Beaten, Seared, and Sauced

by Jonathan Dixon

  We started cooking half an hour later; my assignment was to do eggs Benedict. I attempted to poach one hundred eggs, but my water wasn’t hot enough, and I screwed them up; the pot became full of a yellow-gray slush. Someone else had to make my hollandaise for me as I struggled to right my error. Another person split and toasted my English muffins. All that I knew I’d accomplished at Tabla had turned to nothing.

  On the ride home I had a thought. Maybe it was time to consider the idea that I just wasn’t a cook.

  The thought hung there echoing, and I pulled off the road, into a convenience store parking lot. I sat idling. I turned the music off. Other cars came and went. What if this was true—and a small voice said, hey, it probably is true—what do I do? I felt deeply embarrassed and humiliated. Is this another waste of time, like my entire twenties? I felt embarrassed and humiliated on behalf of my parents, who had been so excited when I made the decision to attend school. I felt embarrassed and humiliated on behalf of Nelly. Did she know the whole time what I was now suspecting, and was too tender to lay it out? All her support and all the sacrifice she’d made while I basically went off hunting unicorns …

  Nelly was right then down in the city, teaching. I wanted to call her, but I knew she was in class. I wanted to apologize and make the apology so heartfelt that I’d break down, and maybe in the dismantling, I’d get a glimpse of what the real nature of things was.

  I started the engine and drove the rest of the way home. I got back to Saugerties at noon. I’d been up for more than eleven hours, and I’d be going to bed in six. I decided to have a beer, then decided to have several more. At some point, I talked myself back into thinking that I was just having a bad spell of it. But the initial suspicion I’d had on my drive lingered. Like a scar, or a lesion.

  On the third morning, I peeled fifty pounds of potatoes and put them into a steam kettle to boil. They’d be turned into home fries later on. I got lost in other activities, and overcooked them until they fell apart.

  After the sixth day, we began the evening portion of the class. We’d be making dinner under Chef Eric Schawarock’s tutelage. I was working with a woman from Wisconsin named Aziria, or Azzy for short. Each team had a different entrée assigned to them; there might be a choice of five or six entrées available nightly to each diner. We were to come up with our own recipes for the meatloaf or spaghetti and meatballs or baked sole or roast beef served starting at 5:00 in the afternoon. Schawarock, a New Yorker with hawkish eyes, a head of gray hair, and a thick Long Island accent, threw out our recipes and explained how he expected the dishes to be executed. We were cooking for around two hundred people a night. The second night, Azzy and I were to make sole topped with bread crumbs. It was disastrous. We baked the sole in the convection oven, sprinkled bread crumbs on top, and put the fish under a broiler to quickly toast the crumbs. We underestimated how powerful the convection ovens were, and the fish lost every bit of moisture. Broiling the bread crumbs just compounded the error. Schawarock’s comments on his grade sheet that night simply read, “All bad.”

  Five more days passed, pretty much without incident, but without any progress or triumphs. Thanksgiving came. The beginning of December arrived, and so did L-Block.

  DURING THE SIX WEEKS of L-Block, there’s no cooking. All the classes—Restaurant Law, Cost Control, Menu Development, Nutrition, Intro to Management—are book based, everything purely academic. I was back in my khakis and polo shirts, arriving most days at 7:00 a.m., downpressed by the frigid winter temperatures, enduring the slack erosion of my time on campus.

  “If you divide the cost of sales percentage with operating expense percentage, you get the variable rate for your restaurant.… Determining the break-even point is to divide the occupational expenses by the contribution margin percentage.… Protein contains 4 calories per gram and should make up 10 to 35% of your daily diet.… The fat-soluble vitamins are A, D, E, and K; they occur in foods containing fat and get stored in the liver or fatty tissue until needed.… There are four basic theories of management: scientific, human relations, participative, and humanistic.… Success in leadership means focusing on a ‘return on the individual,’ a philosophy that blends imagination, initiative, improvement, interaction, innovation, and inspiration.… Judy, a caterer, signs a contract for a party with David for $1,500.00 for October 5. The day before the party, David calls Judy and tells her to cancel the party. Judy decides to sue David for the contract price. Judy then finds out David is seventeen years old. Can she still sue?”

  To Nelly and me, money was now just a fabled thing that other people had. We were low on oil to heat the house but couldn’t afford more. Nelly had taken on additional teaching, which meant many hours of additional reading and time away from her writing, and her synapses were beginning to smoke.

  There was a single bright spot. Raimundo Gaby was a handsome and nattily dressed Brazilian man who taught Menu Development. In a lightly accented voice, he bounced from one side of the room to another, shouting, singing, waving his hands, cracking jokes, always wearing a beautiful suit and wildly colored tie. “Look at this! Look at this menu!” He’d have a picture of the Café Boulud menu projected on the overhead. “Awesome! Excellent! Bringing it! Brrrrrrrrrriiiiinnngggiiinnng it! But then … but then … now, look at this! It breaks your heart!” He switched to a projection of the Balthazar menu. “Not bringing it! Not bringing it! Does your eye know where to go? Mine doesn’t! Off balance! Too crowded! If they just moved this … if they rearranged this …” His hands swooped all over the place. “They’d be bringing it! Three simple changes! Easy, breezy, beautiful, Cover Girl!”

  He was better than television.

  Gaby gave us an assignment to create a menu for an imaginary restaurant. I came up with an idea. I owned a book called British Grub, a garishly illustrated collection of recipes—full of Day-Glo, psychedelic colors and grotesque drawings of English people eating—for traditional British blue-collar food. I had looked through it a lot as a little kid, enraptured by the colors and the food itself. And what little kid wouldn’t want something called Toad-in-the-Hole for dinner? I’d been given a copy of Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck Cookbook and had acquired Grant Achatz’s Alinea a few months prior. I decided that my menu would take all those traditional British foods and give them the Blumenthal/Achatz treatment—sci-fi, high-tech interpretations of salt-of-the-earth classics. Ridiculous foams, gels, and powders; bizarre deconstructions and groan-inducing puns. I spent an entire weekend pouring myself into the menu—sublimating the prior five weeks of L-Block tedium. I was surprised: I really got into it. It was the most fun I’d had in ages.

  I had dishes on the menu like Scotch Woodcock, described as: egg yolk drops and crème fraîche spheres on anchovy-Parmesan toast; “Potted Shrimp” Pousse Café, which was butter and prawn parfait, English pea mousseline, honeydew-cucumber sorbet, and sauternes gelée; and Deviled Varieties, grilled variety meats with braised mustard seeds, mustard-honeycomb-apple compote, and Pommery mustard gelato. I’d look at the components of the traditional dish, break them down, see if Alinea or Blumenthal had handled similar ingredients in interesting ways, concoct flavor and texture ideas, and there I’d have the finished dish. I wound up ripping off my two source materials a lot less than I’d anticipated.

  When I showed it to Gaby, he loved it. It was sophisticated, he said. Vibrant. Fun. Exciting. I explained how I’d “invented” the dishes and his response thrilled me. I hadn’t been thrilled in many months.

  “I know those books. I see the influence, but you’ve also got your own thing happening. I want to eat this food. Really—I want to eat this food.”

  “Oh, Jonathan Dixon,” Nelly exclaimed, when I showed her the menu. “Will you make some of these?”

  I never did.

  At Christmas I had to borrow $200 from my aunt to buy presents for my parents. I considered that this might be a new low.

  The holidays ended, and L-Block limped almost imperceptibly to a close
. I waited for it all to end.

  ON DAY ONE OF the Baking and Pastry class, signs started going up around campus announcing that the Bocuse d’Or finals would be held at the CIA in just a couple of weeks.

  I’ve heard cooking and baking compared to the difference between jazz and classical music; cooking requires an intuition and ability to improvise, but baking is all about exactitude, a science. I did poorly in science classes when I was younger and felt a little intimidated by the idea that it was preternaturally easy to screw up baked goods.

  Baking and Pastry classes run in the Baking Center, a separate building connected to Roth Hall by a walkway. It was the same building where incoming students eat those first few formal meals, and where the Banquet and Catering course occurs; it was an area most of us enrolled in the culinary arts program steered clear of. There wasn’t much of a rivalry between the culinary students and the baking students—although it went unspoken that each thought their program superior and more rigorous and difficult—but the bakeshops, as they were called, felt like uncharted territory. When I looked at a campus map, and saw the representation of the baking center, I always had it in my head that it should read like an ancient map, where unexplored areas bore the words “Here there be dragons” except ours could read, “Here there be Germans.” That was the association I had of the place: that it was staffed by stern Teutons with an appropriate love of order. On the few occasions I was in that area (usually to use their bathroom, because it was really nice), that’s pretty much what it seemed like.

  The weekend before class started, I pored over the textbook. I was hungover from L-Block and the crawling damage of the winter. My snuffed-out enthusiasm hadn’t rekindled.

  I was really beginning to worry. I had a while yet to go to get my degree, and I believed that the only way to really get the most one could out of it was to go through it headlong. Why the hell stay—why bother? Why waste the time and resources?—if I didn’t burn to do it? Wouldn’t it make sense to maybe cut my losses?

  Gaby’s project had felt good. It reminded me of the way I was before I’d started school the year before: excited, brimming with wonder, open to every scrap of data. That menu had been like a shot of L-dopa, with a burst of life but then crucial diminishing returns. I remembered all those forays through the really high-end cookbooks in my collection, almost giddy when I’d look at French Laundry recipes that I knew were out of my reach and think, I’ll be taught every technique I need to know to do that.

  I sat on my bed with the textbook open. Beer bread dough … chocolate cherry sourdough … meringues … croissants …

  It would be pretty cool to understand how these get made, I thought. I flipped back and forth, looking at the pictures and stopped on page 231, the recipe for puff pastry dough.

  Just a short time ago, I’d been having a Proust moment, thinking about these Pepperidge Farm goods I used to eat, a broccoli-cheese mix encased in pastry. Pepperidge Farm had long since stopped producing them. I associated the taste with my first months in New York City because I’d come home late from work and buy some from the supermarket, heat them up, eat them, and drink beer while watching the news. I wish I could have one of those right now, I’d thought that short time ago, and then a second thought came: Hold up there—you’re in cooking school. Why don’t you make some?

  I drove to the local Price Chopper and bought ingredients—broccoli, cheddar, and frozen puff pastry. I balked at the price of the puff pastry because it was ridiculous: $4.99 for two small sheets of it. Still, I took two boxes home. Back in the kitchen, I made a Mornay sauce by cooking up a light béchamel and shredding the cheddar into it. I blanched the broccoli and sweated some onions and garlic in a sauté pan. I chopped all the vegetables fine, mixed in some of the Mornay, and gave the whole thing a generous hit of salt and pepper. I spooned the broccoli mixture onto one of the sheets, folded the pastry over, and cut them into rounds. I got about three per sheet. The bundles baked until they were golden. I let them cool, and then sampled my efforts. Not exactly what I remembered—and it occurred to me even if I had an actual Pepperidge Farm pastry in my kitchen, it wouldn’t taste like I remembered—but pretty good. Then I broke it down: probably about $2 worth of broccoli and cheddar, and $10 worth of puff pastry. $12 for the whole recipe, meaning each pastry cost $2. That was pretty steep for a trifling snack.

  But staring at page 231, I noticed that the recipe yielded almost nine pounds of puff pastry. It called for almost three pounds of butter and three of flour, but I’d get ten times the amount of puff pastry for the same cost.

  I closed the book. I willed myself to think, That will be really cool to know how to do.

  ON TUESDAY AFTERNOON, JANUARY 25, I arrived at Bakeshop 8 a few minutes early for class because I wasn’t sure where the bakeshop was, and I’d be starting with an entirely new group of people again. I’d finish the program out with this group, and I wanted to get a read on them. They had all arrived before me, and when I walked in, they turned to look at the new guy.

  I nodded and forced a faint smile, moving past the four large wooden-topped square workstations toward an open seat right at the front of the room. I put my things down and the other students started coming up to me, introducing themselves. Leo, Micah, Sammy, Rocco. Jessica. Gabrielle, Margot. Stephen. Bruce. Sabrina. I shook hands with everyone. It was nice to meet them, too. Just a minute before 2:00, our instructor arrived.

  Rudy Speiss killed off every preassociation I had with not only the building, but the whole art of baking within about five minutes of entering. He was Swiss, not German; he wore kindness and patience like a nicely tailored shirt; and as soon as he began talking, baking suddenly became accessible, leagues from the esoteric science I’d always thought it. He was about fifty-eight or so, on the short side, with a full head of brown hair and a carriage that indicated that he wasn’t completely averse to sampling his own wares. His voice was soft and even and impossible to imagine rising. He smiled constantly.

  He spent a few minutes laying out the rules—three absences equal a failing grade, two tardies equal one absence, and all the rest of the disciplinary calculus—that we knew by rote.

  As he spoke, I swiveled in my seat to get glimpses of my new classmates. Man, they looked young—really young. Baby skin. Inner glow. Full of energy. They looked incredibly earnest, too. Everyone leaned forward into Speiss’s words, taking careful notes. These kids had no dust of cynicism on them. One student, Carol, caught my eye and smiled and bent her head back over her notes.

  Speiss was saying that from now on, we were to forget about cups and half cups and all the systems of measuring we used in our old kitchens. Here, we worked by weight. Our recipes would call for, maybe, thirty-two ounces of flour—regrettably, Speiss said, we were not on the metric system, which was even more exact—and sixteen ounces of water. We were to weigh this stuff out, even the liquids. Next, he explained all the differences between the flours stored in bins under the worktables. Bread flour, all-purpose flour, cake flour, whole-wheat flour—they all had different levels of gluten in them, and they were employed in different recipes to exploit those differences, and in different ratios to refine the end results even more—heavier on the bread flour for a certain texture, more durum for another texture. Most people, he lamented, have a single type of flour in their pantries at home. You’ll never experience the wonders of baking and all its variety with a single type of flour. He gave a lesson on the nature of yeast. He talked about how salt toughens up gluten, how too much salt will make the dough irreparably sticky and impossible to work with. Then, as if cued by the word “sticky,” he said something really interesting.

  “Students ask me, ‘How long do I mix a dough for? When is it ready?’ They think that baking is that precise, that you mix and knead for an absolute amount of time. No more, no less. This isn’t so. You know in the kitchen approximately how long it takes to sauté a chicken breast, but you can’t say it is for exactly four minutes and thirty-two seconds.
At a certain moment, you sense it is done. Stoves vary with their heat, pans vary with their thicknesses. There are differences between each and every chicken breast. Baking is like that too. You need to be more careful with amounts, but you need instinct, also. A dough will tell you when it is just about ready. You can see the sheen on it, you can feel the stickiness. But you will also learn to feel with your gut when that dough is done. You will just know.”

  Speiss divided us up into teams: laminating, desserts, custards, and bread. I was assigned to the laminating team. Just as I was about to raise my hand and ask exactly what laminating was, he explained that we would be making doughs of butter and flour for pie crusts, croissants, and puff pastry. I perked up. Then he handed out one recipe sheet each. I glanced at mine and saw “Puff Pastry” across the top. I perked up some more.

  We broke apart and started gathering our ingredients. I weighed out five pounds of butter, eight ounces of flour, and then cut the butter into tiny pieces.

  “Good, good,” Speiss said, standing at my elbow. “Now everything into the mixer. Use the paddle attachment. Mix it until there are no more lumps. No lumps, no lumps.”

  I did as I was told. As my flour and butter mixed, I watched Speiss. He moved from team to team, person to person, with a genuine excitement. He loved this. He obviously loved his students—he made his explanations and corrections (“No, I think you might be just a little short with the flour weight” he said to Margot, whose dough was, the first time she tried it, a sopping mess. “There we go … good, good, great, beautiful.”) with concern and warmth. His whole manner seemed to communicate that we weren’t screwing anything up; we just hadn’t yet learned the right way to do things.

  This was a different way of passing on knowledge than Viverito or Perillo or Coyac. A raised voice wouldn’t have suited Speiss any more than a paternal kindness would have fit Coyac. But the endgame turned out the same: You wanted to do things well.