Beaten, Seared, and Sauced

by Jonathan Dixon

  And as for the three Asian students in the class—Sitti, Joe, and Yoon—I suspect they were cracking their knuckles and waiting to kick everyone’s asses. Since Sitti was from Thailand, I resolved in advance to stick close by him, if possible, when Thai day arrived. He’d recently won a cooking competition in Manhattan for some of the Thai dishes he’d cooked at home. He never mentioned his win to any of us, but we’d heard about it through the rumor mill.

  Outside the classroom kitchen, at a little past 1:45, Adam finally stood up from examining the contents of the bins on the cart and announced, “This is going to be a good way to end the year.”

  We were milling around, clapping one another on the shoulders in mute, male affection. We weren’t clapping Tara on the shoulders. But the tensions that had been building in prior classes among all of us—the tensions of long days under pressure, the irritations with people’s bad kitchen habits, their sloppinesses or shortcuts, reiterated day after day—none of them were there this afternoon.

  I was in an especially good mood. Over the weekend I’d watched It’s a Wonderful Life, and every time I watched it, I spent a few days afterward in love with life and humankind. I loved Christmas. It made me sentimental and sappy. I had also watched Gimme Shelter in honor of the anniversary of Altamont and had been singing Rolling Stones songs to myself ever since.

  Smythe arrived, well over six feet tall and slender, and we followed him into the kitchen.

  “Okay,” he said, moving down a long bank of six worktables stretched end to end, walking back and forth and around, “your assignments are taped to the fridge. Find your assignment, find your partner, find some cutting boards, find some bains-marie. Get yourselves set up. Lecture in five minutes.”

  The worktables took up most of the room. Behind the tables, opposite from the door, was a squadron of huge, industrial-sized woks sitting over gas jets. A tandoor oven stood just beyond the woks. At the opposite end of the worktables sat a deep fryer and a steamer. We took it all in for a moment, then fell out to discover what we were doing and who we were doing it with. Brookshire and I were partners, and our assignment that day was to make a dish called “Aromatic Lamb Shoulder with Mushrooms.”

  Brookshire and I got ourselves set up side by side and were about to go digging for ingredients when Smythe started his lecture. He did a tour first—a quick demo on how to turn the woks on, where dry ingredients went, which refrigerator we’d use, all the minutiae. We were all shoulder-to-shoulder in a half circle around him. Then he said, “I know this is insane. I know that there is no way—not a chance in hell—to become literate in Chinese cooking in just a few days. Or Korean cooking. You guys”—he indicated Joe and Yoon, who were both Korean—“you guys have spent your whole lives becoming literate in Korean cooking and I bet there’s still more you could learn.” Joe and Yoon nodded. “But I propose this to you. Braising is braising the whole world over. Sautéing is sautéing by any other name. You cook green beans to the same point of perfection in China as you do in Provence. The flavors might be new, they might be unfamiliar, but not for long. I’m your guide here. I’ll show you what you need to know.”

  Smythe continued. “You are not to use recipe sheets in this class. You can write down a few basic things on index cards—ingredients, some notations about method and technique, but you need to have this stuff internalized. If you follow a recipe blindly, you’re never going to really get that recipe into your blood. You need to memorize it, envision it, see it in your head. Then you’re going to be cooking. But not if you’re doing cook-by-numbers. If you get flubbed up, if you lose where you are with your recipe, you can come up and look at the book up front. But keep in mind, I start removing points from your daily grade for each second you’re standing there trying to figure out what you should already know.

  “If you find yourself short of an ingredient, you have until two fifteen each day to put it on the supplemental order. After that, you’re shit out of luck. And your grade will suffer for it. You need to be prepared and organized.

  “I’ve heard from Chefs Coyac and Sartory that this is a particularly strong group. That there’s a lot of talent here. I want to see it come out. I need to see it come out because we have so much to do and so, so little time.”

  He looked at his watch. I looked at mine. It was 2:15. Dinner was at six.

  Smythe said, “Let’s discuss China.” He began with geography, breaking China apart into provinces, discussing which foods were indigenous to which province, foreign influences, the economics of each region. As he spoke, every word was echoed by the small cacophony of our pens scratching in our notebooks. He went on to talk about different dynasties, then about soy sauce, delineating each of the several types, the differences in character not only between those types, but between brands of the same type. He took the same tack with rice wines. Bean pastes. Different tofus, and how they’re made, from the harvesting of the soybean through to the finished curd. It was 3:00 now. The intensity of the pen scratching was letting up. But Smythe wasn’t. He was on to topography now, and how differing climates affected cuisine. From there to climate change, to the evolution of industry in China, to communism and Chairman Mao and some of his favorite dishes. Smythe took us to the influx of Chinese immigrants to California in the nineteenth century, of how what we know in America as Chinese food came to be and proliferate. It was 3:45. Pens and notebooks had been laid down some time ago.

  “Well …” He trailed off. “I guess that’s probably enough for now. Wow, I’ve talked for a while.” I thought I saw a very faint trace of a grin flit across his mouth. “We have a little less time than we’d probably like, but hey … get cooking.”

  Almost everyone—Adam, Tara, Brookshire, Sean, and I—looked pissed off. On the first day, with this cooking so few of us had ever been immersed in, having to serve a steady stream of students in a few hours, we could have really used any extra minutes lost to his lecture; most of the chefs I’d had barely went on for forty-five minutes. We careened around the room, bumping into each other, not so gently nudging each other out of the way, groping through the dry storage and spice racks for ingredients, grabbing up vessels to hold them. Over at the pile of things from the cart, little violences were playing out. Yoon and Adam were after the same bag of scallions, the same cache of carrots and ginger. The bags were being pulled apart, the contents falling, the volume of voices edging up.

  I was checking out one of the woks, and Smythe appeared next to me, reaching for a tool that hung on a hook on the wall. I thought about the twists, turns, loops, and free associating he’d just done for more than one hundred minutes. I don’t know why I said it, but I remarked to him, “So I guess you’re kind of the John Coltrane of lecturing chefs.”

  Smythe looked at me, expressionless, and said, “I prefer to think of myself as the Pharaoh Sanders of lecturing chefs.” He plucked the tool from the wall and walked on.

  By 5:00, the room was mayhem. Haste does make waste, and a lot of it: The surfaces of the worktables were covered with vegetable scraps, meat trimmings, spilled ground spices, and small puddles of soy sauce. The attempts at high-speed cooking we were all making saw us getting careless. Brookshire and I had split the labor so that he would sear the lamb, simmer it, and measure out the dry ingredients. I’d handle the vegetables. I quartered a couple pounds of mushrooms, with spastic hands that tried to move faster than they were able, and, when I went to sweep them into a bowl, I swept half of them onto the floor. No one noticed but Brookshire. He said softly, “Just pick them up.” I moved on to mincing ginger—it was in ugly chunks when I was done, not close to a mince—and garlic, which didn’t fare much better. I rough chopped cilantro and made stalks of celery into tiny cubes. The clock kept jumping forward toward six, and none of us could move fast enough.

  Adam and Tara were hissing into each other’s faces; across the room, near the spice rack, Dan and Yoon were bitter over who was going to use the last of the dried chiles. Around the room, other partn
ers weren’t talking to each other. Smythe was at his computer, sipping tea. We had a poor handle on the prep work, had only barely started cooking, and still had to set up all the equipment: get the soup warmer hot, get the deep fryer on, set out dishes, remove the tops of the two worktables closest to the door (they doubled as steam tables to keep the food warm during service). At six, there was a line at the door. Students kept poking their heads in to check our progress. Smythe was still at his computer, watching us, looking up at the clock, and shaking his head. Brookshire was setting our lamb into trays, spilling sauce all over. Other pans full of moo shu vegetables, braised cabbage, and dumplings arrived. The rice wasn’t done yet. At 6:20, we started serving. Two people put rice on plates. Others of us stood with spoons over the lamb or vegetables or dumplings and ladled them out according to what was ordered. We took a long time doing this, too. The students who’d waited—and more than a few had walked away—looked angry and put-out. When the last ones got their food and left, we all stood still for a moment and looked at the mess.

  “Twenty minutes late,” Smythe remarked. “That’s pretty bad. I’ve seen groups smaller than this one get the job done on time. And look at this place. I mean …” He trailed off and gestured. Around where the rice was, there were more grains on the table than in the pan. It looked as if it had snowed.

  “Go eat. Be back in half an hour.”

  We filled our plates, then went to the cafeteria, where we all sat in silence, eating the food we’d made. It tasted pretty good, but we were all so shell-shocked from the rush and fumbling that no one seemed to enjoy it. I just wanted to go home for the night.

  We got back into the kitchen and spent an hour and a half cleaning up. When we were finished, it was around 8:45. Smythe said, “This can’t happen tomorrow. I know it was the first day, but you were all running around like little kids, pushing and grabbing and whining. Figure out how you guys are going to cooperate. Figure out how you’re going to communicate better. What you did tonight wasn’t A-, B-, or C-level work. It was D-level, F-level.

  “And I have a little more I want to say about China.”

  Out in the parking lot, I turned the key in the ignition, and nothing happened. The lights had come on when I opened the door, so I knew it wasn’t the battery. I turned the key again and pumped the gas and eventually a sputter morphed into a cough, then into a hack, and the engine turned over.

  The moments I’d shared with Jimmy Stewart over the weekend, those two hours that injected me with so much goodwill, had taken a hit during class and evaporated completely when the truck hiccuped. I had to stop and admit to myself that actually, I was playing opossum with reality.

  For the last week, Christmas carols had been on the radio—I’d really crank the volume when “Good King Wenceslas” came on—and people had already decorated their houses with lights and little statues of Santa and reindeer. If the truck not starting was anything other than just the cold, I’d need to get it looked at and I’d need to get it fixed. And this was an impossible thing, because I had no money whatsoever in the bank. I had exiled that fact from my mind through sheer will, but it was furloughed now.

  The next day, Smythe’s lecture took up only one hour. He discussed tea: green, white, and black; the caffeine levels of each one; how they were, in Indonesia and parts of India, picked by trained monkeys; how to brew the tea, on and on. It was like the day before: frantic note taking in the attempt to capture each piece of information, giving way to selectively recording only pieces of information, giving way to giving up. It was a torrent of information that jumped from context to context. But there was no denying that Smythe was a serious intellect.

  Adam agreed with me when I commented on it later during prep time.

  “But,” I added, “I guess we’re just being given all of that intellect.”

  We were a little better behaved that second night, but we still snapped at one another, got outlandishly angry that someone had maybe taken a little more ginger than required, still dropped things, and wasted things out of carelessness. We opened at 6:10 that night, cooking the exact same menu as the night before. We ate dinner and then cleaned up almost silently again.

  When I got back to Saugerties, I found that Smythe had sent us all an e-mail. The subject line was “The Group Falls Down.” It read:

  Just a note that I have spent the last half hour closing the kitchen.

  The stocks and items cooling in the back sink were still in there as I was closing the room. Their temperatures had not been monitored.

  The sink was not clean, vegetables under the ice.

  Steamer and steamer drip pan not clear of rice residue.

  Dishes still in the warmer.

  Catch pan under broiler not clean.

  Reach-in doors and reach-in floors not clean.

  No closing forms filled out (there are 2).

  Why did I stay to clean up the mess?

  Because my training is such that I could not leave the next shift with the mess, and my concern for the people I feed is such that I could not allow the food service facility I operate to fall into such shabby and careless condition.

  I will point out that there are 2 stewards (team #6) each day. I am not sure why their training is not working. For example (another example): Why would they not point out the problems with so much bare-handed raw food contact all day? Isn’t that the job?

  Officers in the brigade have a responsibility to assure the safety of the operation.

  That did not happen today. It was: careless, sloppy, unprofessional.

  Team #6 does not earn a passing grade on this day for the above reasons.

  No joke! You better take this much more seriously.

  ADAM CALLED A GROUP meeting before class. He wanted to discuss the past two days and try to fix the problem. We all sat at tables in the empty cafeteria. The drink machine hummed and clicked in the background, and we could hear Sartory’s class setting up for the day.

  “Why were we able to get through Coyac’s class—Coyac—and not fuck up like we’re fucking up now? How did we get through Sartory’s class, being as bad as we are in Smythe’s class? What’s the problem?”

  “You want to know what the problem is?” Tara said, indignant. “We have no time. He talks, and talks, and talks, and talks, and we have no time to cook.”

  “I think Adam’s aware,” I said. “Obviously he is. He has no time either. I think what he’s getting at is why we’re such horrible slobs. And we shouldn’t be fighting with each other. I know we all think we’re a pain in each other’s ass, but we still need to work together every night. And besides, it’s Christmas. Peace in the kitchen, goodwill toward men.”

  “Yeah, exactly,” Adam started, but Tara cut him off.

  “I don’t think you’re a pain in the ass, Jonathan. I just think you’re incredibly lazy.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wash a dish. And it always seems to me that you have your partner doing the hard stuff while you sit back and watch.”

  Brookshire spoke up. “No. First off, I wouldn’t take that if that were the case. Second, Jonathan pulls his own weight. And why would you say that here in front of everyone? If you were so concerned about it, why try and embarrass him right now? And me, too? Do you think I couldn’t handle the situation if it were true?”

  Carlos yelled out, “Can we stop talking about how lazy Jonathan is and talk about why we suck?”

  Tara said, “I think the two are connected. Mike—have you ever seen Jonathan wash a dish?”

  Brookshire thought for a second. “Actually, Jonathan, I haven’t ever seen you do a dish.”

  In one sense they were right. I rarely did dishes. But the reason is, there were always three people at the dish sink. One person who scrubbed and passed it off to his or her right, where the next person rinsed it, and then passed it to a third, who dunked it in sanitizing solution and then put it away. Because of the volume of dishes, people invariably
did a half-assed job. The dishes were always greasy and flecked with pieces of food. Every pan in every kitchen was afflicted with that same sheen of grease. When I was in Perillo’s Skills class, I had done dishes, but I’d done them meticulously because the grease disgusted me. So it took me longer. I remember Dan, who was rinsing, getting angrier and angrier about my pace, and Carlos, getting impatient too. Finally, they kicked me out and took over. It happened the next time I did dishes too, and then one more time before I decided I’d dedicate myself to sweeping and mopping the floors and scrubbing down the worktable surfaces.

  Gio said, “Who cares if he does dishes or not? Everyone here contributes. And when he was my partner, he was great.”

  I still hadn’t said anything.

  Adam tried to get things back into order. “Jonathan isn’t the cause of the problem. And if he didn’t work, as group leader, I’d make it my business to say something. And I haven’t needed to.”

  Tara said, “I think we really need to talk about this group leader thing. I did not elect to put you in charge. You are not my chef.” I heard something that sounded like assent from a couple of people.

  I stood up. Class was in forty-five minutes. I was tired of this; every single one of these meetings went exactly the same way. “I’m going to the bathroom for about forty-five minutes,” I announced. Adam looked at me, anger and what seemed to me like betrayal veiling his face. I stopped at his shoulder and leaned in toward his ear. “This is bullshit,” I said. “You and I can talk later.”

  We didn’t, really. When I showed up for the beginning of class, Adam quietly asked me, “You okay?”

  “Fine,” I said. “You?”

  “I guess.”

  “I think you should start practicing for your final,” Smythe said. He’d laid out trays full of ingredients: fish sauces, black bean sauce, bean paste, different soy sauces, different sesame oils, tamarind, rice wines. “Start tasting, start memorizing. On your final, I’ll be asking you to identify everything on this table by taste.”