Beaten, Seared, and Sauced

by Jonathan Dixon

  As the other new students arrived at the Banquet dining room, a long line formed at the door. One of the Banquet students, dressed in dark pants, a dark vest with a faintly ridiculous almost-psychedelic-patterned fabric on the front, and a tie, acted as the maître d’, and escorted people to random tables. There were eight places at each table. We were in for some forced socializing. I didn’t actually mind; we were all going to have to talk to each other at some point.

  Lunch was allotted an hour’s time on the schedule and consisted of three courses: appetizer, entrée, and dessert. Bread with the meal came from baking kitchen classrooms. Everything else had been produced in the B&C kitchen.

  When I sat down at the table—I was the eighth person—I looked at everyone else and gave a cursory greeting. Everyone—about an equal mix of male and female—smiled and nodded and recommenced a long stare at the tablecloth or out the windows that ran along one side of the room.

  The silence was awkward. It stretched itself out until I, too, was staring with great concentration at the tines of my fork. Then it became absurd. I chortled a little to myself and looked up.

  “Wow, this is stupid,” I said. Everyone looked surprised. I turned to the woman on my left. “Where are you from?”

  She flinched, smiled, and then said, “Hershey.”

  “As in, Pennsylvania?”

  “Mmm-hmmm.” She sipped her water.

  “What’s your name?”

  She pointed to her name tag. Britney.

  “So Britney,” I said, “are you culinary arts or pastry?”

  She mumbled something.

  “I’m sorry?”

  She mumbled again.

  “What?”

  “She said, ‘pastry,’ ” another woman chimed in. Her name tag read Tara. She turned to Britney. “Are you coming here from college or high school?”

  Britney paused for a long time. “I just graduated from high school two days ago, on Saturday. I got my diploma, went home, got into the car, and drove up here. I didn’t want to spend the summer in Hershey because I was getting into too much trouble and my parents wanted me to come here instead of juvie.”

  Silence descended again, but this time, I just let it go unbroken.

  Eventually the appetizer arrived, and everyone grew a little more animated. We were right then seeing a portion of our future on the plates. It was a vol-au-vent with mushrooms, a puff-pastry cylinder filled with sautéed mushrooms in a Madeira cream sauce. We all waited until each had been served, put napkins in our laps, and tasted it. Today, the future tasted pretty decent.

  We’d been told earlier that all students are allowed two meals a day. For new students, during the first six weeks, one of those meals could be in any of the school’s different kitchens—the Asia kitchen, the Americas kitchen, the Mediterranean kitchen—but one meal had to be in the B&C room. This was where we’d get the first look at what we were supposed to be doing at the Institute. The meals, as we’d discover, were often ornate, complex: foie gras profiteroles; seared duck breasts with green peppercorn and pineapple gastrique. Occasionally the food was sublime; occasionally it was horrible. You couldn’t help but take mental notes, writing critiques in your head. There were things to try and emulate, things to avoid. These meals were cooked by students just on the cusp of their graduation. It was no coincidence that the newcomers were forced to eat here night after night.

  After the appetizer and before the entrée, the silence evaporated. I’d been watching Tara a little bit while we were eating because I discovered something strange about her, mainly that I suspected she was a lunatic. Her eyes pinwheeled, and she’d jump and agitate in her chair. She cracked her knuckles over and over. Her lips were perpetually set as if she’d give a raspberry at any second, and every movement of her hands and arms and head had something frantic to it. She simmered with a very peculiar energy. She caught me looking at her.

  “Okay, then,” she said. “Tell us where you’re from.”

  “I grew up in New Hampshire, but I’ve been living in Brooklyn for a long time.”

  She slapped the table with her hand and said, “I’m from Brooklyn.”

  “Where?”

  “Cobble Hill.”

  Right near my apartment.

  “I live on Atlantic Avenue, right off Court Street,” I said.

  “You’re kidding! We’re neighbors!” Tara turned to the guy next to her. “We’re neighbors.” She turned back to me. “Well, we’ll have to get together sometime in the city.”

  The entrée arrived. Roasted beef tenderloin, pureed potatoes, sautéed green beans. The future was tasting simple, but still pretty damn good.

  IF YOU PAID ANY attention at all to the CIA’s public persona, you knew who Tim Ryan was. A graduate of the school, he became the youngest-ever Certified Master Chef (a title bestowed on experienced cooks who pass a rigorous test of skills, technique, and creativity); a popular instructor; and, in his early forties, the president of the Institute. That’s just the short list. He was also on the US Culinary Olympics team, honored by dozens of culinary societies, on and on and on. In the realm of food he is a serious overachiever. He is known to be a no-nonsense but extremely kind sort of person. He also has a reputation as someone best not crossed.

  And he’d been in the news lately.

  Two months before I was set to start at school, someone e-mailed me an article from the New York Times, detailing the clash between certain student groups, the teachers’ union, and Ryan. Slipping standards. Bad equipment. Overcrowded classes. Cozying up to corporate food entities. And my favorite: the use of premade frozen waffle fries for the Quantity Food Production class. Nelly and I both laughed hysterically when we read that.

  The teachers’ union had given him a vote of “no confidence.” The students had created Facebook pages.

  The corporate toadying and, yes, the waffle fries gave me pause. I decided to call the CIA and ask about it. I spoke with a woman in the Student Affairs Office who was surprisingly candid.

  “I really can’t say that I feel academic standards have fallen,” she said. “The same chefs are still teaching the exact same curriculum we’ve taught for years. They aren’t deviating. Those people—with all their experience and training—are the ones you’ll be studying with. No one from Sysco is going to be teaching you in the classroom. And yes, we have relationships with corporations. We’re a nonprofit institution. We rely on benefactors and donations. So, yeah, we have the Conrad Hilton Library and the Colavita Olive Oil Center. But does Mr. Hilton’s name mean that the second-largest collection of cookbooks anywhere in the country is any less valuable? And furthermore, let me address the question of frozen waffle fries. Let’s say that you’re working in an industrial cafeteria, or a hospital or a prison or on an army base. Are you going to have the time to cut thousands of servings of waffle fries from scratch? No, you’re not. But when you do get those frozen fries, we want to show you how to prepare them so they’re as good as they can be. However good that is.

  “Listen, Jonathan, if you want to drive up here, or take the train, we’ll pay for your gas or your ticket. You can come and spend an entire day, or two days if you want, in one of the kitchens. And if you still have any concerns, we can sit and talk about them.”

  I thought she was so up-front that I decided to take her word for it. I also found out later that, for cost-cutting purposes, some members of the board of directors had been pressuring Ryan to eliminate seriously costly items like foie gras or truffles from the curriculum recipes. Ryan wouldn’t budge. If the recipe—deemed to be of such stature and classicism that it should be learned by every student—called for foie gras, then there was going to be foie gras available.

  A student I met early on told me that I’d see Ryan twice during my entire time at the CIA: on the first day when he spoke to all the incoming students, and when I graduated.

  When I walked into the auditorium, where he’d address us shortly, there was a large video monitor down front
with the words “Your attitude determines your altitude” projected on it.

  I sat midway down the sloping rows of seats. We waited just a few minutes and a man came out to tell us that we were about to be addressed by Dr. Ryan. Then another man came out to do an actual introduction. And then Ryan emerged.

  He is a handsome guy, distinguished, with the sort of thicker build that men in their fifties seem to grow into. He wore a blue blazer, a blue shirt, and a starkly green tie. He was also immediately charismatic. I found myself watching intently as he conferred with a few people around him and strapped on a microphone.

  I became aware again, as I looked around, of just how young so many of these people in the room were. I realized the attitude/altitude slogan was probably part of a talk geared toward people who hadn’t yet worried about paying for electricity and rent.

  “Good afternoon,” Ryan began. He got a muted response.

  “That was terrible,” he said. “Let me hear you: Good afternoon.”

  This time he got the shouts and bellows. I felt faintly uncomfortable.

  The next ten minutes were pretty much what you’d expect—he spoke about the high standards in the classrooms, the high rate of people who don’t continue because of the pressures of it all. He told us that the school only selected a very limited number of applicants. Thinking of Britney, I was a little dubious.

  “There are eighty of you in this entering group,” he said. “This time, only eight of you have degrees so far. Of those eight, we have a number of career changers.” I slid down in my seat.

  He went on: “What careers are they changing from? We have a law school student. We have a telephone sales rep. We have a magazine writer and a professor.” Two students across the aisle conferred with each other, slightly disbelieving, at that professor thing. It did sound a little off. He listed a few more occupational switches. And then began one of the strangest speeches I’d ever heard.

  On the video monitor, the letters “CPA” appeared.

  “CPA,” Ryan began. “Does anyone know what those letters mean? ‘CPA’ stands for this: carrot-peeling attitude. Does anyone know what that means? Anyone know what it means to have a carrot-peeling attitude? No? Let’s say you landed an externship at the French Laundry out in Napa Valley with Chef Thomas Keller. Everyone knows who he is, right? Now, if you get an externship there, what do you think you’re going to be doing when you start?”

  This was about the sixth time I’d heard Keller mentioned that day. His name was used pretty much as a synonym for unparalleled excellence, and it was invoked all the time as the program went on. The Muslims may have ninety-nine names for God, but at the CIA, there was pretty much just one: Keller.

  “If you were an extern at the French Laundry, your first job would most likely be peeling carrots. A lot of carrots. Now, some externs would think this was beneath them. They’d think that spending weeks peeling carrots at the French Laundry was a waste of time. But, if you have a carrot-peeling attitude, this isn’t true. If you have a carrot-peeling attitude, there’s no such thing as a waste of time. If you have a carrot-peeling attitude, you’re going to make it your business to be the best carrot peeler the French Laundry has ever had. Why should you be discouraged if you’re asked to peel carrots, day after day? This is an opportunity.

  “Try and see how many carrots you can peel in a day. And then the next day, try and break that record. Now, each time, you’ll want to go see whichever chef is supervising you and say, ‘Chef, I know you’re busy, but could you come and look at my carrots?’ He or she will always—always—take the time to look at your work if you show that kind of carrot-peeling attitude.”

  You could hear the faint whispers of disbelief and, I thought, a little bit of scorn. People covered their mouths with their hands and spoke asides to their neighbor. They exchanged glances. Undeterred, Ryan, who had obviously given this speech before, continued.

  “So now you want to keep trying to break that record. How do you track your progress? You make a chart. You have the days of the week labeled, you have the number of weeks you’re going to be there, and you fill in how many carrots you did each day. And you ask your chef, each day, to come and look at your carrots. Hang that chart above your station in the kitchen. And each time you break your record …” For one second, it seemed as if he was steeling himself. “Each time you break that record, you put a gold star for that day.”

  The place erupted in audible incredulity.

  “No, no—” Ryan said, holding up a hand. “Sure, you’ll get some good-natured ribbing from your coworkers”—there were loud hoots and catcalls—“but they’ll respect you. They will! They’ll respect you!”

  The guy next to me turned. “ ‘Good-natured ribbing’?”

  I thought of some of the cooks I’d encountered in my life. “I guess either that or a good-natured shanking between the ribs,” I said.

  Ryan went on. “And by the end of your externship, maybe you’ll have your entire chart covered with stars. And who knows—maybe, because you’ve shown so much dedication, maybe you’ll be invited to walk across the road from the French Laundry with Chef Keller and go to the garden they keep there. And maybe you’ll be invited to help Chef Keller pick carrots for that evening’s service. Wouldn’t that be something? Picking carrots with Thomas Keller?

  “You’ll be the best carrot peeler they’ve ever had. You’ll peel carrots better than anyone else. The journey is the destination, people, the journey is the destination. And you’ll be able to use that attitude no matter what job you have in the kitchen. And if you do have that attitude, you can become the best at anything you want to do.”

  The guy was, admittedly, a really good speaker. But the idea of anyone over the age of twelve being so meek and submissive as to ask a supervisor whether it was okay to put a gold star on a chart made me squirm. I got the point. I think everyone did. But you’d really have to be a special kind of sniveling bootlick to plumb that depth of obsequiousness.

  That acronym, CPA, still showed on the monitor. And then we were dismissed.

  Done for the day, I went back to Roth Hall and began walking down the hallways. I needed to see what was going on in the kitchens. I wanted to look at the students while they worked. I wanted to look closely at their faces and see if I could recognize something reflected back to me, a portent or omen that might indicate I wouldn’t fuck this up.

  The hallways were dim like tunnels, the colors of the floors and walls both dark, and the ceiling was high above, almost in shadow. Along the hallways were the kitchens, bright portals visible through glass windows in the doors, humming with motion, but quiet inside, nearly silent. I stopped at one. In the dimness, it almost had the force of a revelation, light and movement from another world. It was another world. It would, I found myself understanding, be my world too.

  The kitchen walls were all yellow tiles; the floors, red tiles. There were workstations arranged strategically throughout the room, and a number of ranges, ovens, and sinks. The instructor was walking among the students as they worked. He’d stop and hover, dig among their chopped vegetables, hold pieces between his fingers, and shake his hand for emphasis, dropping them back onto the cutting boards. Some students were at the ranges, attending pots and sauté pans. The instructor walked to a pair of them and spoke. The students stopped what they were doing. The fire burned unsupervised under the pans; steam rose up from whatever was inside. They nodded at him and he kept talking. The steam was coming up thicker. I saw the students—one young male and one young female, brown hair coming out from under the back of her toque—eyeing the pan. The instructor walked away, and they scrambled to take the pan from the heat. The instructor took a few steps backward, keeping his front to the students, and said loudly to the group that they had thirty minutes left. He pivoted and was facing me. He was tall and thin, with a heavy mustache streaked with gray. I saw him see my name tag and he smiled and made a nod with his head and then swooped away to stand behind someone else
at their station.

  I fixated on one student who was chopping what looked like parsley; his knife came up and down, up and down, with violence and speed, and the metal caught the light in the room and the knife seemed to glimmer. He worked with complete purpose, and I felt something that was like a cousin to admiration and envy both. I watched him, feeling that sensation for another minute or so, until it was time to get to the parking lot, start the truck, and drive home.

  2

  I DROPPED OUT OF kindergarten, and I had no friends until I was six. I knew how to talk to adults, but not to others my own age. I was a tiny kid—bait for bullies. And the world was just about at an end.

  We’d moved from some remote burg in the White Mountains of New Hampshire down to a small town bordering Massachusetts. We lived next door to my grandparents. This was during the autumn when I was five, and, because of the move, why I never finished kindergarten. I was reading already, so I was set to start first grade the following September. There were no other kids around; my sister was a toddler and therefore useless. I spent the year with books and playing by myself in my own fantastical hazes. I counted Charlie Bucket, heir to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, as a good friend. I took a seat around the Cratchit family’s Christmas table. Laura Ingalls was my first girlfriend.

  Right before we moved, I’d undergone one of the great rites of passage. My parents took me to the drive-in and we saw Bambi. After Bambi’s mother was shot, our car was one of many queuing up at the exit with a weeping, hysterical little kid in the backseat. Around that time my mother had been supposed to die. She was bitten by an infected mosquito and contracted viral encephalitis, which cooks the brain and leaves you dead or comatose. I was called into her hospital room to say good-bye but I didn’t quite get it; I kept asking for soda. I thought we’d be back the next day—which we were; my mother pulled through. It messed her up for the next decade, but she lived.