Beaten, Seared, and Sauced

by Jonathan Dixon

  “Oooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” he began.

  Ox and Twitch turned toward him.

  “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” Coyac continued. Then he erupted.

  “Shit! Shit! This is shit! What is this shit!” He reached into their bowl and took out a large handful. He shook it in their faces. “What is this? Were you going to try and serve this? This is useless! Useless! This is the worst spaetzle I have ever seen in my life. In my life! This is just … just … just shit.” He tossed the spaetzle onto the floor and stamped his foot in it, grinding under his shoe. He pivoted and walked away toward the other side of the room. Then, he stopped. He stood immobile for a moment, turned, and walked back toward Ox and Twitch. He looked down at the pile and stamped it again, ground it, kicked it. He turned and strode out of the room.

  I started to laugh, then laughed some more, and kept going. I couldn’t stop. Just about everyone joined in.

  Except Tara. She stood in a posture of indignation, close to outrage, hands on her hips, turning her head to look at all of us. “That was not right,” she said. “Not right. That is not the way to teach anything.”

  A couple of classes later, on election night, our team was doing chicken fricassee, and for some reason, I was in charge of it. I saw Coyac approaching me, and I felt uneasy, but at the same time excited; I figured some more scales might fall from my eyes, even if he was about to make me feel like an idiot. I had a large rondeau—a heavy pan with tall sides used for braises and stews—over low heat on the stove and a pot of velouté—chicken stock and roux—that I’d made simmering behind it. I had leeks ready to go. The recipe called for white pepper, which I found flat-out disgusting—the eczema of spices—and had planned on adding just enough so I could tell Coyac that I had used it. A jar of the stuff was on my cutting board. And I had chicken pieces seasoned and ready to go. Coyac watched me add butter, tilting his chin up as I went to indicate that I should add more. He watched the rate at which it melted and told me to turn the heat down. I placed the chicken in the rondeau and it sizzled. He bumped me away and pulled the pan off the heat.

  “No color on this. The chicken should have no color. Everything should be pale. The leeks should be translucent. You had the pan too hot. You need patience for this. Patience. It will get to where you want it. If you rush it, you’ll ruin it. Easy. Relax.” Together, we cooked the chicken lightly in the butter. He took over for a few seconds, picking the chicken up with tongs to gauge its progress and my eyes moved back and forth from the pan to his face, watching everything. In a few minutes, we removed the chicken and I added the leeks.

  “You want these to sweat,” he said. “Not sauté. Just let them rest in the heat. Let them give up their liquid. Do you smell that? Can you smell the difference between the leeks sweating and if you were sautéing them?” I could. “Okay, let’s add the velouté. Good, good, now get the chicken back in there. No—gently. Use the tongs, but don’t break the skin. You need to hurry. Quicker.” He picked up pieces of chicken from my platter and laid them into the liquid, which came up over his fingertips as he worked. That liquid had been simmering a second ago; it was hot. He didn’t miss a beat, just wiped his hands on a towel.

  “And now,” he said, turning to grab the vessel of white pepper, “it is time for seasoning.” He began with just a pinch, but then added more and more, and finally, in a fit of enthusiasm, upended the entire vessel into my mix. He looked enraptured in a Proustian sort of way, eyes distant, a quarter smile on his face, transported, perhaps, decades back, feeling the heat and smelling the smells of the kitchens of France where he’d learned what would become the rest of his life.

  As the fricassee cooked, the white pepper scent reminded me of the chickens from the CSA farm after they’d been slaughtered, plunged into hot water to loosen the dirty, encrusted feathers, and eviscerated.

  “Hey, Chef,” I asked as he was about to walk away. “That white pepper—do you genuinely like it?”

  He did a double take. He looked me up and down, distraught and incredulous, as if, when he was looking the other way, I’d sneakily pissed on his leg. “Yes,” he pronounced with gravitas. “Yes. It is good stuff.”

  Later, Coyac stood over the fricassee, stirring it. He tasted. He turned. “The conziss dancy is not right at all. But the flavor is good.”

  This was a pretty cryptic assertion. I had no idea what a dancy was, or what sort of modifier conziss was. But the chicken apparently had good flavor.

  He returned after a few minutes. “What did I just tell you about the conziss dancy?”

  “That it was no good.”

  “So fix it.” I had no idea how. I looked at the fricassee; the sauce looked a little thin. I decided to take the chicken out and reduce the sauce. That should fix the …

  Conziss dancy. Consistency.

  At dinner, I ate the fricassee without much interest because the taste of the white pepper irritated me. But I kept at it.

  What could I say? The fricassee was made the way tradition prescribed. The goal of the CIA is to instill a sense of that tradition, not to foment rebellion or dissent. What Escoffier did in his hotel kitchen is the classical culinary golden mean. It is a papal bull of cooking methodology, not to be deviated from without fierce soul-searching and debate.

  So, I told myself, when your food is seasoned against your will by a man with roots way the hell deeper than anyone else around here in traditional French cuisine … go ahead and taste it. This is what tradition says it is supposed to be like. Now you know. And now that you know, if you want to do something different, you have a history to react against.

  The penultimate night, Coyac had a brief, private conference with each of us.

  “You need to speed up,” he said to me. “You’re thinking too much. You’re pondering, pondering, pondering everything you do, but you’re not doing it. This is your Achilles’ heel. If you work hard, if you truly apply yourself, you will be a very, very good cook. I can see it. You’ll be great. You need the speed. You need to hurry, hurry, hurry. But when you hurry, you cannot be sloppy or clumsy. You’ll get there if you work. But you need to work hard.”

  Tara came out, shaking her head. She wouldn’t sit near us or tell us what had gone on in the other room. She stared at the floor.

  When Dan came out, he told us, “Coyac said I move too fast.” Dan nodded in thought, smiling.

  “Hell,” he said happily. “I’ll take that.”

  “Not sure he meant it the way you’re taking it, big guy,” I said.

  “Shut up, Grandpa.”

  Adam came out. He sat down, stretched his feet out, cracked his knuckles, and said, “He had nothing to say to me. Daddy’s getting an A.”

  “Oh, fuck you,” Tara said, quietly, to the floor.

  8

  OVER THE WEEKEND, I worked on a notebook I’d bought at Barnes & Noble. It was small, flexible, and sturdy, and I intended to make it into a reference for myself. I wrote down the methods and proportions for all the basic sauces we’d learned—tomato, hollandaise, velouté, espagnole, béchamel—and a selection of sauces that derived from them. I wrote down the water-to-rice ratios of seven different varieties. I did the same for grains. I copied out Thomas Keller’s instructions for a sauce gribiche, Escoffier’s version, and James Peterson’s version, from a fantastic book I’d gotten in a used bookstore, Glorious French Food. Things like that. In the back, I began copying out recipes that I’d tried and liked enough so that I wanted to repeat them: arepas, sautéed leeks and chestnuts, marinades I used for grilling meats. I’d add to it as my time at school went on, and when I went on my externship.

  The externship was beginning to be a thorn. Not-so-subtle pressure trickled down from Administration to get a site for the externship—a four-and-a-half-month stint in a restaurant somewhere in the country or world—secured. We’d be seriously penalized if we didn’t. You received a grade for your externship, and if you didn’t have everything set on time, you could lose up to ten points
from that grade. I hadn’t made any real moves toward finding one yet. I was cowed.

  In the deepest, most private reaches of my fantasy life, I wanted to go to Per Se. As my fascination with French cooking grew, so did my fascination with Thomas Keller’s world. I had heard his name ad infinitum since the moment I stepped on campus, but I began understanding him differently than I had before. The French Laundry and Per Se were synonymous with beauty and imagination, elegance and refinement. And after delving more and more into Escoffier, Point, and Bocuse, the degree to which Keller was dyed with that tradition became illuminated for me, and I saw him and the people who carried out his vision as the closest anyone could spiritually come in a modern context to working at, say, the Ritz with Escoffier himself. And the stacked motions of perfection, one perfect component melded with another and another and another, were even more appealing after time with Coyac.

  But maybe the very fact that I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone other than Nelly about where I wanted to go, that I kept it locked away like a shame or trauma, said a lot about my chances.

  Whenever I diced an onion, I still had large pieces splitting off from the sides and ends. I suspected this wouldn’t fly at Per Se, or any place like it. I was—in every sense of the word—still a student. But I had a thread of logic that went like this: If I were picked up and tossed into the deep end, it might be a shock, it might bring with it a period of suffering and distress, but in the end, I would wind up swimming. It was even possible that the experience might catalyze something previously veiled. I might turn out to be really good.

  People at school would inquire, “Where are you going to try and get your externship?”

  The most I’d give away was, “Somewhere in New York City.”

  From a database on the school’s computer system, I got all the contact information for Per Se, then helmed by Chef Jonathan Benno. I started looking at other New York City restaurants and made a startling discovery: There weren’t very many that were registered with, and approved by, the CIA. Maybe around twenty or so. All of Danny Meyer’s places were listed—Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park, Tabla, the Modern, and so on—as were David Bouley’s restaurant and Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s spots. Odette Fada’s San Domenico was there. Daniel Boulud’s restaurants were all listed too.

  I spent a few minutes looking over Boulud’s listings. It said outright that students could expect to work about ninety hours a week, with one day off.

  I considered that prospect. That would be an amazing education—total immersion, breathing haute cuisine for every waking hour. But three things occurred to me. I thought about Nelly first. She was my anchor, my partner. She was always supportive, even when I could tell my school schedule was driving her nuts. I was completely in love with her. She would probably have some issues if I disappeared for four and a half months. I wanted our relationship to survive, and I didn’t want to be apart from her for that long. Two, I would be thirty-nine years old pretty soon. Physically—and this was difficult to admit to myself—it would be hard to pull off ninety hours a week, eighteen weeks in a row.

  And three—the hardest to acknowledge—I knew that with scant kitchen experience, with only a handful of months of school to lay claim to, I was simply not good enough yet to survive in that environment. A lot of my peers had experience, and their education at the CIA was one of refining. They knew a lot of the basics and could advance immediately to concentrate on learning the more nuanced details. They already knew what a consommé was and how to make one. They could focus on the minutiae of how to perfect the consommé. The rest of us were trying to learn all of it from scratch, to acquire the rockbottom basics.

  We started Cuisines of the Americas with Chef Paul Sartory on a Monday in early November and would be cooking our way through a series of regional menus—New England, the Midwest, the South and Louisiana, Florida and the Caribbean, the Southwest and Pacific Coast, Mexico, and South America—spending two days on each. The menus seemed somewhat arbitrary; eggplant Parmesan came on the midwestern day, for example, along with braised short ribs. But more than that, the syllabus was incredibly ambitious.

  “How are you supposed to learn Mexican cooking in two days?” Nelly asked, next to me on the sofa, paging through the syllabus. “What kind of grasp can you get in that amount of time? South American cooking in two days? Southern cooking in two days?”

  I didn’t know. And in the next block, we’d spend a few weeks trying to learn to cook Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, and Korean food. Three weeks—that seemed even more ridiculous.

  I read through our recipe manual. I had never cooked a mirliton squash or made crawfish étouffée like I’d be doing on days five and six of the class, and I’d never made a Mexican pork stew with red chile sauce like I’d be doing on days eleven and twelve. But I’d made stews before, and I’d braised meats. The unfamiliar elements were the flavors—the chiles and spices, crawfish, black roux. Every culture the world over roasts and grills, braises and stews, sautés and pan roasts.

  “You can’t learn that stuff in two days,” I told Nelly. “But each class—it’s like practicing scales.”

  That was the best analogy I could come up with. If you’re a musician, you learn your scales. A scale becomes a chord and a chord becomes a progression; the progression becomes a song, and a song can become a symphony.

  Sartory was a handsome guy of about fifty-five or so, a model of restraint, and entirely unflappable. He did not get angry. When things went wrong, he did not waste time yelling; he simply figured out a way to fix the problem. He’d nail you, gradewise, for whatever fuckup you engineered, but he would not shout. And as far as fixing problems went, Sartory had a lot of opportunities with our group.

  We were at the six-month point. We’d not had a break. We spent more than eight hours a day together under pressurized circumstances. We always worked in teams, but the teams were always divided alphabetically. Whenever I showed up to class, I knew I’d have either Carlos or Sean as a partner, and often both. Joe was earlier in the alphabet and often got paired with Brookshire. I thought Carlos was scattered and moved recklessly through the tasks at hand. I found Sean was lazy. And it started to get more irritating the more comfortable I got in the school’s kitchens. As for me, I can imagine what they thought. I’d been a teacher for several years, after all, and I was often hit with the spirit during class. I started not discussing things with them, instead I talked at them. “Okay, so we’re supposed to make the stewed pork with the chili sauce. Sean, I’m thinking you might want to handle the pork. Carlos, I bet you’d do well with the vegetable prep. Since I seem to gravitate toward sauces, it’s probably best if I tackle that. Okay? Let’s go.” I was becoming a bit of a jerk.

  Carlos would usually just go ahead and do it. Sean was a little more passive-aggressive. He started showing up late and doing whatever he felt like. More than a couple times, Sean and I wound up prepping the same components of a dish. We’d each arrive at the stove with a pan full of mirepoix, or each peeled a pound of shrimp without the other being aware.

  The exchanges between all of us in class got more curt and louder.

  During the Skills classes, ingredients were truly communal. If you needed a pound of onions and only had half a pound, everyone would give up some of theirs so you could get yourself right. If you were short on thyme or Chablis, and someone else had it, they’d give what they could and adjust their recipes accordingly. These impulses were eroding away.

  A lot of hoarding started, even if the person doing the hoarding didn’t need all the extra ingredients. Or pans. There were eighteen of us and a finite number of cooking vessels. We would take what we thought we might need and hide it in the reach-in refrigerators underneath our stations.

  Unless they were in your momentary clique. Little alliances formed at the beginning of a class, but they would often not last until the end. One afternoon, Brookshire and I might have been fast friends since 2:00 p.m. But the second
he’d show up at my side and say something like, “Oh, well, I guess that’s one way to cube your beef,” I’d start to resent him. And if he needed a particular sauté pan that I had in my possession, he’d go on needing it.

  Once, we’d been supportive of each other. No matter how inedible someone’s dish may have been, you still told them it was great, just by way of encouragement. Now their dish was dissected behind their back with purposeless cruelty, the line between the food and the person smudged in a wash of sarcasm and spite: “I can barely be bothered to throw this out. Only Tara would fuck up seasoning this bad.”

  There was always Tara. Asking a thousand unnecessary questions, growing in volume with each class, perpetually confused and acting out from the fog of her bewilderment. She’d storm up to you and hiss, “You need to get your stuff out of the convection oven right now. Chef told me to put my meat in there. You’ve had it in for twenty minutes and I wanted to let it go but now I need it. Get it out of there. Right now.” Sartory had, in fact, told her to use the regular oven, which she had not yet preheated. Upon being informed of this, she’d walk away, saying nothing, and glower at you for the rest of class.

  We were also getting sloppy. Food was frequently burnt, or underdone, or raw in the center, or just destroyed.

  On the first midwestern day, when Carlos and I were preparing eggplant Parmesan, I sliced and salted the eggplant, letting it drain its bitterness away. I set up a breading station with a tray of flour, a bowl of beaten egg, and a pan of bread crumbs. Carlos assembled a tomato sauce. Carlos was starting to bread the eggplant in slow motion. I went ahead and prepped other things. I returned and he’d made no headway. Slowly, methodically, meticulously rolling the eggplant in the flour. Dipping it into the egg. Pressing it in the bread crumbs.