The people and stories portrayed in this book are all true; however, the author has changed the names of a few of those people in an effort to minimize intrusions on their privacy.
Copyright © 2011 by Jonathan Dixon
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.clarksonpotter.com
CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dixon, Jonathan.
Beaten, seared, and sauced / Jonathan Dixon. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Dixon, Jonathan. 2. Cooks—United States—Biography.
3. Culinary Institute of America. I. Title.
TX649.D59 A3 2011
641.5092—dc22 2010040145
[B]
eISBN: 978-0-307-95334-6
Design by Stephanie Huntwork
Jacket photographs © Jetta Productions; David Atkinson (chef);
Rubberball/Mike Kemp (egg)
v3.1
For Jane and Peter Dixon
And for Nelly Reifler
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANK YOU TO DAVE Larabell, my agent. Thank you to Rica Allannic, my editor. I owe both of you a huge debt of gratitude.
And thank you to everyone who directly impacted this entire experience: Adam Kuban, Gail Rundle, John J. Singer Jr., Barbara Ryan, Anna Dixon Lassoff, Dave Lassoff, Sam and Niloufer Reifler, Jenefer Shute, Susan Daitch, Lauren Cerand, Lesley Porcelli, Deborah Finkel, Adam Walker, Gerard Viverito, Robert Perillo, Irena Chalmers, Ben Smith, Lee Greenfeld, Chesley Hicks, Lacy Shutz, Ian Bickford, Dwayne Motley, Laura Wallis, Jay Cooper, Jill Olson, Elizabeth Albert, Erik Satre, Andrew Lindsay Cohen, Sarah Prouty, Ryan Carey, all the Pownal WW crew, and Bob Miller.
And of course, Dan C., Margo G., Stephen P., Bruce P., Micah M., Rocco P., Gabi C., Jessica S., Max S., Brian T., Carol J., Jackie Y., Mike O., Diego F., Greg L., Jeremy D., Kevin S., Zach L., Natasha M., Sam G., Sammy S., Gio A., Mike B., Sasha G., Jeff S., Sitti S., Evan B., Dimitri K., Joe C., and Leo R.: gracias to all of you.
I want to acknowledge Michael Ruhlman’s excellent book, The Making of a Chef, which looked at the day to day workings of the Culinary Institute of America’s curriculum with a more microscopic, objective eye than I achieved in mine. My goal was to supplement Michael Ruhlman and not to supplant him.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
1
MY THROAT FELT TIGHT. My hands were slick. My heart kept up a high rhythm, so fast the beats almost collided. Because of nerves, I’d had three hours of sleep.
I was just a few weeks away from my thirty-eighth birthday.
We’d been staying with my girlfriend Nelly’s parents in Rhinebeck, New York, about twenty minutes up the road from the Culinary Institute of America. Last night, I’d turned the lights out at eleven and lay in the dark, twitching and tossing through a long pileup of minutes and hours. At four a.m., I got out of bed, made coffee, and sat outside watching dawn stir and listening to a riot of birdsongs. At five, I started Nelly’s car and drove off.
For an hour, I’d been sitting in the student parking lot, listening to the Grateful Dead, weighing the situation: the fact of this day, the fact of the next two years. I was certain other people too had made decisions before that seemed ordered and right, seemed logical and good, and then felt suddenly disastrous and badly considered. They had screwed up, and screwed up supremely, had been blind all along to a plan’s inherent, obvious flaws.
We’d packed up the better part of all our books, our furniture, all the little totems of our life, and trekked from Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley. I’d turned down a job offer. A stranger was in our apartment for the next six months. My savings account was paltry, and I’d just bought a decrepit pickup truck, which was being made less decrepit by a mechanic for a good chunk of what little remained in the bank.
At one point, I’d realized that walking away would cost me only the $100 registration fee I’d paid the school to enroll in their Associate of Occupational Studies (AOS) in Culinary Arts program. The tuition was, at this juncture, fully refundable.
I knew that Nelly thought this was a little crazy. She’d spent some of her early years in Poughkeepsie and knew exactly what it meant to attend the CIA. She was excited I’d be doing it. But a good part of the day-to-day finances—money for electricity, gasoline, groceries—was going to be her purview. She is a writer, and shouldering that burden would be rough. I knew that a few of our friends also thought this was a little crazy and—more—irresponsible. I was borrowing tuition money, and I’d be paying it back. You didn’t do that at thirty-eight.
I saw people moving off in the distance. They wore white chef’s jackets and checked pants and carried notebooks, textbooks, and knife kits. Others wore suits. Everyone, I noticed, walked quickly and intently. Without knowing them, without seeing their faces, I felt inferior. My fingers felt incapable; my mind felt shaky. I did an inventory. My discipline seemed slack and my concentration delicate. I wasn’t, perhaps, all that smart. My memory for figures and facts would certainly fail me. It didn’t feel as if I belonged here.
The school, a few hundred yards from where I was in the parking lot, loomed like a set piece out of Citizen Kane. The main building, its biggest building, Roth Hall, the one taking up most of the campus real estate, was a former Jesuit monastery. It rose up for five stories, all dark aged stone, stained glass, and ivy. It felt permanent and pitiless, significant.
A new group of students begins at the CIA every three weeks. Every three weeks there must be someone racking themselves just like I was. I had almost an hour to kill before I was supposed to present myself, along with all the other students starting that day, in the school’s Admissions Office.
The sky was overcast and it was cold out. Bob Weir was singing about Mexican prostitutes and venereal disease at the precise moment I decided to start the car, drive away, and go explain to Nelly, her parents, my parents, my sister, my grandfather, my friends—to everyone—why I decided this was just a bad idea.
I’d be almost forty when school was finished. This was escapism. This was indulgence.
I had given a lot of thought to what I was going to do after I graduated. The results—the specifics—were inconclusive, but I knew I wanted to cook for the rest of my life and I wanted to do it for other people. By definition, I wanted to be a chef. I did not know how I’d bend the definition of that word to suit me. But I wanted to be a chef and I was here in the parking lot of the school that taught you how to become one.
I liked the idea of cooking on the line in a restaurant. I liked the notion of being anchored to a burning stove in a rush and whirl of activity, of making food strangers would eat. If it was good, you earned their admiration, and that was attractive too. But being a cook under those circumstances will not fill your wallet, and it’s physical. I was fit, I was still strong. But cooking involves serious time on your feet, a real commitment of the body. Eventually, I might need to be realistic. I didn’t know.
I knew I would never ow
n a restaurant. To do so would most likely sap any assets I might someday acquire, and cause my heart to rupture and stop. I’d drive myself to an embolism obsessing over how to save two pennies on a bushel of spinach, worried sick that my staff was robbing me blind behind my back.
I would never be Daniel Boulud. I would never be Ferran Adrià.
I would never be on TV. I knew the camera would never love me enough.
But I loved food, and I loved cooking.
It would be two years gone, two years of strain, two years getting older—all without any guarantees. I had an aptitude for cooking, but as far as I knew, I’d never shot off sparks of brilliance. My parents, my friends, dinner guests—everyone liked my food when they ate it. Or said they did.
A few weeks before, I’d reread Denis Johnson’s Already Dead. There was a line I’d always liked, right at the beginning when one of the characters is cruising the back roads off California’s Highway 1, that said, “You might throw a tire and hike to a gas station and stumble unexpectedly onto the rest of your life, the people who would finally mean something to you, a woman, an immortal friend, a saving fellowship in the religion of some obscure church.” Or cooking school.
We are what we nurture. I’d nurtured writing. I hadn’t nurtured cooking. But I felt it there in me, and I was here to coax it out and see how it flourished.
People amble through their lives with the serious weight of lost years on them, looking for moments like this. I watched the students in their uniforms for a while longer. Then I got out of the car and walked toward the Admissions Office to stumble onto the rest of my life.
THE ADMISSIONS OFFICE WAS a nicely turned-out room of gentle carpeting, only-just-tasteful couches, and brooding light. About seventy people were already there.
In my mind’s cineplex, I think I had envisioned the other students—soon to be my peers—as people of unequaled intensity. Their knowledge would be encyclopedic. Already excessively competent, they were here to hone and refine, to make food sing. I had worked my way through most of the titles on the CIA’s recommended reading list that had been sent out several months prior. I was dipping into Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire—the foundation of classic French cuisine—every day. I wanted to try and catch up. The competition, I’d assumed, would be fierce in the school kitchens.
The scene in the Admissions lobby was very different from the film in my head.
These faces were still puffy with baby fat. They were gritted with acne. A dozen or so stood in small clusters. I overheard a few conversations. Most of the kids lived on campus and had arrived to settle in several days earlier. A few had been up late the night before, drinking. Someone had been sick in the shower. One young man wondered aloud several times when we’d get our knives.
But the majority of them stood alone. There was a general sway of exhaustion and disquiet in the air; I wondered how many had slept as poorly as I had. A few people in the crowd began to stick out. Their faces were older. Not quite in my age range, but definitely closer to me than to eighteen. They seemed to be scanning the room and looking a little bit wary. Way apart from the crowd I saw two people standing together who were definitely in my age group. They probably had an involved story of how they got here and why they came. But I couldn’t bring myself to cross over to where they stood. I leaned against the wall and stared at my feet. I didn’t really know how to begin telling my story.
Except for the knot of people in the room’s center, few others were talking at all. Maybe they didn’t know how to tell their stories either.
At 7:00 a.m. on the nose, we were led into an adjoining room, a small auditorium with a video monitor and a few hundred seats.
A squat, thick woman of potent seriousness gave a speech on the Institute and the rigors of its program, about how hard we were going to work, about how much it would change us, how skilled we’d be at the end. It was exactly what I wanted to hear, but terrifying to be told. She went over the schedule of classes for the next semester and the one following. The calendar was broken up into blocks, the first one a quartet of academic classes that lasted six weeks (five classes if you had to take the basic writing course, which I had tested out of). Afterward, there were twenty-four weeks of practical classes, broken into eight three-week blocks. At that point, every student left the school to do an eighteen-week externship, working for minimum wage, or nothing, in a restaurant somewhere around the country or world. Upon completion of the externship, you returned for the second part of the program, which meant six more weeks of academics, and another twenty-four weeks of practical classes. A lot of the kids were fidgeting as she talked.
She called a list of names, mine included, and told us to speak with the school nurse, who was at a table by the door. We needed to schedule a hepatitis-A vaccination and a tetanus booster. Then we were sent upstairs to set everything right with the bursar.
The wait in line for the bursar was long, but I spent it watching the others. We’d been sent sternly worded notices about the school’s dress code—dressy pants, collared shirt, no sneakers, no jeans, no facial hair. The hair on your head must be of “natural color.” No lengthy sideburns, and no earrings for the men. No nose rings for anyone. Most of the males in line—including me—looked as if we had hit the same sale at Old Navy. We looked like stereo salesmen, or golfers. Everyone had the same polo shirts in the same small spectrum of solid colors. Everyone’s khakis had the same cut. Some people had apparently missed the memo, though. As we stood in line, an administrator of some sort approached each of the scofflaws and explained that they’d have to change or shave. One young kid, with a huge bush of a beard hanging off his thin face, made arrangements with a complete stranger to go back to the stranger’s dorm room and shave.
Very few of the people in line were talking. That vibe of angst and fatigue just seemed to mute the moment. One by one, we made our way to the bursar. Afterward, we were ushered through a door and down a long hallway to a tailoring station where we were measured for our uniforms. Then we were set loose for a few hours until lunch. I filled the time touring the campus.
When you’re on these grounds, it’s hard to not be impressed. This was certainly intentional. They went at the planning and landscaping with grandeur in mind. The place is situated a couple miles north of Poughkeepsie, in Hyde Park, on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River, high enough so that every building catches the sunlight. Right across from the Admissions Building was a structure modeled to look like an Italian villa. It was done up in yellow stucco, with a red tiled roof, and hemmed in on two sides by evergreen trees. Inside was the school’s Italian restaurant, open to the public and staffed by students. The road in front of it was made to look like a cobblestone street. Behind and below the villa, at the bottom of a slope, lay meticulous rows of dozens of herbs. I walked the rows and periodically reached down to rub the leaves between my fingers and smell the oils on my skin. Maybe because of the neatness of the garden, or because of the surroundings, they had an authority in their scent, as if these were not herbs like those you bought or even grew on your own.
Across from the gardens was the library. We’d been told that morning that the Conrad Hilton Library housed the second-biggest collection of cookbooks in the country, and I wanted to see what the second-biggest collection of cookbooks looked like. I went inside, made some inquiries, and was told that the cookbooks were on the second and third floors. When I went upstairs, I saw dozens and dozens of rows of shelves, dense with books from floor to top. I went at random through the stacks, walking more and more quickly—every book Elizabeth David ever wrote, everything by Jane Grigson. Michel Guérard’s books were here, Alain Ducasse, Paul Bocuse, arcane books on Serbian gastronomy and Native American cooking, endless numbers of books on Chinese cooking from every region; the collection went on and on and on. For the first time that day, anxiety gave way to anticipation. I wanted to learn everything that was in here, everything available. I wanted to turn my mind into a repository and I wanted to f
ill it. I had never once in my life pondered Serbian cooking, but right then I wanted to make myself an expert. After an hour, I forced myself back outside.
Next to the library stood a plaza with a view of the river. The plaza was small but looked imperial, broken up into a geometry of trimmed grass, a fountain, trellises, and gazebos. The water was off, but it had apparently been on earlier. Puddles lay on the surface and some of the students, out of uniform, dressed for the summer weather, ran and splashed. These grounds were beautiful, everything devoted to food. It was like Disneyland for cooks.
We’d been told to report for lunch at eleven thirty, in the same complex as the Admissions Office, where the Banquet and Catering (B&C) class is taught. To get to the banquet room, you walk down a long hallway that passed the B&C kitchen. For the benefit of visitors, there are large windows looking in, and I stopped to watch the students at work. These students were on the tail end of their second year. Their faces did not carry baby fat. They didn’t have the lazy radiance of the kids I’d mingled with a few hours ago. The acne was a little more stubborn, apparently, but, still, I noticed they all moved with purpose and focus. They were cutting up tenderloins of beef, attending to big steaming pots, working some decorative tricks over plates of desserts. No one was bumping into each other; no one seemed panicked. They simply flowed through the two or three minutes I stood watching.
A young woman appeared right in front of me on the other side of the glass, wearing the standard white chef’s coat, checked pants, and a paper toque on her head. She had a box of tools open on a tabletop and was searching through it. She looked up and straight at me. I could see her take in the clothes I was wearing. I saw her notice the name tag. She smiled and raised her eyebrows at the same time, then pursed her lips like she was suppressing a laugh and quickly looked down and away. If a thought bubble had formed over her head, I was imagining that it would have read, You poor little fucker. All awkward in your khakis, with that stupid name tag. You just have no idea—no idea—what’s coming.
Beaten, Seared, and Sauced Page 1