Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  At Babbo, they cooked up about three cows’ worth of short ribs at a time, around forty-eight, but a quarter of them always turned out to be impossibly fatty and unusable, or else crooked, mutated, and very ugly—and unusable. (Christ, I found myself saying, holding up some dwarfed, battered boomerang specimen, wondering if pasture pastimes included bovine boxing, What happened to this cow?) This is the nature of the cut—some are just mutant—so if you’re preparing short ribs at home you want twice what you think you need: say, eight ribs for four people. You can do other things with the bits you don’t use—at Babbo, the discarded meat, shredded by hand and mixed with parmigiano, becomes a ravioli stuffing, unless Cesar gets to it first, in which case chili flakes and cayenne pepper are added to make a fiery filling for family-meal tacos, with white-flour tortillas grilled on an open flame.

  By now, it is widely recognized that you don’t brown meat to seal in the juices; you brown it for the flavor. The misplaced belief, in which a crunchy outside was seen as the protein equivalent of Saran Wrap, arose in the nineteenth century out of the untested speculation of a German chemist, Justus von Liebig. The theory was that a seal is created when protein coagulates at a high temperature, just as when bleeding wounds are cauterized, and it gained popular acceptance as a scientific justification for what was seen as the new cooking method of the moment: hot and fast, rather than the traditional slow and wet. Remarkably, it went largely unchallenged for more than a century, until 1984, when chemist and cookery writer Harold McGee confirmed that no such seal exists and that we brown our meat simply because we like the taste.

  With meat, browning is the result of proteins breaking down under heat—the surface is caramelized (it literally becomes sweeter and more aromatic) and the texture changes—but this doesn’t occur until the temperature reaches at least 340 degrees Fahrenheit. As it happens, cold-pressed extra-virgin olive oil starts smoking at 360 degrees, so I suppose, if you are scrupulous in these matters, you could find happiness inside this twenty-degree buffer zone and brown your meat in olive oil without polluting the kitchen and the lungs of your colleagues. This, alas, was not the way at Babbo, where you were told to take a big, heavy-bottomed pot—a “rondo,” about three feet in diameter—place it on the flattop, and pour olive oil inside once the bottom was smoking. The first time I did this, I hesitated. I peered over the rim of the by now very, very hot rondo, a rib in each hand, like pistols about to be drawn in a game of cowboys and Indians. The olive oil had acquired a hot liquidy quality, and some molecular thing seemed to be going on, and the oil was moving around in currents. I had not seen olive oil currents before, and I didn’t like what I was seeing. As I stood there, I heard a voice, a tiny one, coming from a little man residing in the back of my brain whom I’d always regarded as Mr. Commonsense. Mr. Commonsense, who also had not gone to cooking school, was telling me that I didn’t want to stick my hand into the bottom of a very hot gigantic pan, so hot that it was spitting oil, did I? Of course not. So, as I made to set my ribs inside, I dropped them just before they reached the bottom. The ribs landed. They bounced, splashing in the hot oil, which then seemed (in my mind, anyway) to roar up the length of one of the ribs, leap off the end and explode, enveloping my knuckles. The pain was remarkably intense, and my skin responded immediately by forming globe-like blisters on the tender area between the back cuticle end of the fingernail and the first knuckle. Four of them, one on each finger. These globes were rather beautiful, not unlike small shiny jewels.

  Okay, so I learned something that I’m sure every other person in the world already knew: hot oil was not for splashing in, bumpy landings strongly not advised. I had forty-six more ribs to go, and these, I concluded, would be eased down into the bottom of the pot. But there was a problem. The jewel-like globes at the ends of my fingers were now extrasensitive to the heat (not unlike an inverted case of frostbite), and the closer I brought them to the hot bottom of the pot, the more they protested. An extraordinary thing then happened: just as I was about to lay down another rib, my fingertips, like little pets that had got loose from their leash, ran off on their own and dropped the rib. Once again, it bounced. Once again, there was a splash. And once again hot oil roared up the bone, leapt off the end, and exploded, enveloping, this time, not my knuckles but the shiny jewel-like blisters that were on them. Blisters on blisters. The process was akin to what I was trying to do to the meat—break down the protein in the tissue with high heat. But this thought occurred to me only later. At the time, I had only one thought: to remove myself from the source of the pain. I became airborne. I shot straight up, ramming my maimed knuckles into my crotch (no idea why men do this—do we expect to find comfort there?) and howled. By the time I landed, I was surrounded by several Mexican prep chefs, staring at me with compassion but also with a clear message: You, señor, are actually very stupid. Cesar handed me his tongs.

  Use these, he said.

  Of course. Another lesson learned: use tongs.

  After the browning, the rest is straightforward. Actually, with tongs, the browning, too, is straightforward. There are five remaining steps.

  One. Remove the now brown and glistening ribs (using tongs, por favor) from the rondo and make a braising liquid, the stuff that’s going to cover the ribs while they cook. In this method, the liquid is the essential ingredient, and it doesn’t matter what it is as long as it’s wet and plentiful (in an Irish pot roast, it’s water), although the ideal liquid is both flavoring and flavorful and is made from one part wine (at Babbo, about three magnums’ worth, which, as it happens, is not the Barolo of the dish’s name but a perfectly acceptable, very cheap California Merlot) and one part meat broth (say, a chicken stock), plus loads of vegetables: some carrots, an onion, two stalks of celery, and five peeled cloves of garlic, all roughly chopped, which you throw back into the rondo, still hot, and stir. You add the wine, the broth, a can of tomatoes, and cook for a few minutes.

  Two. Put the now-browned ribs in a roasting pan, pour the braising liquid over them, add some rosemary and thyme, put a lid on top, stick it in the oven (350 degrees), and forget about it.

  Three. (Three hours later, the ribs now cooked.) Turn the braising liquid into a sauce, although the instruction itself raises an obvious question: what is a sauce? In this preparation, for instance, this is what you do: first you remove the ribs and set them aside to cool; then you pour the liquid they were cooked in through a strainer into another pot. This liquid, even before you’d begun cooking the ribs in it, had been pretty rich, being a broth that had been made from chicken feet, plus lots of vegetables, herbs, and plenty of wine. Then the ribs themselves had been cooked in it. (The bones of any animal, simmered slowly, make for a wet, intense expression of the meat; here you’re getting a double expression, like a broth made from a broth.) Next, you take this dense, aromatic, already highly extracted liquid and hammer it: you put it back on a burner and boil it to hell. Just torch it. Full blast. Lots of yellow-frothy melted fat will rise disgustingly to the surface. You skim this off and keep boiling the thing until it’s reduced by more than half, when, lo and behold, it is no longer a braising liquid or a broth: it’s a sauce. The result is very, very, very concentrated. (In fact, it’s really almost French.)

  Four. Once the ribs are cool, you discover that the bones have loosened themselves from the meat and come right out. You also discover that what’s left is really quite ugly. It consists of two parts: a muscly tendon of some kind (the texture is not unlike a baseball catcher’s mitt) that is smooshed, by way of a fatty sinew, to the meat. The two parts can be pulled apart by hand. The bit that looks like a catcher’s mitt is, in addition to being very ugly, entirely inedible. With great pleasure, you throw this away. The other bit is quite yummy, although you need to trim it into a rectangle, eliminating any fatty goo. But, curiously, mixed in with your good short ribs are a number of mutants. In these, for some reason, there is no distinction between the two parts, the bad and good bits (that is, catcher’s mitt and dinn
er). They’re all mushed together, and you can’t pull them apart without tearing the thing to shreds, which is what you do: tear the thing to shreds to find some something, anything really, that Cesar can use to make the family meal with.

  Five. Assembly. Your meat is now arranged like so many dead toy soldiers, neatly tidied up. The sauce has been skimmed of fat and reduced to something that could be described as the food equivalent of most male movie stars: dark, rich, and thick. Everything is ready. Next you want to put it away in a fashion that allows you to retrieve it quickly, blast it in an oven, and serve: say, six short ribs in a half-hotel pan (which isn’t a pan, either, but a tray, and is half the size of the full hotel not-actually-a-pan-but-a-tray pan, or in normal life what you cook brownies in), pour some sauce on top to keep the meat moist, and bundle the whole thing up first with plastic wrap, then with foil, tightly, tightly, so that, once stacked on the floor of the walk-in, it can be stepped on (and in the frantic rush of service, things happen—they always happen) without short-rib juice squirting out and adhering to the bottom of your shoes, leaving a disgraceful track to the toilet when you finally get a chance to go. What you now have is a wholly typical restaurant preparation, in which most of the work is done long before the dish is even ordered (and if a restaurant can do it, why can’t you?). It keeps for a week.

  These steps—brown meat, make a liquid, cook meat in it, remove it, and reduce the liquid until it’s a sauce—are the same for every braised dish everywhere. Lamb shanks are done this way; so, too, are lamb shoulders, veal shanks, wild boar hams, venison shoulders: it’s all the same.

  Then, on December 2, 2003, a modest proposal, with potentially historic implications, was made by the Babbo meat supplier, Pat La Frieda. He asked Elisa if she wanted to experiment with chuck flaps.

  “What’s a chuck flap?” she asked.

  “It’s like a short rib without a short rib,” he said.

  “A short rib without a short rib? You mean, you don’t have any ugly ones that you have to throw away?”

  “Exactly, it’s like the perfect short rib—the dream short rib, the short rib from Heaven, the Platonic ideal of a short rib—but without a short rib.”

  And so, for the first time in five years, on the following Thursday, the Babbo winter menu didn’t have short ribs on it. It had chuck flaps. The dish was still called “Brasato al Barolo” (why change now?), and, to my palate, there wasn’t a lot of difference in the taste, although I’ve since wondered if the sauce, without the short rib bones to enrich it, hadn’t lost some intensity. Of course, nobody knows what a chuck flap is or where it might be located. Even so, Tom Valenti liked it. Not long after Elisa’s menu change, he dined at Babbo on his night off and was particularly taken by the chuck flap. Who knows?

  And so the short rib ends with a new beginning. Or so I thought. But recently I happened upon an account, published in 1979 by the English cookery writer Jane Grigson, of her efforts to re-create dishes cited by Proust in À la recherche du temps perdu. The second volume of Proust’s novel begins with a dinner featuring boeuf à la mode, what Grigson describes as a slowly braised secondary cut of beef served in its own jelly. A secondary cut is anything not fancy, and several of them work in the dish. Grigson prefers one that’s shipped to her by Charles MacSween & Son in Edinburgh. This is how she describes it: “The special cut is the long lean muscle from the inside of the blade bone, known by many names, principally as the shoulder fillet, but also as the salmon cut or fish tail. I first saw it in our butcher’s shop in France, and cannot understand why English butchers do not provide it.” A long lean muscle from inside the blade bone? I went to Benny, my butcher, and asked if he had a name for such a cut. “Well,” he said, “there are several possibilities. It could be a mush steak or a flat square or even a Scotch tender. Then again, it might be the chuck flap.” A chuck flap? The implications are interesting: Babbo’s Brasato al Barolo is not only made neither with Barolo nor in Piemonte: it’s French.

  THEN, WORKING ALONGSIDE Mario one evening, I boldly asked a question that would change my life. I recalled a suggestion he’d made, that at some point I might try being a line cook. When can I start? I asked him.

  “What about now?” He addressed the grill cook. “Mark, move over. As of tonight, you’re training a new person.”

  LINE COOK

  Imagine a large kitchen at the moment of a great dinner. See twenty chefs coming and going in a cauldron of heat. Picture a great mass of charcoal, a cubic meter in size, for the cooking of entrees, and yet another mass for making the soups, the sauces, and the ragouts, and yet another for frying and for the water baths. Add to that a heap of burning wood for four spits, each one turning, one bearing a sirloin weighing forty-five to sixty pounds, another with a piece of veal weighing thirty-five to forty-five pounds, and another two for the the fowl and game. In this furnace, everyone moves with speed; not a sound is heard: only the chef has a right to speak and at the sound of my voice everyone obeys. Finally the last straw: all the windows are closed so that the air does not cool the dishes as they are being served. Thus, we spend the best years of our lives. We must obey even when our strength fails us, but it is the burning charcoal that kills us. Does it matter? The shorter the life, the greater the glory.

  —ANTONIN CARÊME, 1833

  Cooking is the most massive rush. It’s like having the most amazing hard on, with Viagra sprinkled on top of it, and it’s still there twelve hours later.

  —GORDON RAMSEY, 2003

  9

  THE GRILL STATION is hell. You stand at it for five minutes and you think: So this is what Dante had in mind. It is in a dark, hot corner—hotter than any other spot in the kitchen; hotter than anywhere else in your life. Recently air-conditioning was installed in the kitchen, but there is none over the grill during service: how else can it maintain its consistent hot temperature? The light is bad, for no sensible reason except that there isn’t enough of it, reinforcing a feeling of a place where no one wants to be—too greasy, too unpleasant. What light there is seems to come from the flames themselves: they are lit about an hour before the service starts and remain burning for the next eight hours. I hadn’t thought through the implications of learning the station. I never projected myself into this corner, doing its tasks. Mario said go there; I went and crossed the wall of heat I’d once erected in my mind, feeling the sudden rise in temperature as a crackling sensation on my skin. Close up, Mark Barrett, who had been told to teach me the job, reminded me of a person from another era. His hands had a nineteenth-century griminess. His fingernails were crescent moons of black cake. His forearms were hairless and ribbed with purple burns. His eyes were magnified—he blinked distortedly behind big-framed glasses—and his nose, still bandaged from being broken, was streaked with sooty streams of grease. He could have been a nearsighted chimney sweep. He smelled of sweat.

  Mark described the station. There were two cooking devices besides the grill. An oven was to your right to finish the cooking of large items, like a three-inch-thick steak (first on the grill, then in the oven), and a flattop was to the left for preparing the contorni—the accompaniments, the rest of the stuff that went on the plate. Mark gestured behind him, at a display of nearly a hundred different small trays of food: herbs, green beans, artichoke hearts, beets, and who knows what else—lots of red and green and yellow. I took them in and thought: never in my lifetime. I looked back at the corner. I was hemmed in by heat. “Watch your jacket,” Mark warned. “If you have your back to the grill, the threads melt and stick to your skin.” He proposed dividing the duties: he’d do the plating, and I could run the grill. He added that dividing them was the practice of most restaurants, anyway.

  I was thrilled. Didn’t this mean I would be cooking all the meat in the restaurant? (Didn’t it also mean I wouldn’t have to learn the contorni?)

  Mark explained the drill. Because meat needed to rest, it was cooked the moment an order came in, even if it wasn’t needed for another hour. (La
ter, when the order was “fired,” the meat would be rapidly reheated and plated.) Orders were called out by the expediter, which was Andy five nights a week and one of the sous-chefs, Memo or Frankie, on the other nights, and the person at each station shouted them back in confirmation. “Two Chinos,” Andy would say, the kitchen shorthand for the pasta-tasting menu, and Nick would answer, “Two Chinos.” Or Andy would say, “Followed by Love, Sweetie, Butt,” meaning that the next course was a pasta called love letters, an order of sweetbreads, and a halibut, and the pasta chef would answer back, “Love,” and Dom, the sauté chef, would answer, “Sweetie, Butt”—a sequence of words which, if listened to with any detachment, seemed to constitute a narrative in their own right. Or: “Bar loser, tender,” which meant that there was a person at the bar alone (the loser) who had ordered a pork tenderloin.

  I shouted back and removed the pork from a “lowboy” refrigerator underneath the display of contorni. Everything was designed to minimize movement, so you could pivot like a basketball player on your planted foot. Raw meat went onto one tray, where I seasoned both sides with salt and pepper. Once cooked, the meat went onto another tray, to rest. The idea was that, at any moment, I should be able to see everything that had been ordered, cooked or not. On the floor was a large plastic bucket of hot soapy water. “Your hands will be covered with oil and fat, and you need to dip them in water to prevent food from slipping through your fingers,” Mark said. “Unfortunately, it’s usually too busy to change the water.” After an hour or so, the water was neither warm nor sudsy. Actually, after an hour or so, the water was not something I wanted to look at, and I closed my eyes when I dipped my hands into it. By the end of the evening, I stopped: my hands seemed greasier after I washed them.