The other academic class was Product Knowledge, taught by a local farmer and former football coach, Darryl Mosher. Mosher was a big, serious man with a tight crew cut who didn’t laugh very much. He was a formidable guy and charged with teaching the students how to identify vegetables and to select the best examples of them. I imagined him as the Vince Lombardi of produce. He was a constant presence at the Rhinebeck farmers’ market, and I always envisioned him going through his stock, discarding a too-large zucchini or an overripe tomato, saying, “There’s no room for second place at this farm stand.” This was a class that everyone agreed was essential. It was also a ton of work. We all knew what broccoli was, obviously, but differentiating between a dozen varieties of apples was challenging. It wasn’t always easy telling five kinds of cooking greens apart, or keeping track of twelve or thirteen species of mushrooms.
With every piece of produce, Mosher informed us of how to recognize when one was fresh or perfectly ripe. He offered tastings of just about everything we were shown in class, and because it was summer, there was a lot of produce to study. Everything was to be committed to memory. Apples, berries, cherries, and lemons won’t ripen off the vine, but melons, pears, avocados, and bananas will. Tomatoes will ripen but not become more flavorful off the vine, so often, Mosher told us, they are picked while green, gassed with ethylene until red, and shipped to the supermarket where they arrive tasting of nothing. If, at the beginning of the course, you had a hard time identifying the herb savory, or telling the difference between oregano and marjoram, Thai and regular basil, or a selection of various mints, you had better get things straight.
You can tell a piece of broccoli is fresh by looking at the cut at the bottom of the stem; if it isn’t cracked or doesn’t have the slightest brownish tint to it, if it is pale green and moist, it is pretty fresh. The flowers on top—the green stuff—should be tight and vibrant. It should feel heavy in the hand.
A cantaloupe should have a strong cantaloupe smell. It too should feel heavy, and its “belly button” should be smooth, inverted, and round. The webbing should be raised and distinct, dry, with very little green. A honeydew should feel waxy and tacky, with a little give where it was cut. Tomatoes contain three acids: malic, glutamic, and citric. Dark tomatoes are high in acid; yellow or light tomatoes are lower.
Three days a week, for two hours a shot, we were bombarded with fruits and vegetables. We were to test what we learned by making regular trips to the CIA’s storage room—a dark, refrigerated area where all the produce was held before being distributed to the kitchen classrooms. Everything was labeled so you could go through and handle, smell, and squeeze a thousand different herbs and vegetables.
We had two classes for a total of four hours every day. The rest of the time I spent in the library, doing homework and studying. But sometimes, I’d get on the computer and look at the course guides, recipes, and syllabi for the classes I’d be taking down the road. In the Skills Development III folder, I found a document called “Methods,” which listed the basic techniques to cooking a piece of fish en papillote (in parchment paper), making a dozen different sauces, and pureed soups among a score of others. I found recipes for Green Chili Stew and Bori Bori Soup in the Cuisines of the Americas folder, recipes for potato gnocchi with duck ragu and a hundred different tapas dishes in the Cuisines of the Mediterranean.
I really immersed myself in cookbooks, especially after I’d spend some time rooting around in the folders of upcoming classes. I’d pull a few of my favorites down from the shelves—Bouchon, Babbo, Michel Richard’s Happy in the Kitchen, Le Guide Culinaire, The Zuni Cafe Cookbook—and look at the more elaborate recipes that I once thought I’d fuck up irreparably if I ever tried them. I’d feel bright and optimistic, like the future had open arms, that all these methods and techniques would be within my range, that this was where a demarcation got drawn, one between the legion of home cooks and the professionally trained.
I was outside one afternoon, two weeks after school started, reading Escoffier on a bench. A young, uniformed woman walked straight toward me, holding a Styrofoam container in her hand.
“You’ve got to try this,” she said. She reached out and crammed something into my mouth. I could feel her fingers on my teeth. I ate it, and it was delicious. After I swallowed, I asked: “What was it?”
“Rabbit crepe,” she said, wiped her hands on her pants, and walked away.
IT’S A NICE PIECE of synchronicity that farther down the river there’s another citadel on a hill: West Point, the United States Military Academy. I came to believe that the CIA had swiped some of the Academy’s ethos.
All around the school, I saw signs and bulletins glowering down from spaces in the kitchens, hallways, and administration offices, almost all of them beginning with phrases like “You must” or “You are required to” or “It is prohibited for students to” or “You may not” or “Students cannot.”
The CIA dress code informed us that students in kitchen classes must wear “Institute-issued cleaned and pressed chef’s checkered pants of proper fit, neither pegged nor cuffed. Pants must be hemmed above the natural heel and below the ankle.” It went on: “White undergarments are required for both men and women” and “one plain ring and one watch are the only pieces of jewelry permitted.”
Furthermore, men must be “clean-shaven, with sideburns not exceeding the middle of the ear. Beards are not permitted” and “mustaches must be neatly trimmed and may not extend below the corner of the mouth.” Failure to adhere to these codes could result in demerits, which dogged your CIA permanent record until death. This sort of stuff extended into the kitchen operations too. I saw a list of regulations for one of the Skills classes, the bedrock basic foundation courses that signaled the real beginnings of everyone’s cooking education. It read:
Plates presented not hot enough or too hot will reflect 1 point deduction from your professionalism grade.
Each food items [sic] presented not hot enough will be subject to a deduction of 1 point.
Plates presented with smudges will reflect 1 point deduction from your professionalism grade.
Plates presented dirty will reflect 2 points deduction from your professionalism grade.
Plates presented with poor presentation or not reflecting chef’s demo plate will reflect 1 point deduction from your professionalism grade.
Not having a pencil #2 for the scheduled quizzes and tests and/or a calculator for the costing exam will reflect 2 points deduction from the quiz/test/costing grade.
One day, I watched, horrified, as a student had his sideburns measured with a ruler in the hallway by one of the chefs. He was told to leave the building immediately and not to return until he had shortened them.
“I understand that when you’re dealing with a bunch of kids who still have wet dreams, you need to be a hard-ass,” I said to Nelly, who was in disbelief after reading all that. “But I’m almost thirty-eight. I’m not here to fuck around. I’m not here to waste time. Enough with the rules and regulations—I’m here of my own volition, I’m not being supported by Mom and Dad, I’m taking it seriously. Just teach me something and I will learn it. I don’t need to be threatened.”
I’d been eating most of my meals by myself and was doing so for another lunch when Adam Walker materialized at the table and sat down, accompanied by two more students I recognized from one class or another—Culinary Math, I think—and they sat too. One’s name was Mike Brookshire, and the other was an utterly silent guy by the name of Gio. It took a minute, but I recognized him: He had been at a table in the B&C dining room one evening. Gio had not spoken a single word. There had been only one other person at the table, some diminutive idiot from Long Island who was running through his tough guy act, telling us, “I’ll tell a chef straight to his face, you respect me, I’ll respect you. But don’t you fucking disrespect me—I’ll cut you. Just don’t do it. I won’t put up with that shit.”
During the guy’s long rap, Gio had stared at his plate with a weird q
uarter smile twisting his lips. After the guy finally left, Gio left too. He nodded once by way of good-bye.
Adam remembered my name and introduced us all.
“What’s your story?” Brookshire asked.
“I’m from Brooklyn.”
“That’s it?”
“No. I used to work at Martha Stewart before I came here.” I deliberately left the teaching part out—it seemed like it was going to put more distance between me and everyone else; for me, my age was always a shadow, and I didn’t want to darken it any further. Plus, whenever I dropped the Martha Stewart thing, it was always a conversation piece. No exception this time: “Holy shit? Are you serious?” Adam said.
“Yeah, I’m serious. It was one of the most miserable stretches of my life. Every day, I prayed for the sweet and final deliverance of death, but it didn’t come. Eventually, I just got canned.”
“I’ve got to say,” Brookshire said, “you do not look like a Martha Stewart kind of person.”
“I was not a Martha Stewart person. Hence the getting canned.”
“What did you do there?”
“I was a writer.” I had to make the admission, even though I preferred not to. It caused exactly the reaction I hoped to avoid.
“So you’re one of the food writer types? Like you’re gonna go work for Gourmet or something?”
I’d felt invisible a lot of the time, but I still paid attention. I listened to a lot of conversations. My restaurant experience was a lot more limited than almost everyone else’s. A lot of these people had been line cooks during high school. I hadn’t. And this was a sort of dividing line. Other students took you more seriously if you’d had that experience; it meant you were authentic, the real thing. They seemed to think that it signified a good bedrock for everything we were about to learn. I can’t say I totally disagreed.
“I’m sure I’ll always write, but—hey, just like you—I’m here to learn to cook.”
“The industry needs writers, too.” Adam said. “You guys are a necessity when it comes time to write the cookbooks.”
“Man, give me a fucking break,” I said. “I’m here to cook. I’m not here as a journalist.”
“Okay, hey, whoa, easy does it there,” Brookshire said. “No need to get prickly.”
Adam, Mike, Gio, and I started eating our meals together after that. I found out more about them. Brookshire had moved to New York from California. He’d married pretty young—at twenty-three—and his wife accompanied him to Poughkeepsie, a few minutes off campus. She hated it here and, according to Mike, they did nothing but fight. Whatever rancor stormed inside their home, he brought it to class.
Adam was, thus far, the most ambitious person I’d come across. He knew exactly what he wanted and had plotted out each step to get there. Attending the CIA was something, he said, that he knew he’d do from the time he was eleven. After graduation, he wanted to immerse himself in Asian cuisine, become executive chef at a few restaurants, pass the Certified Master Chef test before he was forty, and then come back to the CIA to teach.
I found out Gio was from Rochester.
These guys were the older students in my classes, and by older I mean they were all twenty-three or twenty-four. None of them had ever done a research paper without using the Internet. I kept skirting the issue of my exact age, but every once in a while, something would slip.
We were talking about music and bands we’d seen. I told them that Jane’s Addiction was one of the best live bands I’d ever witnessed. Someone mentioned that he’d wanted to see them on their reunion tour in 2001, but he was too young and his parents wouldn’t let him go.
“I saw them on that tour too,” I said. “They sucked, so you didn’t miss anything. I’m talking about how good they were with their original lineup.” I realized at that second that I had started seeing the band’s original lineup in 1988, at which point these guys would have been four or five. There was a silence.
“How fucking old are you?” Brookshire asked.
“Pretty old,” I answered. Then I changed the subject.
A few others would join us from time to time. Michael Lombardi was usually at the table, an intense guy from Connecticut who never really said what it was he wanted to do, but talked a lot about self-improvement. He seemed to be obsessed with rules. Before a class would officially start, when we were all seated in the classroom, and the second the instructor walked in, Lombardi would begin quieting us down. His clothes were immaculate. His pencils were always sharp.
Carlos sat at our table a lot. He was seventeen, had been taken under Lombardi’s wing, and was spastic and kind of obnoxious.
Carlos and I had been seated together at a B&C table for dinner one night. He was complaining about how much drinking and drug use went on in the dorms. He said, “I fucking hate it—all they do is drink. I just don’t get it. Drinking is for idiots.”
“Hey man, I drink any practical chance I get,” I said. “In fact, as soon as I get home, I’m having a really big scotch.”
“And I totally respect that,” he said without missing a beat. “Look, don’t get me wrong—I like to have a good time. But I do it clean.”
It was at lunch that I also met Don and Trevor. Don was nineteen, a red-haired kid from Florida, stunningly cocky, with the worst table manners I’d ever seen. When he’d sit with us, I couldn’t look at him; he’d eat with his mouth open so wide you could chart the progress of his food with each chew. He’d fallen in with Trevor, eighteen, barely out of high school, head shaved to the scalp and skin smoldering with pimples.
The first day I met Don, he was seated at a table with the others, leaning back in his chair, legs spread wide, gnawing a toothpick. The topic was Iron Chef America, a favorite television show of almost everyone you talked to on campus. Don was of a different mind, however. He said to us, “I can’t watch Iron Chef. Bobby Flay just makes me laugh. If I’m a better chef than you, then I’m not going to waste my time watching you on TV.”
None of us knew what to say.
Trevor, at another lunch, told us in passing, and without flinching, that back home in Iowa, he’d been an executive chef. An executive chef is in charge of every aspect of a kitchen. He or she oversees every aspect of a restaurant, approving vendors, paying the bills, maintaining quality control over the food made in the kitchen. He or she outranks everyone. It’s typically his or her vision that fuels the menu. An executive chef is a restaurant’s driving force.
We listened to him. After he left, we had a single question.
“Executive chef? Did he really just tell us that?” Adam said.
“He must have run that lemonade stand with a really tight grip, for those few hours between history class and curfew,” I conjectured.
“What sort of restaurant would he have been at?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m just imagining the phone calls: ‘Mom? Could you please pick me up? The sous-chefs hid my car keys again.’ ”
At another lunch, Don told us about the plan he and Trevor were hard at work realizing.
“What we’re going to do is, we’re in class Monday through Friday, but we’re free Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. We’re looking around to try and find a restaurant space, and we’re going to set it up and open just on the weekends. We’re going to see if we can do our externship there. Trevor’s going be executive chef because he’s already done that. He’s an awesome line cook. I’m not that good a line cook, but I’m the bomb prep cook.”
“I can’t see you having any trouble at all getting investors for a plan like that,” I said.
“Oh, yeah—that’s no problem,” Don informed me. “Trevor’s dad might throw some money in, and I think my grandmother might want to invest.”
Our last class before the summer break was on July 2. When we returned at the end of the month, we’d have three more weeks of academics and then begin the meat and fish butchering classes.
Nelly and I spent just a few more days in Rhinebec
k. We were set to move into the house she’d bought in a tiny hamlet in Saugerties on the fifth. There wasn’t much for us to do until then, as the two stoned, aging hippie restorers worked their way very, very slowly across the hardwood floors. We decided to make dinner for her parents one night, and we went to a Stop & Shop right up the road for ingredients. The produce section spread itself out right inside the door—a few dozen square yards of fruits and vegetables. None of the signs or labels indicated that these came from anywhere nearby.
Not very long ago, I’d still seen the supermarket’s stock as almost tyrannical—This is what we have, tough luck, you’ll have to make do. Not up to par? Too fucking bad and, since this is the same stuff that we have shipped in from all the same places, all year-round, how would you even know the difference? But I had new eyes now. I picked up a cantaloupe and it smelled of nothing; there were light swaths of green all over it. The peppers showed some almost imperceptible wrinkling at the top, near the stems, something I wouldn’t have looked for or noticed just a few weeks prior. The cut stems of the broccoli looked okay, but the flowers on the crown were loose and dry. The fennel’s fronds were limp and sagging. There wasn’t much here that seemed to have ever had a relationship with soil. It was all like a harvested equivalent to a jar of Prego. We left with some herbs and some lettuce, and a compact watermelon that looked nice.
The new house was just a stone’s throw from the Hudson. There were train tracks running a small distance away and we loved the sound of the freights rolling by. From the porch, we could see the crests of some of the Catskill Mountains. I found myself not missing Brooklyn.
I spent my mornings painting the walls, moving room to room and listening to Black Flag’s discography from start to finish, over and over, singing along, painting at a quicker and quicker pace. In the afternoons, I’d read some of the books I’d borrowed from the library just before school ended: M.F.K. Fisher; a biography of Carême; an account of the case of Bernard Loiseau, who caved to the pressure of maintaining his Michelin stars and killed himself; a history of Chez Panisse in Berkeley.
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