Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  Provoked by White’s command, Batali embarked on a grand tour of the grandest restaurants in Europe, tracing White’s skills back to their origins like someone following a genealogical line: the Tour d’Argent in Paris; the Moulin de Mougins, in Provence; the Waterside Inn, outside London, then regarded as the best restaurant in Britain. “In four months, you learn the essentials of the place,” Batali told me. “If you want to learn them properly, you have to stay a year, to cook through the seasons. But I was in a hurry.” Most of the time, Batali was stuck doing highly repetitive tasks: squeezing duck carcasses, night after night, using a machine designed to get that extra ounce of juice to go into a duck stock, which, in turn, would be reduced into one of those “sticky, gummy” sauces for which Batali was developing such a distaste. “You learn by working in the kitchen. Not by reading a book or watching a television program or going to cooking school. That’s how it’s done.”

  That’s what I wanted to do—to work in the Babbo kitchen, as Mario’s slave.

  KITCHEN SLAVE

  Serendipitously, I found that a man cooking turned out to be seductive. I’d invited a woman over for dinner—let’s call her Mary Alice. I put on some Erroll Garner, then some Miles Davis, then “Moonglow” and the theme from Picnic, the most romantic music I know from the most romantic love scene ever filmed, and brought out the first course which I’d made beforehand—shrimp Rothschild, which is hollowed-out loaves of bread sautéed in clarified butter, then filled with shrimp braised in fish stock for just a couple of minutes, the stock then reduced practically to a syrup, topped off in the oven with some Gruyère and a slice of truffle. I brought it to her.

  “Oh,” she said and followed me back to the kitchen where I put together the tournedos Rossini—small filets of beef topped with foie gras, a truffle slice, and a Madeira reduction.

  “Ah.” She began asking very detailed questions about what I was doing and who I was.

  What cinched it was a spectacular creation called Le Talleyrand. You make it with canned cherries of all things and ground almonds and sugar, cover them with a meringue, and in the meringue you put half an empty eggshell, bake it, and for the spectacular part you turn off the lights, ignite a little kirsch or rum, pour it into the eggshell when it comes out of the oven all browned, and it looks like a small volcano—which is where things can get very moist.

  Mary Alice’s eyes were limpid and beseeching. “You’re the deepest and most complex man I know, and I love your knowledge and your fingers…but I made another date tonight at ten.” And off she went to spend the night with another guy. All my work went to benefit him! And he never even called to thank me.

  —JONATHAN REYNOLDS, Dinner with Demons, 2003

  1

  I WAS ACCEPTED “inside” on a trial basis. “The question is space,” Mario said. “Is there room for another body?” There wasn’t. There wasn’t room for the people already there. But somehow I squeezed in. To start, I’d do a night or two plating pasta plus Fridays in the prep kitchen, preparing food for the evening. Mario then invited me to attend a Saturday morning kitchen meeting. It was January 26th, 2002.

  Twenty people showed up, gathered round a long table upstairs, Mario in the middle. In April, The Babbo Cookbook would be published, and its publication, he said, had a number of implications. “We’ll come under more scrutiny. There’ll be television crews, bigger crowds, and, most importantly, the critics will be back.” Babbo was a three-star restaurant and, according to Mario, was now likely to be reassessed to see if it still deserved its stars. What he really meant was that the new New York Times restaurant critic hadn’t written about Babbo, and he might use the occasion of the book’s publication to pay a visit, and Mario wanted everyone to be ready. “What’s more,” Mario said, “because the book will reveal our secrets, we’re going to have to change our menu.” He invited ideas for dishes and suggested that his cooks read through old recipes, looking for a traditional thing that can be made new. He then reminded everyone of the three essential principles of the kitchen: that we were there “to buy food, fix it up, and sell it at a profit—that’s what we do”; that consistency was essential (“If someone has a great dish and returns to have it again, and you don’t serve it to him in exactly the same way, then you’re a dick”); and that the success of Babbo, “the best Italian restaurant in America,” had arisen from its style: “More feminine than masculine. People should think there are grandmothers in the back preparing their dinner.”

  When Mario was finished, Andy Nusser, the executive chef, the one running the kitchen day to day, brought up a labor issue: kitchen rage. Andy was forty-one, Mario’s age, but wholly different in appearance, Apollonian to his boss’s Dionysian. He was six feet with a swimmer’s broad shoulders and boyish good looks, his age betrayed only by the fact that his big head of hair had started to gray. He’d been at Babbo since it opened. His manner (austere, unfrivolous, in a hurry) conveyed discipline and a military-like respect for the rules. A cook, Andy announced, had just been fired because he couldn’t control his temper. He had banged pots, thrown utensils, “poisoned the kitchen with his anger.” The behavior, Andy said, wasn’t to be tolerated. Mario interrupted to make suggestions: take a break before the service starts, because otherwise “the stress will enter your cooking and we’ll taste it.” He offered strategies for the week: even though you might have to work thirteen, fourteen, possibly fifteen hours on “your first day, because the first day back is always brutal, your second day is easier, and the last day of your week will be a breeze. You can show up at two o’clock.” A shift ends around one in the morning; even if you start at two in the afternoon, your day was still a lazy eleven hours long.

  “Be patient,” Andy added. “Stick it out. I know most of us are here because we want to be running restaurants of our own.”

  I looked round the room. The average age was thirty-something. Most of the people were men. They were pale and unshaven. Many spoke English badly. Were they all here because they hoped to be running their own restaurants?

  THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, at seven a.m. I presented myself to the prep chef, a handsome, athletic woman in her forties named Elisa Sarno. I was eager, hopeful, utterly ready. But Elisa didn’t seem all that happy to see me.

  I put on an apron and jacket, and was given a tour. One corner of the kitchen was taken up by the “walk-in,” a refrigerated closet about the size of a small truck with floor-to-ceiling shelves. That week’s New York Times restaurant review was pasted on the door, as was the custom—a reminder of the competition and of the importance of Babbo’s three stars (very few restaurants, you learned, got even two). Another corner was given over to dishwashing. Pots, pans, and various plastic containers were stored overhead. Elisa was describing each one according to its size, but I was distracted by the dishwasher, a young angry man (I wasn’t introduced but later discovered his name was Alejandro) who was assaulting a pot the size of a suburban trash can with a high-pressured gadget that was spraying water powerfully in unpredictable directions. “These are the one-quarts,” Elisa was saying meanwhile, “and here are the two-quarts, four-quarts, six-quarts, and eight, all with their own color-coded lid. Hotel pans and half hotels are there, along with sheet trays and half-sheet trays.” The containers, I learned, were the medium of the prep kitchen—everything you did went into them so that it could be fetched later in the evening—and great weight would be expressed in questions such as: “Is this (chicken feet, say, or a quantity of beef cheeks) to be put in a six-quart, or will it fit into a four?” I was already thinking about the private autistic language of the kitchen, in which everyone around me was so demonstrably fluent—is this what you learn in cooking school, what a hotel pan is?—when Elisa stopped suddenly. “Where did you put your knives?” she asked.

  “My knives?”

  “You don’t have knives?”

  “I’m meant to have knives?”

  “Oh, my God. Okay. Bring them next week.” She muttered to herself: “God
, I hate lending people my knives.”

  She led me into the walk-in, talking very fast now, wanting to get on with her day. “This is where we put stuff for the grilling station”—she pointed to a shelf packed with green-lidded containers, indistinguishable from all the other shelves, also packed with green-lidded containers. “This is the pasta shelf. This, the pantry shelf. This, the sauté shelf. Oh, yes, and this is the masking tape. Everything is labeled and dated. Where’s your pen? You didn’t bring a pen?”

  Vegetables were in the back—crates of carrots, celery, white onions. Fish had been stacked on the floor, delivered before I arrived, some silver Mediterranean monstrosity.

  “Time to bone the ducks. Come.”

  There were four boxes of ducks, six in each box.

  “Wipe the counter, wet a cloth—do you remember where the cloths are?—get a cutting board” (Where are they again? I asked, panicking), “an eight-quart and two four-quarts, a hotel pan” (which ones were the hotel pans?) “and parchment paper. You get sheets from the pastry station. The four-quarts will be for the gizzards. Here, take one of my knives. Will you bring your knives next week?”

  Yes, yes, of course.

  “Unpack the duck from the top, so you don’t get blood all over you. Remove the gizzards. Liver goes in one container, kidneys in the other. Remove the legs to make a confit, but first chop off the knobby bit at the bottom with a chopper—here, use this,” she said, handing me a giant tomahawk, “—and then remove the breast. You do know how to bone a duck, don’t you?”

  “Well, I think, yes, I do. I mean, I’ve done it.” But when? I seem to recall a dinner party. Was that in 1993?

  “And you know about the oyster of meat?”

  “The oyster?” I asked, and my mind did a simple calculation. Duck, an animal with wings: fowl. Oyster, molecular thing without wings: mollusk. Ducks don’t have oysters; oysters don’t have ducks. “The oyster?” I repeated.

  “Yes, it’s the nugget of meat you don’t want to lose. It’s here,” she said, swiftly cutting the breast in half and whipping her knife round the thigh. She had an appealingly easy manner with the knife, which seemed to involve no effort, and the meat instantaneously cleaved in two. I was thinking, I want to learn how to do that, and ended up not quite getting the location of the duck oyster—was it in front of the thigh or behind?—when she was off. A delivery man had appeared, bearing boxes of meat.

  I looked around the kitchen. The pastry chefs were beside me, two guys cutting up pineapples. In front of me was a wall of stoves, with vats of something boiling on top. Behind me two guys were making pasta. On the floor was a giant mixer, rhythmically knocking around a large mound of dough. It was seven-fifteen in the morning.

  I picked up a duck, removed the wings, and hunted around for that oyster. I felt an obligation to honor this bird in my hand by ensuring that its thigh oyster found its way onto the plate. But where was the little fucker?

  I slowly got through my first ducks and stacked their parts on my cutting board. The idea was that you should whip through each one, slice, slice, slice, just as Elisa had done—the knife doing that effortless trick, all edge, no pressure, the meat opening up like magic—and drop each bit into its appropriate container. But I wasn’t sure I was getting it right. I piled my thighs on one corner of my cutting board, burying my first hacked-up experiments under some of the better examples, just in case Elisa came round to inspect my work.

  Meanwhile, she was opening up the meat boxes. (“Frozen pig cheeks,” she was saying to the delivery man, “frozen is no good for me.”) The delivery man didn’t reply. He was staring at me. (“Did you count these lamb shanks?” Elisa was asking him. “It’s never the number you say—I can’t run a kitchen if I don’t know the number of lamb shanks.”) What was wrong with this delivery guy? His stare was making me very self-conscious. Don’t you have better things do? You think it’s entertaining to watch a guy ruining twenty-four entrées because he can’t find the oyster?

  I looked across to one of the cooks, who seemed to be boning quails, a much more challenging operation. And he was doing it at staggering speed. The delivery man hadn’t moved. Was he actually shaking his head?—when, somehow, I dragged the blade of Elisa’s knife, smoothly and delicately, across the top of my forefinger—from behind the first knuckle to the nail. There was a moment: did I just do what I think I did? Yes. And the top of my finger erupted in a gush of red blood.

  “Did you just slice yourself?” Elisa asked, breaking off her lamb-shank count and in a tone that said, You’ve been here half an hour, and this is what you’ve done?

  “Yes,” I said, “but not to worry,” as I wrapped my hand up in a meaty, soiled cloth. “I do this all the time. You should look at my fingers. A road map of scars and nicks. I think I need to wear glasses. Nearsighted. Or farsighted. Both, actually. Really, it’s what I do.”

  “Do you need to go to the hospital?” It sounded like an accusation.

  I shook my head, a little worried by her worry. There was a lot of blood.

  “Band-Aids are in the refrigerator,” she said. “You’ll need to wear a rubber glove. The Band-Aids won’t stay dry.”

  I retreated to the dining room, crunched up the wound with a crisscrossing of Band-Aids, wrestled my finger into a surgeon’s glove, and returned. It was nearly nine o’clock, and my cutting board had a modest square of about five inches of work space. The rest of it was stacked with pieces of duck.

  I resumed. Chop, trim, twist, pop, thwack. I cleared my board. And, as I did, the Band-Aids started to work themselves loose, and the clear synthetic surgeon’s glove started to expand and droop, filling up like a water balloon with my blood. The truth is, I am always slicing off little bits of me, but I could see that if I sliced off a little bit of this glove it was going to be a mess. I was falling behind, and Elisa was looking at me.

  She picked up a thigh. To me, it looked like I’d got the oyster. In front and back, wherever the thing was, there was plenty of meat. That wasn’t the problem.

  “There’s too much fat,” she said, trimming it off, and added, as if she’d failed to mention a crucial instruction, “you are aware that these are going to be served to people.”

  I CAME TO REGARD the prep kitchen as something like a culinary boot camp, especially during my first weeks, where I was being taught basic techniques of being a cook, especially knife skills. It seemed that I’d been using a knife for years without knowing how to use one. On that first morning, I paused to sharpen my knife—well, Elisa’s knife, actually—and she stopped what she was doing and stared: I was doing it backward (ergo, I had always been doing it backward). Then, there was the rocking thing. The idea is that, when you’re chopping food you want to leave the tip of your knife in place, on the cutting board: you end up rocking the knife back and forth, and the blade then slides effortlessly, and with much more control, through whatever you’re chopping. Everyone who cooks probably knows this, but I didn’t.

  Some techniques seemed fussy. Carrots were a trauma. Long-cooking meat broths have carrots in them, along with celery, onions, and herbs, which soften the meatiness of a meat liquid. This was something I knew, or at least I thought I did. I’d made broths at home—soups, chicken stocks, that sort of thing—and I’d simply tossed in my carrots, chopped up or not: what did it matter if they were going to cook for hours? Wrong.

  Evidently, there are only two ways to prepare a carrot: rough cut and fine dice. Rough cut meant slicing the carrot in half lengthwise and then—chop, chop, chop—cutting it into perfectly identical half moons (which, to my eye, had nothing rough about them).

  The nightmare was fine dice, which meant cutting every bit of the carrot into identical one-millimeter-square cubes.

  A carrot is not shaped like a cube, and so you first had to trim it up into a long rectangle, then cut it into thin, one-millimeter planks, and then take your one-millimeter planks and cut them into long, one-millimeter slivers, and then take your perfectly formed
slivers, and, chop, chop, chop, cut them into one-millimeter cubes. I seemed to have done my first batch almost right—either that or it was late and everyone was in a hurry and no one looked too closely at the geometric mishmash in the container I’d filled. My second batch involved thirty-six carrots. It took me a long time to cube thirty-six carrots. Normally, Elisa popped round to make sure I wasn’t mangling what I was working on, but she must have trusted me with the carrots—after all, what can you do to a carrot?—so when she finally looked in I was almost done. She shrieked, “I said fine dice! This is not a fine dice! I don’t know what they are, but they’re wrong.” I had been cutting carrots for two hours, and then, like that, they were tossed; they were that bad. I wanted to weep. It took me three days before I could tell anyone about the experience (“She threw away my carrots—all of them!”), and even then I could hear the quiver of indignation in my voice. It was a month later that I finally succeeded in getting the carrots right, although the achievement—“Wow,” Elisa said, picking up my four-quart and dumping the contents into a braising liquid, “these are good”—was secretly marred by my having covertly eaten several hundred imperfect little squares.