Beaten, Seared, and Sauced

by Jonathan Dixon

  Melissa, one of my editors, said, “Actually, that isn’t the right ratio of water. And furthermore, have you ever actually had a serving of perfectly cooked rice?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never even considered it.”

  “Then you haven’t.”

  An old Buddhist koan came to my mind as I pulled my pizza out: How many flavors can you detect in a single grain of rice?

  I remembered Viverito saying to me, “So many of these kids tell me about things they want to try making: ‘Oh, I want to do shrimp with a pine needle foam and pea gel.’ I want to tell them, ‘Okay, so you’ve made a foam. Now, explain what this adds to the dish other than demonstrating that you can make a foam? How about learning inside and out how to cook that shrimp so it isn’t pure rubber?’ ”

  The underside of the pizza was a beautiful light brown. I shoved a pizza peel under it to pull it out and slid it onto a cutting board to cool. After a minute, I used scissors to cut pieces of ripe basil over the top.

  You get a perfect roasted chicken by following directions close to this: Dry the skin of the bird with a paper towel; you don’t want moisture. Remove the wishbone. Salt the cavity of the bird. Truss the bird—there are a hundred dozen ways to do this; choose one—and salt the exterior of the chicken as well. Have your oven at around 425. Put your chicken in a pan, up and off the pan’s floor. Some people use a rack, I roll aluminum foil up, wrap it around my fingers into a coil, and perch the chicken on top. Put it into the oven and let it go for twenty, twenty-five minutes, until the skin begins turning color. Drop the heat to 375 and let it go for another thirty-five minutes. Tip the chicken; red juices will run out. Close the oven on it for another four or five minutes. Tip again. There will be less red in the juices, and they will be darker. Close the oven. After a couple of minutes, tip again. The juices will be a dark, cooked red with some gray. Take the bird out; it’s done. Let it rest, uncovered, for twenty minutes—no less. Then cut it up.

  This represents an accretion of steps. None of them—in and of themselves—essential, none of them complex. Could you not truss the bird and still get a good chicken? Yes. Could you skip trussing and salting the cavity? Yes. Skip the trussing, cavity salting, elevation off the pan, and seasoning the exterior? Now you’re pushing your luck.

  If you do it right, the chicken is tender, juicy, and really tastes of chicken.

  Culinary mediocrity is an accretion of shortcuts. Take a shortcut now and you’ll be taking them for the rest of your career.

  Kent and Allan knew that there is a way to handle every single element, no matter how small, that goes into a dish—there’s a right way to do everything, Ty had said at Tabla—and they didn’t take shortcuts.

  Jacky was at my shoulder. “You had all those vegetables here, all those sausages, and you made a margherita pizza? You are so ambitious, aren’t you?”

  “Do you like roast chicken?”

  Jacky looked puzzled. “Of course I do.”

  I lightly slapped his forehead. “Then eat the freaking pizza and shut the hell up.”

  The two of us stood eating my pizza. Maybe I could have taken it out a minute earlier, but it was really good.

  We had spent that day and the day prior in a state of light heartbreak over leaving Speiss’s class. “It was like a womb in here,” I’d said, and everyone agreed. But we’d gotten good news on the morning of our final day. The next class was Cuisine of Europe and the Mediterranean. It covered basic Middle Eastern, Spanish, Italian, and French cooking. Everyone was excited. The best lunch and dinnertime foods came out of the Mediterranean kitchens. And our instructor was the recently promoted former Skills teacher, Robert Perillo.

  12

  “ALL RIGHT,” PERILLO SAID. We were gathered in a semicircle around him in the Mediterranean kitchen, which looked identical to most of the other kitchens, except there were a few more ranges and ovens, each stretching parallel against opposite walls. Behind us there was a cart loaded down with that day’s order, and trays of meat and fish on table-tops nearby. “A lot of you I remember from Skills I and II. But we’re all going to get to know each other even better. I love teaching this class. I love the food, I love passing on what I know, I love learning tricks and techniques from you guys. You’ve all been out on externship, and you all picked things up. And I’m excited to see what you can show me.

  “I think we’re going to have a really great time together. Everyone has their assignments? Okay, then. Start cooking.”

  There is something difficult to describe about how different you feel working under someone who doesn’t have too many other places he’d rather be, who wants you to do well, who is genuinely excited about imparting information, who loves cooking and assumes the same about you, who watches every move you make—not to nail you for an error, but to be sure you’re doing it the best possible way—and who is having a truly good time doing it all. It’s like being given permission to succeed, and you operate fueled by a low, constant ebullience. It was great working with Perillo.

  Not that he was easy, or tender, all the time.

  It’s simpler to cut an onion in half and then pull away the peel than it is to cut off the tops and peel the whole thing first before slicing it in two. But it’s cleaner to peel the onion first. Perillo told us to do it that way. He didn’t just get excited when things went right; he was just as emotionally invested when things went wrong.

  “Okay,” I heard him say to Bruce, his voice animated. “When I say peel the onion first, how many different meanings does that have? I’m certain there is one meaning. I think there’s no room for interpretation on this one. Peel. The. Onion. First. Please don’t make me tell you again.”

  Or, a little later that first day, Sammy and I had finished our prep work and were putting together a demo plate for Perillo to critique. We were doing ghaliyeh maygoo, an Iranian dish of sautéed shrimp in a tamarind-tomato sauce. I was sautéing shrimp. I didn’t have a spatula near me, so I was tossing the pan to make the shrimp jump and bounce and turn over.

  “Jonathan,” Perillo called out. “Have you ever eaten flying shrimp?”

  “Are they a Mediterranean shrimp?” I asked. “I’ve never heard of flying shrimp before.”

  “Me neither. Keep the damn pan on the stove.”

  But then when things went right …

  I’d been following the hummus recipe and noticed something. “Chef Perillo. There’s no cumin in this recipe.” He scanned my recipe sheet.

  “Very good, Jonathan. You’ve assessed the recipe correctly.” He started moving on.

  “Can I put cumin in?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because …” He stopped and seemed to think about it. “Actually, I don’t have a good reason. Okay, go ahead. Just don’t make it overpowering.”

  I immediately toasted some cumin in a pan. The flavor of the cumin is intensified and transformed by toasting it—something I’d picked up at Tabla. I ground it up and put it aside. I minced some garlic, got the chickpeas out (someone from the previous class had soaked and cooked the beans for us), and put them right into a food processor. The recipe didn’t call for my next step either. The skins of the chickpeas are tough, and usually make hummus grainy. I pulsed the peas into a paste and then put them twice through a tamis, which looks like a drum head covered with fine wire mesh. The flesh of the peas came out the other side; the skins stayed behind. I put the peas back in the processor with the garlic and cumin, some tahini paste, and lemon juice.

  Perillo happened by. “And here’s Jonathan, still laboring over the hummus.”

  I didn’t look up. “I would love to banter with you, Chef Perillo, but right now, I am very, very busy and you shouldn’t distract me.”

  “Oh, Jonathan, how I’ve missed you.” He drummed his hands on the worktable and walked away.

  I remembered reading that when making hummus, a very slow dribble of oil into the mix as it blends results in a smoother fi
nish. I had my olive oil and began to drip it in, slowly, slowly, a thimbleful at a time, the food processor whirring and shrieking. I could smell the motor heating up. It took a while, but when I finally got the consistency I wanted, I turned the processor off. I tasted it. Before the texture, before the flavor of the hummus, the lack of salt and the need for some tartness hit me first. To leave some wiggle room, I added less salt than I thought I’d need, and then a squirt from a quarter of a lemon. I tried again. The earthiness of the chickpeas came through, the creaminess of the tahini; I could taste the ghost of the garlic on the back of my tongue, and the flavor of the cumin. A touch more salt, another two seconds of the processor. I called Perillo over to evaluate it. He picked up a spoon from a container Sammy and I had standing nearby, dipped it in and tasted. He dropped the spoon into a bin filled with other dirty spoons. Then he took a new spoon and tasted again.

  “Man, that is damn good hummus,” he said. “I was dubious, but …”

  “Dubious?” I said. “Oh, ye of little faith.”

  He stared. “What can I say? I’m happy I’m wrong.” He took another spoonful for good measure and went on to make his rounds.

  I wasn’t the only one doing well. I tried the falafel and it was great. The baba ganouj, too. The fresh-baked pita, the lamb dumplings with yogurt sauce in brown butter—everything was a success. And we were on time to open the kitchen at six. At quarter to, Sammy and I put a stack of eight sauté pans into a 450-degree oven to heat up so the shrimp and tamarind-tomato sauce would cook more quickly. We readied all the ingredients we’d need. When service started, Sammy pulled the sauté pans out from the oven and put them on a burner we weren’t using. He would sauté the shrimp when an order came in, and I would take care of the sauce. When the door to the kitchen opened we got two orders immediately and fired them up, passing them off to the students within a minute. I reached for a new pan and pulled it toward me. It had been out of the oven for barely sixty seconds. I felt a sensation that I described later as being “blue” and a scream run from my fingers up my arm. I tried to let go of the handle, but my skin stuck to it. I thrust it loose and looked at my palm. It was a gleaming red. A lot of skin was gone. It hurt so much, my eyes welled up. Sammy turned to look at me.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I just fucking burned myself.”

  “How bad?”

  “Pretty bad.”

  Perillo called out for three orders of shrimp. I wrapped my hand in a towel and kept cooking. The pain was grotesque. There were a series of refrigerators under our worktables and we had several metal bains-marie in ours. I kept reaching in and pressing my palm against the cold metal for relief. It would help for about five seconds.

  I kept cooking. I didn’t quite get why; this was a student kitchen, not three-star dining. Who cared if the students didn’t get the shrimp as fast as they wanted it? Or at all. But I couldn’t walk away. All I needed to do was spoon some of the tamarind-tomato jam into the pan, shake it with butter until the mix was loose and flowing, and toss in Sammy’s shrimp. But I couldn’t concentrate on anything other than the blaring pain in my hand.

  Perillo came over and said loudly, “Jonathan, your sauce is like mud. What the hell are you doing?”

  I didn’t answer. I just kept going.

  “Hey, come on—we need to fix this sauce!”

  Sammy said, “I’ll do this. Just serve up the rice. I got it. Don’t worry.”

  I gave up my spot at the stove and addressed myself to the rice. Perillo kept looking over. After about fifteen more minutes, we’d served all our shrimp—about twenty plates’ worth. I went up and told Perillo I needed to see the nurse.

  “Is that why your sauce was so bad?” he asked, when I told him about the burn.

  “I was on the verge of tears.”

  “Why didn’t you leave?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s insane. Lemme see.”

  I held my hand out to him.

  “That, my friend, is going to hurt.”

  The nurse debated whether or not to give me antibiotics, decided not to, salved the burn, wrapped it up, and told me to keep it dry. I went back to class; dinner service was long over. Family meal was finished. Everyone milled around, cleaning up. I did what I could with one hand.

  I couldn’t do anything the next two days, except spoon rice onto the students’ plates. By the fourth day, the skin had blistered over, so I put on a latex glove and started cooking again.

  But during that time, I was really impressed with how smoothly everyone was working together. Each night, there were a lot of dishes on our menu—six different entrées and about a dozen appetizers, in addition to freshly baked breads, everything to be prepared in two and a half hours. There were the usual problems: dropped pans, brief but vicious arguments over who got to use which piece of equipment when, the inevitable burned foodstuffs.

  But in past classes, like in Americas, when something had gone horribly wrong—dropping a full sheet tray of eggplant Parmesan, for instance—the problem got solved by eliminating it completely. The eggplant got wrecked? Fine, we didn’t serve eggplant that night.

  Perillo wouldn’t eliminate the problem. If something went bad—a tomato-pepper jam that got dried out in the pot beyond repair—he made you figure out a way to fix it, to make sure that item was available on the menu with all the others. He moved as if on fast-forward, and when Perillo kept that pace up, the rest of us followed suit. A year ago, when we had tried to effect that sort of speed, we looked like the Keystone Kops, a wake of spills and breakage and cinders trailing behind us. Now the tomato-pepper sauce got done again, and on time.

  It became apparent that we had been the recipients of a pretty good education. We’d been taught every technique we’d need and been given the opportunity to practice and refine them. When mistakes happened, it was almost always the result of carelessness, zoning out. It was never a matter of not being able to do something. A lot of the nerves and angst we’d all felt when we’d start a new class had eroded away. We were capable, and there was a lot less to worry about.

  On the fourth night, we made a selection of tapas dishes. Sammy and I did braised oxtails; others made paella, cod fritters, fried monk-fish, tripe in a sauce of stock and wine, braised octopus, Serrano ham fritters, and at least six or seven more. Perillo was ecstatic with the results, and so we were too.

  When I labored over an osso bucco one night, during each step, the past two years repeated itself in bursts and flashes in my mind. I thought of the trip to the CSA farm to dispatch the chickens when I was handling the veal, and as it cooked I remembered the duck. As I diced up onions and carrots and made a tomato concassé, I was retelling myself the story of Viverito and the blue bin, and also picturing the platters at the Bocuse d’Or. I tried to make every cut a model of exactitude. I tried to use every scrap. When I saw my cutting board getting littered, I remembered Tabla, and remembered it again when I’d look at the clock and see it pointing out the disparity between what needed to be done and the target time of 6:00. I’d taste my sauce and a phantom Coyac would arrive at my shoulder with bulging eyes; I worked for perfection with the seasoning. I tried to hit a harmony of mind and action that let whatever dish I was working on come together from nothing into a aggregate of small successes.

  Perillo had really bloomed too. He mused to us one day about how fascinated he was with history in general, how it made up the bulk of his reading, and he reflected it in his lectures. Italy, France, Spain, and the Middle East each has, to understate the matter, a substantial historical record, and Perillo got animated and intense whenever he’d talk about the spice trade, or the Inquisition, or which foods came from the New World, or the fall of the Roman Empire. He had a theory of history that was based on economic exploitation, and he’d grow angry talking about blood spilled in the name of money, shaking his head, pursing his lips, waving his hands.

  Before dinner service one afternoon, a few days before th
e end of the class, Perillo took each of us into the hallway for a short conference on our progress.

  “So what happened to you over the last year and a half? I’m watching you zip around the kitchen with more confidence—more competence—than I saw in you before. You’re really doing some cooking in here, and you’re putting up great food.”

  “I don’t know. I sort of had a born-again culinary experience a little while ago. It’s a little hard to explain.”

  “Well, hallelujah, then,” he said. He glanced down at the clipboard in his hand. “On the other hand, your sense of teamwork needs some help. You’re not communicating with others well. Part of working in a kitchen is keeping a dialogue going with people around you.”

  “Okay. Fair enough. I’ll give you that one.”

  “Thanks. That’s kind of you. Especially since I’m the one giving the grades. Just as an example, the night you burned your hand, I shouldn’t have to have been the one coming over to you and telling you how bad your sauce was. You and Sammy should have worked that one out.” He gripped the clipboard by its corner and started swinging it, signaling we were done. “But really—you’ve come a long, long way. Keep going.”

  FROM PERILLO’S KITCHEN WE went to Banquets and Catering, seven days of cooking in quantity for the incoming students—around eighty or so each night—who crowded into the same room I’d sat in the first weeks of school. But before we got near a stove, we would spend seven days waiting on them.

  Ezra Eichelberger, the hospitality instructor, was a short, smart, jolly guy with a broad smile and a mustache, and he jumped right into the fundamentals, teaching us the first day about how to carry several full plates at once, about setting the table, taking orders on our dupe pads, learning how systems of tables and seats worked in restaurants, and the fundamentals of dealing with people face-to-face.

  It was easy to take in the mechanics. I already knew where knives and forks went on a table because my mother had taught me. Seat one at each table in the B&C room was at seven o’clock. When you said “table 45” that did not mean there were forty-five tables in the room, but that you were referring to the fifth table in the fourth row.