“That’s up to you,” he said softly.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Hey, that’s O.K.,” he said, almost a whisper.
I paused. I needed him to know I wasn’t blowing this off lightly. I said, “I am sorry. I really want to be there.”
Silence on the line. Then, still quiet and weary, he said, “Michael, I don’t want you to take offense at this.” He searched for words. “I was going to say this yesterday. Maybe I should have. I don’t want you to take offense at this.”
When I hung up, I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened or why I was feeling so strongly. I paced. Then I sat down and tried to think about the conversation.
“Part of what we’re training students to be here is chefs—and when chefs have to be somewhere, they get there,” Pardus had said calmly and evenly, not as judgment but as fact.
“Chefs are the people who are working on Thanksgiving and Christmas, when everyone else is partying,” he said. “Or at home with their family.”
He didn’t stop there: “You’re cut from a different cloth,” he told me. At that moment, I believe, I stopped thinking as a writer and just listened to what he had to say. There was a hint of snobbishness in his voice. I knew every now and then during class he would look at me trying to figure me out, when I argued with him about whether or not my hollandaise had too much lemon juice. He would grow pensive and just stare. He had told me he watched the way I carried myself. He never said this, but I could see it in his eyes and hear it now over the phone: College boy. White collar. Smooth. Writer. I sensed that part of him envied this and part of him was amused by it. He was a smart, articulate man. But he was a cook through and through. We were different. But I resented his saying that we—and it was a cumulative we, meaning himself and everyone in that class but me—were cut from different material. As if I were satin gown or Oxford cloth. As he went on, he seemed to grow less tired. He was getting worked up, too.
“We’re different,” he said. “We get there. It’s part of what makes us a chef.” I was quiet. “We like it that way. That’s why this place never shuts down. And we’re teaching the students this.”
He knew I was doing a different job, he said. This wasn’t meant to be a criticism. He just wanted me to understand. He had his job to do, and I had mine, he said. I said I understood. I asked him, if I were a student and was making this call, didn’t make it in, what would happen? He told me if I were a student and didn’t show for Day Fourteen, I’d fail.
This is a physical world. The food is either finished at six o’clock, or it’s not. You’re either in the kitchen or you’re not. Much of what one learned here was why food behaved as it did. But sometimes there was no room for why. Sometimes why didn’t matter. It wasn’t simply that excuses were not accepted here—excuses had no meaning at all. The physical facts in any given moment—that was all.
When I entered K-8—the cooking practical in full swing—Chef Pardus’s eyebrows rose above the frame of his glasses and he strode immediately toward me, shaking his head. “I didn’t mean to shame you into coming,” he said.
I said, “I know.” I told him what he’d said had angered me. Then I said, “Can I still take the practical?”
“You happen to be in group two,” he said. “Group two starts in a half hour.”
On Day Fourteen of Skills One, Chef Pardus divides the class. Half do their practical, the other half cleans pots, cleans the kitchen—no jockeying for burner space, no running to the sink to wash a pot because your béchamel sauce was scorching and the pot room was empty. The school simply wanted to see that each student knew how to make a consommé, a stable emulsion. After an hour and a half, the groups switched.
My name was on the board in the second group. It was significant, I think, that he’d written it down at all.
I was an hour and forty-five minutes late but had made it in time not only for the practical, but I also had an extra half hour to take the written test I’d missed yesterday. I stowed my knives and briefcase beneath my station, my heart still racing, and accepted the test. I sat outside in the hall between K-8 and K-9. I forgot to write my name on the test. I had gone from my warm room in Tivoli twenty-five miles away to the Culinary; I was not certain why I had done it or why I was here, and I was not certain why I was so furious. But again, this was not a place that concerned itself at such times with why. I read the first question on the test: “Describe the procedure for making brown veal stock. List ingredients in sequential order.”
I paused and thought. “First, you rent your house in Cleveland and move your family hundreds of miles east to the Hudson Valley … .”
Clearly, something had changed but I had no time to reflect. Twenty-five questions to answer in that many minutes, occasionally interrupted by a student giving a tour—the Culinary receives about two hundred thousand visitors a year—who would move down the hall (“And this is a Skills kitchen, students’ first kitchen experience at the CIA, and behind you is the kitchen for the Caterina de Medici restaurant …”). The moment I finished, I hustled into the kitchen.
David and Bianca had prepped their stations and gathered their mise en place. Their consommés were already at a simmer beneath sturdy rafts of ground meat, egg white, tomato, and mirepoix. They nodded, said hello. I asked them if we were going to have enough room here—feeling a complete outsider now, I didn’t want to screw up their practical. I wasn’t a real student, after all. David was confident and welcoming. “No problem,” he said, “plenty.”
I was a little behind because of the test and because I hadn’t prepared to be doing this at all. We’d done everything—a quart of consommé, a quart of béchamel, a three-yolk hollandaise, and a one-yolk mayonnaise (we used an ounce of a pasteurized yolk out of a carton)—in class many times, so much of it felt like rote. I grabbed three bowls from the cage and on my way to my station picked up a healthy ten ounces of meat—Pardus would be looking for flavor, no time to skimp—whipped three egg whites, dumped in the meat, cut up some mirepoix, and carefully measured the tomato paste—short that and you’ve got a cloudy broth—poured in the beef stock, whipped it some more, then got it heating. Slowly. Plenty of time now that the consommé was on the flame. As soon as the raft had formed, a perfect thick flesh-colored disc, I got the béchamel started, first cooking the flour in clarified butter till it had a nice pastry-crust smell, added the milk and seasoned it, and put it on the flattop on a ring of aluminum foil to keep it from burning. The foil wasn’t enough and I scorched it three times, each time dumping it into a new pot, bringing the scorched one to Travis; Travis was at the helm of the sink, so I knew there would be plenty of pots.
“How ya doin’?” Travis asked as I passed him.
“I’m a little disoriented,” I said.
The two emulsions were simple, though the mayonnaise could take time; one of the big problems with the mayonnaise was that we had to whip the heck out of it, and if you whipped too much, the mayonnaise would turn gray because of the old steel bowls we used. I liked the hollandaise best, so in the middle of the practical I relaxed a bit with that, took my time, cooking my eggs over water till they were a nice sabayon consistency. Pardus said he’d seen people cook eggs on a flattop and once seen a hollandaise cooked in a deep fryer. The double boiler was safest so long as you didn’t let the water boil. I added some lemon juice first, then whipped in warm clarified butter. It took more than eight ounces and I had to reheat it before I brought it to Pardus.
Chef Pardus, behind his desk, regarded my sauce. “It’s got a nice color,” he said. “It looks a little flat, though. It could be more fluffy.” He was right; I didn’t argue. He lifted a spoonful and let it fall in a thick slow ribbon. “Good consistency.” He tasted it, didn’t move. Then he nodded. “This is a good hollandaise sauce.” He squinted at me and said, “It’s just a little light on acid. You could have added a little more lemon juice.”
“All week I’ve been adding too much lemon juice,” I cried.
He shrugged and said it was a minor point. He took off a point for the flat appearance. It would be the only point I would lose during the entire practical. Everything else was perfect, and the mayonnaise was best of all, a perfect body, “exactly what I’m trying to teach them to do to make it a great base,” Pardus said, and it had a perfect balance of salt and acid that gave it “a real brightness.” With fifteen minutes remaining, I’d gotten a 199 of 200 points. My head was now clear. I’d crushed the test. Cut from a different cloth? I’d absolutely crushed it.
The question that now pressed on me: Had I gotten out of hand? Had something snapped?
I don’t know. A few days later, having mentioned in an E-mail to a friend what had happened, he sent a chuckling response: “I can’t wait to read about how, leaving wife and daughter on the hearth, you drove twenty-five miles through a snowstorm to make a béchamel sauce.” I could understand, from a distance, that the situation had comic possibilities, but at the time it wasn’t funny to me. Something had happened.
After the phone call with Pardus, and having reflected on the situation, I’d gone into the other room to talk to Donna.
“So he basically called you a wimp,” she said, deftly assessing the situation.
I started, then said, “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“This is really upsetting you,” she said.
“I guess it is.” I paced the room awhile, hyperventilating.
Then Donna, who watched me as one would a tennis game, said something that upset me more. “Michael, you’re not a cook, you’re a writer.” I ignored the angry subtext of her statement (Don’t even think about going out in this weather), and said, “I know that, I know that.”
This, of course, was a lie. I didn’t know that at all. In fact, and it wasn’t until that day and that snowstorm that I fully understood what had gradually taken hold of me since the moment I pushed through the door of the stall, dressed not in jeans and sweater, but in white chef’s jacket and houndstooth-check trousers.
I wanted to be a cook. I wanted to be a cook. That’s why I was angry beyond reason. Pardus’s I’m-tougher-than-you got to me. His snobbishness ran so deep it was blasé. I seethed. I would show him.
The second problem—what lent confusion to my anger—was that I was a writer, and I had certain obligations in telling a factual story. Pardus had thrown my entire modus operandi into question, had revealed me as a kind of double imposter. I was not solely an observer, a recorder dressed in student gear, to learn what it was like to learn to cook. I now intended to play, too. I wasn’t here for recipes. I was no longer here to learn how to make a great veal stock. I knew that now, and that wasn’t the end. I needed to know what it took to be a professional cook. But in order to know this, I had to relinquish what made me a credible reporter—my objectivity, my serene writerly distance. And yet it became clear to me that day that I could not know what it meant to be a cook from a distance, simply by watching. Pardus had upped the ante by saying I could neither learn to be a cook nor write completely about what it took to be one. Pardus had told me I couldn’t know, because I wasn’t one of them. Cooks git there.
And if I couldn’t know, didn’t live up to it, wasn’t tough enough, didn’t git there, then I was failing as a student and as a reporter simultaneously.
I had promised my wife that I would turn back if the road grew too dangerous, and headed out into the snow. That day changed me: I would be a cook. I didn’t have the experience, I wouldn’t have the time, and I would be forced to jump around in the curriculum and stay true to my reportorial obligations, but somehow, someway, I was going to prove myself as a cook.
The Making of Chef Pardus
Following the catharsis of the cooking practical and still unsure why I had behaved as I did, I suggested to Chef Pardus that we talk, preferably before he began his three weeks of doubles next week.
With no lecture on Day Fourteen, with the kitchen cleaned, and with no failures, class ended shortly after seven o’clock. As we pushed out the doors of K-8, I told Pardus how furious I’d been earlier. This interested him. I said I didn’t know if I could explain, but I told him what Donna had said. Pardus chuckled. “I guess she was right,” he said. “I kind of was calling you a wimp.”
Now, as we headed through the dining hall, down a flight of stairs into the mailroom—Pardus checked his box—and into the chefs’ locker room, a narrow, carpeted chamber with seventy-six slim green lockers, I asked why?
“Wow,” Pardus said. “This brings up a lot of stuff for me.” He began to unbutton his chef’s jacket, then stopped. “It’s sort of like therapy for me. I get goose bumps thinking of it.” I expected him to smile, but he didn’t.
“I think part of it is protection.” He tossed his chef’s jacket into a hamper. “Protection against feeling like you don’t have a normal life. To protect you against all the things you give up because of this work.” I nodded but he stopped changing and turned to me to say, “I haven’t had a Thanksgiving since I was a kid. Till this year. This was the first. Mother’s Day? I didn’t spend it with my mother. Busiest day of the year. I’ve lost a lot for this work. And I’m not happy about it.”
He put on jeans, a green sweater, tied the laces of his shoes. I hadn’t really thought of it while he was changing but the transformation was startling. He looked like a grad-school student in his jeans-and-cable-knit attire, trim, clean-shaven, short wavy brown hair, preppy wire-rimmed glasses. It was only then that I realized how powerful a uniform can be. Then I suggested that life as a cook must be like a cross between life in the military and life in a traveling carnival.
Pardus laughed, said the analogy wasn’t off the mark, and we headed into the cold. The storm had passed; the roads had been salted and appeared dry. The night was frigid but clear. Pardus said he might be a little behind me, he’d have to dig his car out of the snow. He’d slept at the Culinary last night to ensure the storm didn’t waylay him in Germantown. Susanne, who lived an hour south of Hyde Park, had stayed the night in Eun-Jung’s room. Everyone had gotten there.
We met at Starr Cantina in Rhinebeck, a cozy little town midway between Hyde Park and Tivoli, populated on summer weekends by New Yorkers but, in cold early March, happily unfashionable. The bar, too, was slow on this Friday night, though a couple at the next table called out “Hi, Michael” to Chef Pardus when he sat down; he introduced me to former students heading into Garde Manger.
This was the first time Chef Pardus and I had talked outside class. I knew he’d worked in New Orleans because our bad posture, hunched as we were over our SMEP at Table One, led him to tell us about working garde manger station at a hotel in the French Quarter, cutting all day. “I blew out my sciatic nerve,” he told us, which had caused him to collapse to the floor. Weeks of tai chi got him back in shape, he said.
I knew that he had traveled in France, eating. “You know that moment in Amadeus,” he told us, a memory sparked by the bright green germ of a garlic clove on my cutting board, “when Salieri says God speaks through Mozart? That’s how I felt when I left Robuchon’s restaurant.” He had said that attention to detail, such as removing the germ from the garlic if you weren’t going to cook it well, was what distinguished a good restaurant from an excellent one. And Jamin, the three-star restaurant of Joël Robuchon, a chef known for almost machinelike perfection, had proven to be Pardus’s own private mecca, food holiness he had never before encountered.
And I knew that he had an abiding love for northern California, where he could forage for wild mushrooms, where farmers’ markets were so abundant he would sometimes drum up business at his restaurant in Sonoma simply by walking out the front door to the market across the street and buying a few unusual ingredients. Shoppers, attracted by his uniform, inquired what he would do with this or that and he would create some daily specials on the spot that they might try for lunch or dinner if they cared to stop by the restaurant.
I knew that he worked hard, was ambitious, focus
ed, thoughtful, an occasional braggart, that he kept McGee, Le Guide Culinaire, and the latest issue of U.S. News & World Report on his bedside table, and that he was intensely competitive—he got there.
Still throbbing slightly from the unusual events of the day, I tried, at his request, to explain why I’d gotten so mad. Because I was responding to something he had started, though, I returned the focus to him and a particular sense of loss: namely, Vicky, his former wife, who had begun A Block at the Culinary just as Pardus was about to graduate. She too became a cook. The marriage lasted eleven years. It ended in part, he believed, because in a line of work requiring such long hours from two people who were by nature perfectionists, and who therefore worked even longer hours, lines of communication broke down. About a half year later, he fell in love with a woman several years older than himself, the mother of a ten-year-old boy. They discussed children of their own, she was getting old (“Now or never,” she said), but Pardus didn’t feel stable in his career at the time; later, when he did, she said he’d waited too long, that she was too old. Not long after that he began to feel that he had “topped out” in the chef world, would never hit the ranks of celebrity that would make the long hours and work worthwhile, and he felt he’d burn out if he continued to cook. At the same time, the Culinary’s Greystone campus neared completion, a spectacular state-of-the-art facility in a nineteenth-century winery built of volcanic rock in the Napa Valley, for the continuing education of professional cooks. This, he knew, was where he wanted to be. So he began a long-range plan to get there, the first step being to apply to the Hyde Park campus for a job.
Feeling he’d grow bitter if he did not make this career move, he packed his car and left the woman he loved and her son, whom he had all but adopted, and returned east, realizing, he told me, “I had nothing to show for thirteen years of my life.” Not his former wife, nor his current love, only, as is true of many cooks, a long résumé of restaurants scattered from the East Coast to the South Coast to the West Coast. The work of a cook can be almost medieval in its itinerancy, and this has its repercussions. “A big chunk of me is still back there,” he said.
The Making of a Chef Page 10