came to appreciate for a number of reasons. When you choose the cooking life, you remove yourself from many of the rites of passage that most people take for granted, and the barracks helped make up for that loss with an alternate-universe variation. Having decided against college, I deprived myself of the social conventions that would have helped me develop as an individual, such as the dorm-room rap sessions, impromptu parties, and the like. These cooks had carefully defined identities, which helped immunize them to the rigors of the scene, evident in the proliferation of tattoos, piercings, facial hair, and other aggressive declarations of confidence. (When I took the job at L’Escargot, I had taken to wearing mostly black clothing and pulling my shoulder-length hair back in a ponytail; I fit right in.)

  In the barracks, I also came to learn that each cook was partially defined by his taste in music. Bernard blasted French death metal (yes, there is such a thing) from his room; another cook listened to country western, usually and mercifully through a set of headphones. As I began to mature, my tastes expanded to include contemporary and alternative bands such as The Sisters of Mercy, Fields of the Nephilim, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, and The Jesus and Mary Chain. In time, I even came to listen to American rap pioneers such as Public Enemy and N.W.A, groups that none of my friends, or anybody else I knew in London, were even aware of, but that, despite the seeming incongruity, spoke to me with their own distinct brand of alienation.

  Each cook also had his own favorite cookbooks, and we’d sometimes share them with each other. The awe that aspiring chefs heap on a top toque’s cookbook is something to behold. I remember gathering with my coworkers, looking over a beloved classic or a just-published recipe tome, ogling and talking about food photographs with the hushed reverence most teenagers reserve for centerfolds, our eyes caressing the images, our minds overflowing with possibilities. In addition to the perennial White Heat, Ferran Adrià’s book about the food of the Mediterranean (El Bulli: el sabor del Mediterráneo), published in 1993, had caught my eye and admiration. He wasn’t known in London yet, and was just beginning to find the style that would make him a legend, but his food was already very interesting and compelling.

  Less healthy, but no less a part of the atmosphere, were the crew’s after-hours drinking binges, of which I was a sometimes participant. One of the unfortunate by-products of the celebrity-chef phenomenon is the glamorization of the social lives of cooks. The exploits of toques have become known to even the most casual observer of my industry, and chefs have developed a reputation as rowdy party boys.

  The general public finds this entertaining, and young cooks find it appealing, a convention that they feel gives them license to indulge. But there are profound reasons for this aspect of the chef’s life that ought to be considered. For most cooks, the day begins early in the morning and doesn’t end until well past midnight—bruising hours that normal working people endure only at the height of major projects or deadlines. Most of those hours are passed in the physical company of others but in reality are relentlessly isolating. The business of prep demands unfailing attention to detail and almost absurd repetition. A young cook might perform the same mundane tasks—peeling and turning a particular vegetable, or shelling and cleaning langoustines—up to fifty times a day for months on end.

  Service ups the stakes. One has to maintain a rhythm from the first order to the last, turning out a handful of dishes with robotic consistency. The ultimate paradox of the cooking life is that for all of the labor and concentration that goes into the production of each dish, the finished product should look elegant, effortless, almost as though it sprang to life, fully formed, on the plate, without the aid of human thought or hands.

  To produce that effect never ceases to be stressful. Just as a Broadway diva will confess to nausea in the moments before a performance, any honest chef will tell you that he still feels the flutter of butterflies when the first orders of the night roll into the kitchen. Stress isn’t unique to chefs, but cooks are deprived of the social conventions of most workplaces: the watercooler chitchat, lunch breaks, and so on that help a great many people get through their days. Moreover, in the time when I came up, if you made a decision to become a cook, to pursue The Food, you essentially committed to shutting off your life for a few years, subordinating the development of your personality to the gathering of knowledge and the honing of technique. As a result, we essentially end up stuffing a full day’s worth of socializing into those few, precious hours between when we’ve wiped down our stations and when we turn in for the night, which is also the only time you are able to uncork your true personality, to stop being a soldier and be a person again, to reconnect with yourself. Another less-positive side to the need for release: occasionally, if two colleagues had had a contentious night in the kitchen, we staged our own version of Fight Club, standing around in a circle as they worked out their differences.

  Put another way, the discipline that we exhibit in the kitchen is the untold story behind the excesses that are often displayed outside of it. Much as I love the life, I have to admit that cooking can strip one emotionally bare. You have to prove yourself not just every day, but in every task and in every dish put up on the pass. There is nowhere to hide as a cook, no opportunity to phone it in, not even for an instant. If you let up, lower your standards, or just plain get lazy, you will be found out, if not by the chef, then by the customer who sends your work back. As a young cook, you are constantly reminded of this—either getting savaged by the chef yourself or witnessing one of your comrades in arms getting ripped by the boss—and you are only as good as the last dish you put out.

  For all of these reasons, the nightly decompression that takes place after service is an essential part of a cook’s life, a necessary release of tension and a chance to share the feeling that, after surviving a night together, you’re on R&R, savoring a well-earned break. That said, it must be acknowledged that some chefs have difficulty calibrating their celebration. The stories of drinking, drugs, and philandering in my industry are all true, and not nearly as glamorous
or funny as they’re often made out to be. Mostly they are tragic, ending or interrupting careers, or branding a cook with a hard-to-shake reputation.

  Still, the moments of toil and release create a bond between chefs. Indeed, many of my most cherished professional memories are of the silent moments after service, looking up from scrubbing my station or from a just-cracked-open beer, and catching the eye of a kitchen mate in an infinitesimal, wordless glance that says, “We did it. We pulled it off … again.” Those nights weren’t the norm. Oftentimes after service, all any of us wanted to do was to get into the barracks and crash, banking as much sleep as possible between the end of dinner service and the commencement of prep in the morning.

  But the upstairs kitchen was closed on Sunday and Monday, and so Saturday nights were special, a weekly party such as only professional cooks could throw. Throughout the day, a member of each station would make or stash a few extra portions of whatever he wanted to share with the others. Bernard might produce a few extra chocolate tarts; the meat cook would reserve some foie gras trim or duck breast. As for me, I’d gather up some pommes dauphinoise or another garnish that we wouldn’t keep after the weekend because it wouldn’t survive the two days of cold storage.

  Around one thirty or two o’clock in the morning, once the last of us had finished scrubbing down his station and the unit had reconstituted at the barracks, we’d bust out all those things and have a feast. The meat guy would sauté the duck, I’d cook the potatoes or risotto, Bernard would bring the tarts or some such, and one guy would go out and buy an ungodly amount of beer. Then we’d lay it all out on the one table we had for ourselves, sit around, fire up the telly, and unwind almost until sunup.