“For what? What did I do?”
“He picked up your essay as soon as you left the room and read it. He was laughing out loud. I think you’ve ruined it for the rest of us.”
Two more people came out, and the room was empty except for Viverito. The three of us walked in and Viverito held my paper out to me. He’d written “Excellent” across the top.
“What was the paper about?” Adam asked.
“It was a total denunciation of American culture,” I said.
Viverito said, “Hey, man—I love preaching to the choir.”
On the Saturday after the last fish class, Nelly and I were in the supermarket and I felt an urge to grill beef for dinner. I stalked the meat aisle, looking for hanger steaks. I found one. It was not all natural, it was not organic, it was not grass fed, it was not local. I put it in the cart. Nelly and I did the rest of our shopping. We slogged through the checkout, paid our money, went home, had cocktails. At 6:00, I fired up the grill and cooked our meat. Nelly made salad. At 6:30, we ate. Nelly had a small portion of meat, and I ate the balance.
After dinner, I was playing with the cat, Cash Money. Cash Money is an obligate carnivore; he requires meat. I do not. He liked playing with the plastic rings from the top of Gatorade bottles, and I stood in the kitchen tossing a ring and watching him attack it. This went on for a while. I poured a scotch and went to the porch to sip it. Through the window, I watched the cat keep on attacking the ring. Dinner didn’t taste right anymore. I don’t know what the connection was, between the cat and dinner; I just knew that one existed.
I had in my mind an image of a steer, and I pictured that steer hobbled and ruined. I pictured a perfect piece of meat, beautifully marbled, exquisitely cut. I pictured a syringe full of hormone, another full of antibiotic, another full of weird chemistry. I pictured all of them being injected into the meat, then cooking it, then eating it. I envisioned chewing, I saw the additives blending with saliva, I saw myself swallowing.
I felt a definite disgust whenever I saw an ad for some triple burger at a fast-food joint, or an all-you-can-eat buffet at the mall down the road in Kingston, but I’d bought, cooked, and eaten that hanger steak.
Nelly, as if by prompt, said to me the next day that she felt it would be worth it to spend the extra money on clean meat, if we were going to eat it at all.
We made a pact.
6
ON THE FIRST DAY of Skills class, we marched into the kitchen like a bunch of invading Pattons. We were ridiculously early. We were ridiculously excited. This was the start of the real thing: real vegetable cuts, real sauces, real stocks, real heat under real pans with real food.
Everyone had cut vegetables before, and made sauces, and cooked things, but not all of us had done so under the guidance of a genuine, classically trained chef.
We’d all read enough, or seen enough television, or just been sufficiently indoctrinated by the CIA to understand that classical, traditional techniques—which meant French methodology—would be the mainstays of our arsenals for the rest of our cooking careers. Know this stuff and you could build off it without limit. After all, was there really anything in Saint Keller’s Bible that wasn’t practiced by Escoffier, too?
Skills I would run for three weeks and be followed, logically enough, by Skills II, a seamless slide from one right into the other. Both would be taught by the same instructor, Chef Bobby Perillo, a new guy. Perillo’s biography had been posted on the CIA website. A CIA grad from the class of 1986, he had been a sous-chef at Balthazar, restaurateur Keith McNally’s famous Manhattan bistro. He’d been the opening chef at McNally’s Schiller’s Liquor Bar, had worked as a tournant—a sort of kitchen jack-of-all-trades—at Charlie Palmer’s Aureole. Most recently he’d been an instructor at the French Culinary Institute in New York City, a school that was widely derided at the CIA—like every other cooking school—mainly because it wasn’t the CIA. Maybe he hadn’t trained under Bocuse, but it was still an impressive résumé.
Adam had met with him and told us Perillo seemed “cool.”
The group of us who’d been together in meat and fish had been split up again. Brookshire was in the new group, Lombardi was there. Seventeen-year-old Carlos, presumably still doing it clean, was with us. There were some other people I’d seen around who walked into Skills, and many I’d never seen before.
When we entered the kitchen, a stack of cubbyholes for our stuff sat on the left and opposite that, a pair of sinks, a worktable, and two immense steam kettles. Two banks of four ranges and ovens extended from one wall out into the main space, two ranges and ovens on each side, and two more of each running along the back wall. There was a dry storage closet and shelves stacked with pots and pans and a dish sink with all sorts of utensils—kitchen spoons, spatulas, spiders—hanging above it. The room smelled like mop water and was dimly lit with fluorescent lights that were on their way to being spent.
We’d wanted to get into this place for two and a half months.
Perillo was there when we came in, standing by a small podium opposite the ranges. He had a look that many—though not all—the chefs seemed to have, a sort of weathered appearance that signified a lot of time spent in the heat on one’s feet, of years of line cooking, enduring a bloodstream boiling with adrenaline. He sort of bobbed and weaved as he stood, like a boxer whose feet had been nailed to the floor. He kept his hand cupped near his groin. He had short, dark hair with streaks of gray, and he was smiling widely. He did seem cool.
He recapped his bio for us and explained that he and his wife had just moved up from the city and lived in Woodstock, and they hadn’t quite gotten used to it yet. He told us that this was the first class he’d be teaching at the CIA.
“I’m probably as nervous and excited as you are,” he said. “I remember walking into my first Skills class. And now I’m teaching it. This is a significant moment for all of us.” I began to like the guy.
We’d all been assigned workstations, but most of us had been unable to decipher the chart Perillo had made. We went ahead and assigned ourselves. Perillo didn’t care. “Just stay wherever you are for the rest of Skills I.”
I had taken the spot directly across from the chef’s demo station, which afforded me the front row for everything Perillo would be showing us. I was determined I’d soak up every damn word, every movement of his fingers. I was partnered up with Gio, who nodded hello as he joined me.
Perillo told us to get ourselves set up and we went right to it. We got the cutting boards from a shelf in the back and pulled metal bains-marie from the closet to hold our utensils. We each grabbed a plastic tray and lined it with paper towels for our knives. We unpacked our knives—chef’s knife, paring knife, boning knife, fillet knife—and our utensils—vegetable peelers, wooden spoons, plastic heat-proof spatulas, tongs. Then he told us to gather vegetables from the worktable near the door: two onions, two shallots, two garlic cloves, two potatoes, and two plum tomatoes. We’d also need a small pot to boil water, and a bowl for an ice bath. We put water in the pots and turned the stove on.
The blue ring of gas that burned fiercely underneath the pot will always be indelible in my memory. It seemed incredibly momentous—the first cooking school flame.
While the water heated, Perillo demonstrated how to cut onions. One onion was to be sliced in one-eighth-inch slices, the other diced in one-eighth-inch dice. He cut the ends off each onion, then cut them in half. He peeled away the skins. To slice the onion, he simply cut it across the grain. But his hands flew and the onion seemed to just fall apart into perfectly equal slices. To dice an onion, he turned the root end of one half away from himself and made several horizontal slices, stopping just short of cutting all the way through. Then he started making cuts perpendicular to the slices, each with an eighth of an inch between them. Next he cut perpendicular to those, each evenly spaced, and the onion dissolved into perfect dice. He held up the butt end of the onion and told us to save it for stock. He took out his paring knife
and performed the same operation on the shallots and the garlic clove. His motions were effortless and the results flawless. So effortless, that matching him seemed entirely possible, even probable.
Peel the potatoes, he instructed, and square off the round edges. He made the peel disappear and, within a few seconds, had a rectangle of potato. He told us to cut one potato lengthwise into quarter-inch slices, then cut the slices into quarter-inch strips. In turn, each strip was to be cut, at quarter-inch intervals, into cubes. He demonstrated and wound up with perfect quarter-inch diced potatoes. The second potato was cut into eighth-inch slices and then into eighth-inch julienne.
Finally, he took the tomatoes and incised an X into the bottom of each one. All of our pots of water were boiling at this point. Perillo dropped two into the pot nearest him, let the tomatoes swim for a moment, then removed them with a slotted spoon and plunged them into an ice bath. After a few seconds he took one out and the skin just peeled away. He cut the tomato into quarters and, with a paring knife, sliced away the seeds and pulp. Next, he cut the tomato quarters—he called them “petals”—into quarter-inch strips and made dice out of them. That, he announced, was how you made tomato concassé.
He informed us we would have seventy-five minutes to repeat his performance. We would put the results on a tray in small piles. We would also save our scraps so he could see how much we’d wasted. He instructed us to bring everything up for evaluation once we were done.
I figured seventy-five minutes was about sixty more than we needed. Simple cuts, repeated. That was it.
Adam did require just fifteen minutes. Yet another Michael—Michael Crosby—required only a few minutes more. A second Adam, Adam Aubrey, finished at about the same time. There was a second tier of people who took a bit longer but came in way under the mark: Brookshire, Lombardi, and someone new named Yoon, from Korea.
That left a dozen of us hacking apart the vegetables, watching the clock’s hands jump forward in bounds.
Slicing the onions was no problem for me. I had addressed myself to a lot of onions at that restaurant in Brooklyn. The dicing, however, was new. The restaurant where I’d worked was proudly rustic, and this attitude extended to its vegetables. Exactitude was not a priority. After I made those first few horizontal cuts and started in on the perpendiculars, the fucking onion was collapsing under my fingers. Within a minute, it looked as if I’d tossed it into a wood chipper. A good deal of my enthusiasm was evaporating away, that peaked excitement that had been stoked so high when I walked in. I had never thought of myself as fragile before, but the DMZ between a sensation of skulking in the kitchen and maneuvering confidently through it was turning out to be pretty narrow.
Gio was working really slowly, but his cuts were right on. I watched what he did for a moment, got a new onion, and then tried to emulate him. Things worked out a little better this time.
My shallots were a mess. So was my garlic. The tomatoes looked okay—a bit uneven—but the potatoes were absolutely mystifying to me. No matter what I did, no matter how I held my knife, I could not get the slices to come out evenly; they were wedged, or one end was too thin and the other too thick. The julienne looked like wooden toothpicks soaked in water for too long. The dice reminded me of some weird-shaped die my friends and I had when we played Dungeons and Dragons as little kids.
Adam was moving through the room, stopping at different workstations, offering advice. He got strange—even extreme—reactions. I couldn’t hear what was said between Adam and whomever he was talking to, but I watched the looks on their faces as he tried to help. The expressions were bitter, pissed off, and their body language announced he should get the hell away from them. Adam looked increasingly hurt, then defensive. He made his way over to me as I was gathering up my scraps. I wanted him to tell me that they weren’t as bad as I thought, but he couldn’t.
“Really?” he asked as he poked through the potato dice. “Really?”
I said nothing, just kept gathering the scraps.
He continued. “You know, next time, you should try this …” and he went to pick up my knife.
“You know what, man? Not now.” I was really irritated. I was every bit as hostile as my classmates. Obviously, I wasn’t mad at him. Not really. If I didn’t want to be angry at my performance in the future, I should learn how to not repeat whatever mistakes I was making. “Wait, wait, wait—I apologize. I’m sorry. Show me what you were about to do.”
“Look at the way you’re standing,” he said. “It’s at a weird angle to the table. When you go to cut, even if you’re holding your knife completely straight—which it looks like you weren’t—you’re at a bad angle relative to the food. Hold your knife like this—and now stand like this …”
A line was beginning to form at Perillo’s desk. The clock said there were just a few minutes left. I thanked Adam and got in line.
As I waited, I could hear Perillo ripping everyone’s efforts apart. He was saying, “No, no, no … does this look even close to a quarter inch? … Uh-uh … you’re going to really need to do some practice outside of class … hey, you know they offer tutorials in the Student Learning Center on basic cutting techniques? … no, no, nope.”
I got exactly the same comments as the others. And I think my face bore the same contours of hostile disappointment, but I was having a hard time figuring out where to place it.
As we were cleaning up, a man from Administration came in. He announced that it was time to elect a group leader. While Adam had been performing the job for the past few weeks, the man said, we would—right now, this very second—have the opportunity to make a choice. The group leader should be less like one of us, the man said, and a little more like a sous-chef for the class.
I had no desire whatsoever to have the job, nor, I realized, would anyone have voted for me if I did. Adam had a lot of kitchen experience. He knew what he was doing. He was willing to take on all the extra responsibility. That was good enough for me. I made up my mind right then to stump for Adam if he needed it.
“Adam, do you want to run again for group leader?” the man asked.
Adam said he did.
“Who else would like to be a candidate?”
No one said a word. I could see a couple of my classmates considering it. I could almost see the gears working in Adam Aubrey’s head. Young, deadly serious, a native of Illinois—you just looked at him, listened to the way he barked out “Yes, Chef!” to whatever Perillo said to him, and could tell he would very much like the power.
Crosby looked like he, too, was giving the idea some thought. A bunch of the others, three or four of them whom I didn’t know yet, looked at Crosby like they were urging him to raise a hand, but he didn’t.
I looked over at Lombardi. He seemed to be the most likely candidate to run against Adam, but he’d be starting as a resident assistant in the dorms soon. Plus, I guessed that Adam would have taken it personally if Lombardi did run.
So Adam ran unopposed. He made a short speech about wanting to be a good group leader and asked if we could have a meeting to discuss what sort of leader he should be. This seemed to puzzle a lot of the students. You got info from the chef and passed it on. What’s the issue? And if there was an authority figure already in class—the chef—was there a need for another one? They actually started to look more resentful than when Adam was trying to dole out advice.
At 6:10 Perillo let us out for dinner. Six ten pretty much meant dinner was over. There were twenty servings of each entrée available in each of four classroom kitchens, with about five different entrées on offer. Hundreds of students were vying for those hundred plates, and when a kitchen opened at 6:00, the good stuff was gone by 6:05. By 6:10, it was down to the dregs. Tonight, there was some steamed flounder available in the Asia kitchen, some johnnycakes with mushrooms in Americas. The Mediterranean kitchen was completely cleaned out. I got the johnnycakes, which gave greater nuance to the word “bland.”
But what weren’t bland were the d
esserts, and the desserts were the downfall of many CIA students. Baking and Pastry students sent the desserts they made on large, multitiered carts, which were unloaded onto long tables. During meals, you were allowed to help yourselves to as many desserts as you wanted. These were not light desserts: tiramisus, custards, dark and white chocolate mousses, pies, and tortes. If I had had a decent meal, I would usually pick one dessert and eat just part of it. It wasn’t difficult getting someone else to eat the leftovers. Others would take two or three desserts at a shot and eat them all. People started getting bigger. Uniforms that had once fit nicely got tight, and in the hallways, as the students walked, you could hear the frictive, whooshing sound of fabric on fabric as swollen thighs rubbed together.
Some people actually lost weight. I did. Since I was tasting a lot of food all day, I didn’t feel much like eating large portions of anything later on. By the end of the second semester, I’d find myself eleven pounds lighter.
As we ate, talk turned to the election we’d just had.
“Well, that was democracy at its finest,” Brookshire said. “We got blindsided with that one.”
Adam said nothing. He toyed with the flounder.
“Why didn’t you run, then? You had the opportunity,” I said.
“I don’t have time. I’m busy.”
“Adam’s busy too. You don’t win if you don’t run.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Aubrey said, emphatic as always. “What’s important is that we get behind Adam. It’s important for us to be united.”
“Well …” I was trying to phrase this carefully. “We’re not dealing with matters of national security. We’re cutting vegetables.” Adam looked a little hurt. “Sorry, Adam, I don’t mean to denigrate the office. But, you know, for all of us: a sense of perspective, huh? I think it’s probably a good idea to have someone who can add a little fuel to the fire. But what’s important is, I don’t know, maybe that we learn something. The rest’ll take care of itself.”
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