Both Paris and Andy held cooking school in some measure of derision. Whatever you needed to know, they’d say, could be picked up by doing it. But after a point, there wasn’t much more for me to be shown, something Andy recognized. “You know,” he said to me as I cut up pieces of chicken thigh for the pot pies, “there are a lot of other restaurants out there where you could learn. I mean, there are places out there that have actual gas stoves.”
I wanted to stay. I was feeling good about what I was doing—no one was correcting me when I chopped onions, so I must have been doing it right. And I thought that if I could do some of the service cooking, I’d get a few of the basics down: timing, speed, multitasking. I kept pressing Andy to let me man the oven and two burners for dinner and he kept refusing. But then Andy’s wife started bugging him about being at the restaurant six days a week, and he asked if I wanted to try cooking brunch. Yes, I told him. Yes, I did.
The following weekend, I was there at 9:00; brunch began at eleven. I made my crepes, got the potatoes in the oven, cooked bacon, had eggs at the ready. I divided quiche into slices, and assembled the sandwiches for croque madames. And at eleven, the orders came in. This wasn’t, theoretically, difficult: I was pretty much just popping things into the oven and frying eggs, but there were a lot of different things in the oven to keep track of. At one point, there were about fifteen different orders being heated, with more and more coming in, and I got lost. I couldn’t keep track of the tickets that the servers were submitting, so I pulled things out whenever they looked done, set them down for Felipe to plate, and figured the right order would somehow get to the right person. I couldn’t figure out how many eggs I was supposed to be frying; I just started cooking them and assumed they’d be used. There were no complaints. I didn’t burn anything. Even if I was lost, my instincts seemed to be somewhat correct, and no one had to wait for food.
Andy had come in late that morning to check up on me. At the end of service, he asked me, “What are you doing on weekends from now on? Do you want to be the brunch cook? We’ll pay you for it …”
But that was the last I heard about it. I kept bringing it up to Andy, but he kept changing the subject—We’re still trying to figure out some scheduling things, he’d say, or We’re going to be making some changes and we need to see how they’ll shake out. After a while, I let it drop. But one afternoon, I overheard Andy interviewing a friend of Felipe’s, asking about his brunch cooking experience. I finished out a couple more shifts and then told Paris it was time I moved on.
During that summer, Nelly and I were on Cape Cod at my cousin’s house for a few days, along with my parents, my aunt, a dozen other cousins and their kids, and a handful of old family friends. One of the family friends, Gail, sat next to me in the shade of a pine tree. Little kids were running all over the lawn playing dodgeball, and I half watched them, drinking a beer, while Gail told me that her nephew had just enrolled in the CIA.
“I’m jealous,” I said. “You have no idea what I’d do to go to cooking school.”
“Your mother tells me that things have been a little rough lately on the job front.”
“I’ve got nothing,” I said. “I’m teaching a class at Pratt in September, and I’ve got these Interboro classes, but you have no idea how little money I’m earning, and how much Nelly is just hating my guts right now.”
“Do you want to be a chef? Is that your dream?”
“I don’t know if I can picture myself in a restaurant or owning a restaurant or anything like that. I haven’t figured out the fine print with this. But I want to learn to cook. I want to cook for a living. I want to learn really badly.”
“Then why don’t you go to the CIA?” Gail asked. “I’m serious: no equivocating, no excuses. Why don’t you go?”
“It’s expensive.”
“There are worse things than having some debt. Which will you regret more, debt or not going at all?”
“It’s two years out of my life. I’m not twenty years old anymore.”
“Again, the same question: Which are you going to regret? You should apply. Really.”
Later that night, Nelly and I sat together outside and I told her about the conversation.
“Is that something you really—and I mean really—want to do?” Nelly asked.
“Yes. I want to go. I think Gail’s right.”
“How would we do this? Would you live up there? Would we live up there? How would you pay for it?”
“I don’t know.”
Nelly’s tone was calm and matter-of-fact. “The thing is, we’ve been waiting a while for you to figure everything out. And this feels kind of like you’re putting the question off for another two years.”
“I feel like this is the answer to the question. I don’t have all the details, but I want to try and do this.”
She took my hand and squeezed it. “Well … then let’s do some investigating and see what the situation looks like.”
LATE THAT FALL, AN envelope arrived from the CIA congratulating me on my acceptance. Nelly and her ex-husband used to own a house together, and with the money she’d made from selling it, she wanted to buy a modest place upstate. We’d keep the apartment and she’d pay cash for a place in Saugerties, where she and I had fantasized about living ever since we’d taken a trip there while visiting her parents in nearby Rhinebeck. Bob Dylan and the Band had recorded the Basement Tapes in Saugerties. The area was beautiful—rural and set right up against the edge of the Catskill Mountains. We’d stay with her parents for a little while. The pieces were falling into place—sort of.
“So basically, the responsibility for our bills and living expenses falls on my shoulders? Will I be fully supporting both of us while you’re in school?”
“No—”
“Honey, I just need to ask. How are you going to make money? School is full-time; you have to study hard. How can we make this equal?”
Nelly had been working hard on a draft of her novel. She worked hard teaching, spending hour after hour outside class every week reading and critiquing student fiction. How much more of her time would I be asking her to give up?
“I don’t know. I will figure something out.”
“Right. And what about those other questions—like, do we get married?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have all the answers.”
Another envelope arrived from school, this one from the financial aid office. The page that detailed the award had figures in two columns: one for Term One, another for Term Two. Combining the funds allotted for the two terms—two years—still left me wholly in the red, and for way more than I really felt comfortable taking on in terms of debt. I threw the paper in the wastebasket in the bedroom, and when Nelly walked into the apartment later on, I told her all the debate, all the worrying, the arguing, everything was moot. I couldn’t afford to go.
A week or so later, we were sitting in the living room, reading. Nelly had her feet tucked under my legs, and she laid her book down and looked up at me. “Do you still have the financial aid statement from the CIA? Can I see it?”
“I threw it out. But …” I got up and moved toward the bedroom. “I haven’t emptied the trash in here for a bit. It’s still here.” I gave it to her and went back to reading.
“How do you know,” she asked after studying it, “that this definitely means it’s for two years and not two semesters?”
“It’s a two-year program; term one, term two. Year one, year two.”
“Will you call them tomorrow and ask?”
I called the next day and asked. After getting my information up on her computer, the woman from financial aid said, “Wow! That is a really generous award.”
I felt a little puzzled. “But my question is this: Does term one and two mean semester one and two?”
“Two semesters.”
“Really?”
“Well, it wouldn’t be very generous if it was for two years.”
She and I spoke at some length and then she
transferred me to the Admissions Office. When I hung up, I was slated to begin the Associate Program in Culinary Arts at the Culinary Institute of America on June 16.
3
ALL THE ENTHUSIASM, ALL the excitement, all the force of the visions in my head—of me, stove-side, actually cooking—slammed straight into a brick wall.
Six weeks of academic classes (Gastronomy, Culinary Math, Food Safety, and Product Knowledge) coupled with the school’s one-month annual hiatus for repairs in July meant nine weeks before I’d get near any food.
The day before classes started, we’d been enduring the last of our orientation, with instructions to refrain from harassing each other and lurid tales of the evils of alcohol, not to mention the ins and outs of fire safety. Then came the words we’d been anticipating: “If you will please go to the lobby outside the auditorium, you will receive your tool kits and textbooks.”
It was mayhem—a stampede of just barely postpubescent students in a frenzy to get their mitts on their knives. A trio of faculty members standing behind several folding tables piled up with our toys was overrun and swallowed by the throng. I sat down on a bench to wait it out. A guy sat down next to me. I recognized him from orientation. He was laughing at the commotion. Another guy sat down next to him. “Man,” the third guy said. “The kids really want those freaking knives.”
Some kids had freed their knives from their tool kit, and I saw the glint of light on steel as they flashed the blades around and squealed and grunted with excitement. The second guy said, “It’s like they’ve just discovered fire or something.”
“Yeah, but I have to admit,” I added, “I kind of want my stuff too.”
“Well, yeah,” the second one said. “But please—a little dignity.” He introduced himself as Adam Walker. The other guy told us his name was Stephen. Adam was from Texas, Stephen from Georgia.
When the crowd had thinned, Adam, Stephen, and I each went to the tables, gave our names, and were handed a tote bag full of books, a knife roll, and a backpack embroidered with the CIA logo. I didn’t look inside anything; I wanted to wait. I wanted to see what sort of tools I’d be making a future with, what books would be guiding me through it. I said good-bye to Adam and Stephen and drove back to Rhinebeck. I sat on the floor in the waning evening light and methodically went through everything.
The backpack was stuffed with packages, and inside the packages were things like spatulas, whisks, a wooden spoon, side towels, measuring spoons, a vegetable peeler, a wine bottle opener, and a melon baller.
I opened the knife kit. A paring knife. A slicing knife. A boning knife. A bread knife. A fillet knife. A long, heavy chef’s knife. They were made of solid German steel, beautiful and gleaming. I tested the edge of the chef’s knife against a piece of paper, and the blade seemed to float right through it without any resistance at all.
Of the textbooks, I already owned The Professional Chef and Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, but they suddenly felt new. Before, when I thumbed through the pages, they felt unyielding and mysterious, but they’d be giving up their secrets now. Months off in the distance, I’d be taking the Garde-Manger class—also known as the hors d’oeuvre class, encompassing the making of composed salads, appetizers, amuse-bouches, basic charcuterie, things like that—and I flipped through the class’s textbook. How to smoke a duck. Making my own pancetta. Making sushi. A recipe for sausage en brioche. Empanadas. Tenderloin and horseradish on toast points. Shrimp quesadillas.
I immediately thought about the wedding Nelly and I had gone to the summer before. After the ceremony, servers worked the room with plates of appetizers just like the ones in this book’s pages. I situated myself near the door to the kitchen and accosted the servers as they came out with their trays. I’d be making this stuff, and I’d be learning to make it perfectly, and that perfection—of technique, of conception—would someday become second nature. This was the best cooking school in the country. And I’d be a product of it. Someday.
STEPHEN AND I SAT next to each other in the front row of Culinary Math class. Adam sat a few tables behind us. I rolled my pencil back and forth across the surface of my notebook, made random calculations on my calculator just to see the numbers change, and willed myself to try and pay attention.
If a pound of carrots has a yield of 87 percent, how many ounces will that be? And if that pound of carrots is meant to serve seven people, what will their portion sizes be?
Say you wanted to make this recipe for tacos, which serves ten, for thirty-two people—what would the new portion of red onion be? What amount of cilantro? And if that cilantro has a 68 percent yield, how many bunches of it will you now need to buy?
And if this recipe calls for 1 tablespoon of vinegar, and you are doing 6.2 times the recipe, how many milliliters of oil will you need?
It was basic stuff. It took very little to recall the required math from high school. Plus, we were given worksheets with all the equations and conversions we could possibly need to aid in the calculations. When asked to do an equation, it took me just a few seconds; Stephen was even quicker. I hadn’t asked him his age, but I guessed he was around twenty-five or twenty-six. He’d been a business major at Georgia Tech and could probably do these numbers reflexively.
Sometimes I’d look around the room, though, and see that some of the kids sat breathing through their mouths and looking blankly at the board.
The instructor, Michael Nothnagel, loved math. He was tall, thin, with thick glasses and nearly black hair. He had almost certainly been called a nerd more than once in his life, and he was instantly likable, bouncing around the room, drunk on numbers, trying to make his enthusiasm infectious. It didn’t take. Around noon, when the class ended, the sun came through the windows and fell on the deep green carpeting. The fluorescent lights buzzed. And most of the room’s eyes followed the track of the second hand as it spun around and around toward 12:00.
On other days, we attended the Food Safety class. We learned the rudiments of sanitation and proper temperatures—and exactly what happens to you when you get food poisoning or eat contaminated fish. Most reef fish, for example, weighing more than five pounds, are likely to harbor ciguatoxin, which leads to ciguatera. Ciguatera will keep you sick for years. At the onset you will vomit uncontrollably, and your gastrointestinal system will betray you. Your fingers and toes will tingle. Later, and for a long, long time, your nervous system will reverse the sensations of hot and cold.
We also learned at exactly what temperatures and under what conditions bacteria will multiply. We discovered that all sorts of toxins, viruses, and bacteria lurked on or around our food. Listeria can cause miscarriages and death. E. coli can make you dead. If you stuff a turkey at Thanksgiving, and the temperature of the stuffing does not hit 165 degrees, you are creating a place where salmonella can thrive and be fruitful. At the onset of anaphylactic shock, when a person allergic to nuts accidentally eats, say, a filbert, they will experience light-headedness and swelling of the face, hands, and feet. They will begin wheezing, be stricken with cramps. Their throat will close and their blood pressure will drop. They will lose consciousness and then die. We came to understand, in essence, that food can hurt you.
Gastronomy class was polarizing. It was devoted to the theory and aesthetics of dining, and the reading assignments were sometimes dense tracts full of postmodern jargon and references to Foucault and Lacan. We were introduced to some of the great culinarians: Antonin Carême, the father of haute cuisine; the godlike Auguste Escoffier, who codified the essence and details of French fine dining in his book Le Guide Culinaire, upon which the entire curriculum of the CIA is based. A lot of the students were bored out of their minds, unable to get their heads around the idea they were required to learn so much that had absolutely no connection to actual, physical cooking. They’d perk up at the mention of someone contemporary—Keller, Grant Achatz, Ferran Adrià—but an invocation of Fernand Point or Paul Bocuse or Joël Robuchon—people I found fascinating, worthy
of awe—left eyes glazed over.
One day in Gastronomy, we were called to the front of the room for each of us to pick up a paper plate with a selection of light and dark chocolates. The first and last chocolates were pitch dark, with a dozen chocolates in between, moving in a color continuum from light to increasingly brown. The instructor asked us to eat the first piece and write down our reaction to it. It tasted disgustingly bitter, inedible, and it took some effort to keep from spitting it into my napkin. I reported as much on my comment sheet. The next piece was cheap milk chocolate; it was cloying and I could almost feel my pancreas twitch. The next had a slightly darker hue and contained less sugar. We moved through the plate, each piece progressively less sweet until we came to the final one. It had an alkaline quality to it and felt metallic on my tongue, but it also had a complexity that I hadn’t recognized in any of the others. It turned out that the first and last pieces were the same, and it was to demonstrate how the palate could be manipulated. The progressive bitterness primed the tongue as it went, until what was initially terrible revealed its nuances. I thought the experience was kind of profound and dramatic; a bunch of the kids thought it was bullshit. There was, as far they could tell, no practical application for this knowledge. I suspected that this thinking was also the reason why the library was never crowded.
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