Beaten, Seared, and Sauced

by Jonathan Dixon

  I always had a strong interest in sources and genealogies. Transfixed by the Rolling Stones as a kid, I discovered Muddy Waters, and after him, I found Robert Johnson and from him worked back to Son House, and then to Charley Patton. From Dylan to Johnny Cash, from Cash to Hank Williams, from Hank Williams to Jimmy Rodgers and Roy Acuff.

  When I’d study contemporary cookbooks—Zuni Cafe, The Elements of Taste, The French Laundry, The Art of Simple Food—the affect of old-style French cooking was obvious. And on one hand, these were the echoes of the dishes people like Anne Willen wrote about in Regional French Cooking or French Country Cooking. On the other, some of these recipes stretched back to Bocuse and the Troisgros Brothers, and back through Fernand Point, and to Escoffier before him. I grew fascinated with the breadth of the lineage. Keith Richards plays like he does because he was dyed in the antique blues. To cook well, one should walk the same sort of reverse path. I began religiously poring through classic French cookbooks.

  I went out shopping one day at local farm stands and a butcher store up the road. When I got back, I made bacon and eggs with fried tomatoes for lunch. As I ate, I realized everything on my plate had been grown within four miles of our house, and much of it had been gathered that morning. And it tasted that way. I was knocked out by the realization. I was blown away by the food itself. Each bite of the eggs, the tomatoes—these perfect foods—this was the cornerstone of everything I was doing. Each technique we’d learn going forward, each piece of information, was to be put to use in keeping intact the integrity of food just like this.

  I had spent a lot of leisure time paging through those high-end cookbooks, often in amazement, sometimes incredulous over how fussy and particular the methodology was. But I understood right then why, when you had ingredients like this—a tomato that wasn’t going to get any more perfect—a person would be so ridiculously painstaking. You do not want to dilute perfection. It would be a betrayal.

  It was like taking acid; my perceptions widened. On my thirty-eighth birthday, Nelly invited some people we knew in the area and some friends from the city over. I grilled chicken with a cherry barbecue sauce I’d made. I found my focus turned entirely on the food, aware of what the chicken was doing at each moment on the grill, the progress of the color of the skin while it cooked, the feel of the chicken as it got more and more done. The chicken was free range and local; I’d brined it for an hour or so before drying it off and putting it over the heat. I waited a long time before applying the sauce, knowing it would burn easily otherwise. I began understanding that cooking was an assemblage of small steps. It was obvious, I guess, but mind-altering all the same.

  Ten days after my birthday, school started up again.

  When the kitchens opened for lunch, it was usually futile to try and get anything from the Asia kitchen. The line was invariably down the hall, whether it was for the Vietnamese street food on a couple days, the curry sampler on others, or sushi on different ones. The Mediterranean kitchen was still crowded, but a safer bet. I’d had some really good gnocchi with duck ragu there, and some surprisingly great thin-crust pizza, as well as nicely executed suckling pig. The Americas kitchen was the fallback. It was reliable, frequently pretty damn fine, and often the least crowded, except on fried chicken day. A few days after being back, a bunch of us had hit the Americas kitchen and were taking our plates back to the dining room. There were eight of us at a table, and most had ordered the duck with raspberry sauce and scalloped potatoes. We began eating. It was dreadful. The duck had been destroyed with heat, and then destroyed some more. It was desiccated and leathery, flavorless and tough. I watched as the others ate and screwed up their faces into expressions of complete distaste.

  I took another bite, then sawed at the duck, and started getting pissed off.

  “Whoever did this,” I said, “is a jackass.”

  “Yeah,” Adam said. “This is pretty shameful. I can’t eat this.” He pushed it away.

  “I agree,” Lombardi said. “What would happen if you took it back to the kitchen and told them it sucked? Would they give you another entrée or something? Isn’t that actually the responsible thing to do in this case? Shouldn’t they know how bad it is?”

  I took one more bite. I started gathering steam. “Fuck that. How could they not know? But seriously—what were they thinking? What were they doing?”

  “Fucking it up, obviously,” Brookshire said.

  “Okay, listen—” I started. I heard Brookshire mutter, All right, here we go …

  “No—listen. Consider a duck—”

  Someone said, “Consider that you’ll be screwing up the duck in a few weeks, so don’t throw stones too hard.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “Who doesn’t love a duck?” People at the table next to us turned to look. “They’re cute, they’re cool to watch. They’re tasty. And—damn—this duck once walked around. It was happy. It enjoyed itself. And look at it now. This creature truly died in vain. A pointless, useless death.”

  4

  THE ACADEMICS WERE DONE. I’d gotten an A– in Gastronomy, an A in Culinary Math, an A in Food Safety, and a B+ in Product Knowledge.

  I stood in the hallway outside the dining room, talking to Adam. He had been appointed—no one was quite sure how—interim group leader. This meant he was the liaison between the instructors and the rest of us—about fourteen or fifteen—who’d be in the morning meat class—the first class where we’d get our hands dirty, the first in which we had to be in uniform. Depending on the group and the disposition of the leader, the job could also mean that Adam functioned as a motivator, a counselor, a giver of instructions. This is what Adam wanted. His appointment as group leader was, however, only temporary; there’d be an actual election when the basic skills classes started. Adam was breaking this down for me when he stopped in midsentence and gestured with his chin toward a man in the school’s instructor’s uniform coming toward us. The man stood over six feet, capped with a head of white hair. His hands, you noticed immediately, were massive. His face was weathered and kind. There was something weary, or sad, at play around his eyes. He looked like a fairy-tale grandfather. As he passed, he nodded and smiled at Adam.

  “That’s Sebald,” Adam said.

  Hans Sebald would be teaching our Meat Identification and Fabrication class, a seven-day crash course on the fundamentals of beef, pork, lamb, and chicken. I knew from his school bio that he had been a butcher his entire life and was considered a master.

  “What’s the story?” I asked. We all asked a lot of questions about the instructors. We wanted some hope, I think, that he or she wouldn’t be monstrous.

  “Supposed to be a nice guy, but you don’t want to cross him. He’ll eat you alive if you fuck up.”

  “Is there a single chef here who doesn’t get described in exactly the same way?”

  Adam shrugged. “I’m going to send out an e-mail, but be prepared. Watch the required-viewing video online this weekend. Bring your chef’s knife, boning knife, and a steel to class on Tuesday. Full uniform.” He brightened. “We’re going to be deboning a hind shank and tying a roast beef.”

  I saw the list of others in the group when Adam sent his e-mail. I had hoped that everyone I ate lunch with would be in the class, but that didn’t happen. No Brookshire. No Carlos. But Lombardi would be there.

  Nelly was out running errands that Sunday when I decided to watch The Calf Slaughter. I logged onto the CIA website and went to the online video library. I cued it up, sat back on the sofa with my laptop, and hit Play.

  There was Sebald, twenty years younger, brown haired, face unlined. He was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and green rubber boots, and stroking the head of a calf. It’s important, he was saying in a thick accent, that when an animal is slaughtered, it feels no stress, no fear. It degrades the quality of the meat. And, more, the very fact of the animal’s existence means that if it dies, it needs to die humanely.

  His hands kept playing over and around the calf’s ears and nec
k. The animal’s eyes were both plaintive and stupid. Before the slaughter, he went on, the animal had to be somehow “stunned.”

  “I will now stun the calf,” Sebald said. He took a step back, pulled out a Luger, aimed, and put a bullet through the calf’s head. The video was in real time, and twenty-five minutes later, he had the calf skinned, gutted, and ready to be butchered.

  For the rest of the day, my mind kept returning to the opening of the video, with the calf and then the gun, and Sebald petting the animal. With a lifetime of butchering behind him, when those hands—with so much dying accumulated in his fingers—touched some part of an animal, it must feel a shiver run over its flesh.

  I LEFT HOME THE first morning, like I would for the next seven days, at 4:45, and arrived around 5:30. I got breakfast with Adam and another classmate, a kid named Josh, a seventeen-year-old straight out of high school, who had way too much enthusiasm. After we ate, we went up to the fourth floor, found the classroom, and waited for Sebald. It was the end of August. The sun was climbing over the peaks of the Catskills, and I got lost watching its progress.

  Sebald walked into class. He seemed even taller than he had in the hallway. His white instructor’s jacket looked like a sail. I couldn’t get over the size of his hands. He greeted us all and gently explained the rules: no tardiness, no deviation from the uniform; come equipped every day with typed answers to study questions, a calculator, a notebook, and your knives. Failure to do any of these things would result in loss of points. Excessive point loss meant failure for that day. More than two failures meant you failed the class.

  He seemed relieved when he was done with this part. Then the class really began. “Unfortunately, for us to eat,” he said, “something—something—has to die. And that animal—or plant—deserves our respect. It demands our respect. It demands our attention. Our commitment to not waste it. If nothing else, this is what I want you to learn here.”

  I was remembering the duck. I was right there with him.

  “I have respect for people who choose to be vegetarians, for people who make ethical choices and stand by them. But I also know that death is part of life. And I believe that when an animal’s life is taken, it carries a big responsibility on our part to make sure that nothing about that death is a waste, that that death is treated ethically and responsibly. I’m sure you’ve all heard how the Native Americans would apologize to the animals they hunted. You should keep that lesson in mind.

  “It’s also our responsibility to make sure that death comes humanely. I have worked my entire career to make sure that when I participate in the slaughter of an animal, that it feels no fear, and feels no pain.”

  His brow furrowed. “I know that kosher and halal butchers claim that their methods are the most humane, the most painless. But I’ve watched it being done. I don’t want to get started on that.”

  There was a very long pause as Sebald stared down at his podium. Then he arranged his papers, took out a roll call book, and said, “Adam, you are the group leader, so you can have the first question: Define the term ‘meat.’ ”

  Adam answered correctly, straight out of the On Food and Cooking sections we were supposed to read: “The body tissues of animals eaten as food. According to McGee.”

  When he credited Harold McGee I saw a shimmer of panic run over a few of the others in class. It isn’t easy reading, and when I was going through it, I’d predicted that more than a few would bail out after a paragraph or two.

  After Adam, he went alphabetically. Stephen got his question right; Dylan did not. Stephen got several points’ credit for the correct answer; Dylan was docked several points for his inability to answer.

  I was asked: “List the species names of meats used in food service.” I got my points for “Bovine, ovine, swine, poultry, and game.” The questions went on.

  During the lecture we learned basic things—tender meats should be dry cooked, tougher meat from the motion muscles asks for slow, moist heat cooking—and more complex things, like the precise physical makeup of lean muscle tissue (72% water, 20% protein, 7% fat, 1% minerals including iron, calcium, and selenium).

  Sebald’s German accent—with the same lilts and cadences as Werner Herzog’s—was sometimes difficult to understand. The mind tends to turn unfamiliar sounds into sounds you recognize. I’d be taking notes, hearing a normal set of sentences: “The chuck is one of the primal cuts of a side of beef. The round is another primal cut, and its subprimals are the knuckle, eye, top round …” etc. And then I could swear he had just said something like: “Night tracking turns nighttime to birds.” As classes went on, we’d often look at one another in bewilderment. Naturally, all of us loved the guy.

  When several hours had passed that first day, after we had learned the anatomy of a steer carcass, about USDA grading systems and inspection methods, about fat-to-lean ratios, we went to the meat room in the basement to get our hands dirty.

  Have you ever smelled a piece of aged beef? That funky, almost rotten-dairy scent that clings to the meat when it’s been hung in the cold air to dry? We could smell an intensified version of that the farther down the stairs we went and the nearer the room we got. Even once we’d been inside the room for a while, we’d still notice the scent.

  This was a busy area. Meat-free dishes did not hold a place of prevalence on CIA menus, and all the meat used in all the kitchens came out of this room. A lot of it would be processed by students like us, but a lot of it came in from the vendors and was broken down by the teaching assistants, the instructors, or one of the full-time guys hired to keep track of incoming and outgoing material. The really well-cut stuff went to the restaurants the school operated on the campus.

  Three large supports were spaced in the center of the room, with a worktable on each side of each support. There was another row of tables along one wall. An instructor’s table was placed up front, with a huge meat grinder behind it, and on the far right side of the room was a band saw, Cryovac machines, and a hand-washing sink. A small antechamber beyond that contained an immense walk-in refrigerator and a stunningly cold freezer. Fluorescent bulbs burned an incandescent white overhead.

  We chose a workspace upon entering, got ourselves cutting boards, and put on one of the heavy-duty aprons hanging on hooks by the instructor’s table. These things weighed about ten pounds and felt bulletproof. Sebald explained why they were a necessity; if your knife slipped while butchering a piece of meat, you did not want to run the risk of stabbing yourself in the stomach, or your groin. “I’ve seen some pretty nasty accidents …” Sebald said.

  He pulled out a sharpening stone and showed us how to use it. He showed us when and how to use a boning knife, when to use the standard chef’s knife, when to resort to our paring knives. There was a huge bin of beef beside him and when he was done with the demo, we pulled a piece out and took it back to our station. We were to remove the bone.

  We wanted long, even cuts—as few as possible—using the tip of the knife. If our cuts were efficient, the membrane holding the meat to the bone could be easily scraped away. Adam, who as group leader was stationed up at the instructor’s table, got the bone out pretty quickly. Others did not. Josh was stationed to my left and I watched him for a few moments as he hacked and stabbed at the shank. A young woman named Alyssa who stood off to my right had even less finesse. I’d like to say I was right on with my own cutting, but I wasn’t. In my fantasy, the bone popped out with a single stroke of the knife. I clung to this for a few seconds until I had to physically start cutting. I found the shallowest spot on the meat, where the bone was nearest to the surface, went in with my boning knife, and cut in a sharp curve—not even close to straight—without meaning to. I tried again and then again, but the blade went where it wanted. I put the knife down and looked at Adam. He glanced up at me and I shrugged. He came over.

  “Oh, dude—” He ran his finger down the cut. “So you got your revenge on this thing, huh? It must have done something pretty awful to deserve this. H
ere …” He took my knife and started a cut. “Like this … now, you go ahead.”

  I picked the knife up and was about to continue. Sebald was suddenly at my elbow. “You’re doing this wrong. That’s not how I showed you to hold a knife. Where did I say to put your fingers? Yes, there, that’s right. Now, long and even, long and even. Go ahead. No, no—that’s not right. No, stop, stop. Now we can’t serve this meat. If you were the owner of a restaurant, would you serve this? No, you wouldn’t. We’re wasting money. Again. Try again. Okay, no. Here, give me your knife. I don’t want the blade, I want the handle. Danke. Like this—” Two or three strokes and the bone sat beside the meat, almost entirely clean. I looked back up front and the bin was empty.

  “Is there another one I can do?”

  Sebald shook his head. “One per student. On another day, perhaps, you can try again. Clean up here, and I’ll be demoing how to tie a roast in a few minutes.”

  I began to suspect that I was encountering the first of the CIA’s educational flaws. I remembered this much from playing guitar as a kid and from taking martial arts lessons over the years: anything you do with your hands needs to be done over and over and over before you can get it into your DNA. One attempt at deboning a piece of beef was just not sufficient. I did a quick cleanup and started following Sebald and Adam around, just so I could see what others were doing, what they did right, and how Sebald was correcting them.

  I was quiet for the rest of class and for lunch. I was pissed at my hands for not doing what I had told them to do. The beef I’d cut was destined for use in the student kitchens; later on, we’d see the mistakes and gaffes of meat students when their handiwork came to our classes. Some people would get contemptuous over their work, but I never would. I understood.

  Sometimes I drove the scenic route home, which took me past a pair of farms. There were some beautiful steer and sheep with dazzling white coats. I connected the animals grazing on the green slopes along the road home and what I tried to make yield to my knife in class. They deserved better. After I’d see the animals, the drives took on a melancholy tone. At first I thought it was because I was sorry that the animals had died. But then I realized I was sorry because everything had to.