We learned deep poaching and shallow poaching; we learned how to use a court bouillon and how to use a cuisson. We even learned how to boil pasta.
“We’re going to fit some pasta into this little routine today,” Pardus called out on Day Nineteen. “Ratio. How do you cook dried pasta? A lot of boiling water, right? The boiling water should be salted. It should be salted to the point where it tastes like a seasoned consommé.” This was news to me. I had never tasted the water before I dumped the pasta in. But this is what Pardus wanted us to do. “I’ve got two pots over here. One is properly seasoned. One tastes like a mouthful of the Atlantic Ocean. You want the water to be salted properly; if it’s salted properly you’re going to have properly seasoned pasta.” Pardus told us when he was chef at the Swiss Hotel, teaching his cooks to properly season their pasta water was a constant battle. He used to walk down the line saying, “More salt, more salt, more salt, not enough salt, more salt.”
After that class I occasionally added aromatics, such as bay or sage leaves, to my pasta water as well as salt. We poached salmon in a court bouillon—most commonly, acidulated water seasoned with mirepoix. Escoffier listed salted water as his sixth court bouillon, which he recommended for poaching sea perch and mullet. Why not, then, cook pasta in a similarly seasoned liquid? Why not infuse the pasta with specific flavors that might complement or add to the final dish? I had never given much thought to how my pasta water tasted but now it concerned me, and I would always have a spoonful or two to ensure that was how I wanted the final pasta to taste.
Chef Pardus focused on mind and method. “You cook with your senses,” he said when someone did something stupid. “And one of those senses is common sense.”
But something happened to you in Skills class that was greater than learning how to season pasta water or braise shank. It was more than technique, more than ratios, and more than knowledge. Something was slowly being woven into one’s very fiber, something that extended out and into everything one touched. I couldn’t name it. I’m not sure it had a name. I could only point to parts of it.
Efficiency: no wasted movement. This idea, this will, bore not only on one’s actions in the kitchen; it extended to one’s life outside that kitchen. It changed how I packed for a trip—I tried to diminish the number of times I moved from closet to bureau to suitcase just as I learned to minimize my trips to the pot room or dry storage. I didn’t make two trips to the hardware store because I forgot something or failed to have foreseen a potential problem. I didn’t go from the bedroom to the living room, stop before I got there, and go back to the bedroom because I forgot something. And if I did, it made me mad. I solved problems differently. When we awoke one morning with no electricity and therefore no way to run the coffee machine, for instance, I thought immediately to put a pot of water on the grill on the deck out back for coffee. I am certain this wouldn’t have occurred to me before Skills, because I had been in identical situations before Skills and didn’t think, “No electricity for coffee? I’ll just get a fire going out back.” Certainly not at seven A.M. And the coffee had a nice campfire flavor to it, too. With efficiency of action, one also wanted speed, efficiency’s ultimate goal. I tried to do everything faster. The faster you worked—in the kitchen, in life—the more you could do. Whoever did the most the best, won—no matter who you were or what you were doing, even if you were just playing against yourself.
The physical world grew more friendly because we were learning to harness and manipulate it. Look what we could do with heat and water and a steel surface. This created a sense of strength that I had not felt before. Control over properties—hot, cold, wet, dry—became a metaphor for control over oneself, one’s actions and thoughts.
Embedded in this control was a sort of anger and fierceness that I saw move very close to the surface of Adam as I worked beside him every day. This fierceness was necessary for the perfection he sought. You cannot be blasé and achieve perfection. You must be in relentless pursuit of it. You can never stop. If you stop, you lose. We know that the physical world tends toward disorder and that energy is required to create and maintain order. Perfection was the highest degree of order there was, and if you didn’t bring a ferocity to your pursuit of perfection, you simply wouldn’t have the energy to finish the job at hand well; you’d be too tired because this was hard work and a lot of it. The work in a kitchen, the perfection, we learned, began with the even roasting of veal bones and a good caramelization of the mirepoix and a long, slow simmer—just the occasional bubble rising to the surface—until your roasted veal stock had perfect flavor and body, and then in the color and flavor of your roux, and skimming all the time till your brown sauce felt perfectly smooth on the palate, and skimming again till the demi-glace was rich and free of impurities. That was the beginning and you never let up. Not if you intended to be a good cook. You couldn’t not do this. It was like driving a car. Once you pulled onto the road, you didn’t just sometimes drive and sometimes stop paying attention, or fail to make a turn when you knew in order to reach your destination you had to make that turn; you didn’t simply ignore things like red lights because you were too tired or you didn’t feel like it or you’d do it later.
Many potential metaphors orbit what there really aren’t words for. I have no doubt that people felt the effects I’m trying to describe in various degrees, and those who did not, or did not like the effect, such as Matt, left the school. Skills differed according to the instructor, whose personality inevitably set the kitchen zeitgeist, but in order to be successful in a Skills kitchen, you had to engage these ineffable forces. Once you did, you couldn’t simply turn them on at two o’clock when class started, and turn them off when you left. They became permanent structures in your mind. They became, finally, all of them together, an ethic, and something more: a system of values—a morality.
“Of course!” Susanne cried, stomping into the kitchen wearing a winter overcoat over her uniform. “Of course. We can’t end a block without a winter storm watch!” The snow fell heavily, and I had left early to make sure I had plenty of time. Up to ten more inches were expected. The snow was wet, the roads icy. Every block since January had ended with a winter storm. With April three days off, we were all getting fairly tired of winter storms. Susanne—former Barnard student and advertising marketer—seemed to be having a tougher time of it than most with weather and kitchens. Her face appeared small within a dark orb of loose black curls; her eyes were large and dark, worthy of a Hirshfeld drawing. She was the sort of person who somehow attracted accidents. She now carried four stitches in her left hand. She had been at home and a knife fell, point down, into and through the meaty flesh between thumb and forefinger. Her husband wasn’t home; driving was out of the question, blood gushing as it was, so she had to call 911. When she cut herself in class, it wasn’t just a Band-Aid-and-finger-condom nick; it was a cut that forced her to stop work, sit down, and wait out the bleeding, hand in the air, clamping a wad of towels to the wounded digit.
Though the block was ending, the usual kitchen chores such as making stock still needed to be done. The entire school depended on Skills’ stocks, and we made them on test days. Susanne, having driven an hour and a half through another winter storm, had stuck a pot in an oven that was also being used to roast veal bones. Midway through class we heard a quick, piercing shriek loud enough to halt everybody. People could hurt themselves badly in a kitchen, so you never ignored such outbursts. The shriek had come from Susanne, who had been burned.
“I don’t know!” she said angrily. “Something just spit out at me!” She walked swiftly to the stock-cooling sink and held her right hand, the one without the stitches, beneath cold water.
Pardus, like a private eye hot on a trail, was already squatting at the open oven. “I know exactly what happened,” he said. “One of the joints exploded. It filled with steam and popped. You can see it.” He pointed, and there, in the back, was a bright white cartilaginous veal-bone joint. This knowledge did not
seem to comfort Susanne. With the burn apparently growing worse beneath the water, she left for the nurse’s office and would soon return, her hand and wrist slathered with cream beneath a gauze bandage.
Later in the day, when production was over, Susanne and Erica compared burns, talked ointment. Erica’s entire left arm was bandaged. Veal bones once again had been the culprit, but this time the victim could assign blame. It was David Scott.
“Erica,” I said when I saw her bandages, “what happened?”
She said, “Stupid-ass Dave did it.”
I got slightly different stories from both of them, but what was not in dispute was that Dave was transferring browned veal bones from one really hot pan to another. These bones and scraps have fat on them, so there’s a lot of rendered grease in these pans. As Erica helped prod twenty pounds of bones out of the pan Dave was tilting—some had stuck to the pan—they all fell at once and Erica was splashed with boiling oil. Huge deep welts covered her arm; the scars would be permanent. Dave said he had warned Erica away. Erica said that Dave had been careless. Every time I saw Dave after that, I shouted out, “Stupid-ass Dave!” And for a while, everyone started calling him that. Erica would cover her mouth and giggle, teeth clamped. Dave would always chuckle, a good sport, but plead that he’d warned Erica to be careful.
One tended to believe Dave, of course. Erica was still not a master of efficient action. And sweet as she could be, her mouth remained the foulest in the class. “I take a lot of shit around here,” she would say, with her customary delicacy.
But the next minute she’d disarm you.
“Michael,” she asked me once, just as class was beginning, “am I lovable?”
“Of course you are, Erica,” I said.
She was immediately suspicious of my response and said, “Is everybody lovable?”
“Well, uh—”
“I don’t think so. But I think I’m lovable.”
I concurred and she walked off to gather her daily mise en place.
The day of the winter storm would see us all attempting to mince two onions and slice two onions in less than five minutes. This was the knife practical and it didn’t sound hard until you realized it took two or three minutes just to peel four onions. Strategy was required. The task would be almost impossible unless you halved the onions before peeling, then ripped their skins off, not worrying too much about trim, and got cutting. Slice first; then mince like crazy till time ran out.
“This is a serious speed drill,” Pardus told us. “It’s ten percent of the final.” If you finish, he said, “you’re really wailing, you’re working at production speed.”
When he was asked what happened if you cut yourself—does your time stop, can you get a Band-Aid, what happens?—he responded, “Please, don’t cut yourself. It is a knife skills practical. If you cut yourself, it means you didn’t do it right!”
Paul would cut himself, and lose too much time to finish, and Eun-Jung continued to chop when Pardus called “Time!” but then looked at Adam, who had put his knife down. She chopped a little more, then saw that Len and I had put our knives down, and as she turned to scan the room, only then, reluctantly and with evident disappointment in herself, did she relinquish her own. Erica finished. And big Lou, who had arrived not knowing even how to hold a knife, had finished, too.
Pardus was particularly proud of Lou. “He’s an ex-shipping clerk,” Pardus had said to me. “You should see the quality of work he’s bringing me now. His cards, he sweats over those cards.” Lou, a husband, father of three, worked hard and it was paying off. Pardus wanted me to know this, in part, because he knew he was a main reason for Lou’s success; he was openly proud. Proud, I think, not only of Lou, but of the whole class. He had not held much hope for this class six weeks earlier. But as Skills Two wound down, he said, “I train you and then you go to another kitchen. Just like in the restaurant business. I train someone and that person leaves to be sous chef at another restaurant.” He paused again. “You guys are going to do great in Intro. I think you guys are really going to do well.”
And we liked Chef Pardus, all except for Erica. I could never figure out why. After dinner that night, before the written test, Chef Pardus passed around evaluation sheets that were filled out and sealed until after he’d turned in his grades; he left the kitchen while we filled them out. He would eventually read the anonymous evaluations, as would CIA administrators. Erica could hardly wait to get at hers.
She was making noise as Ben collected the forms and I asked her what she’d written.
“I coulda been a lot worse,” she said.
“Why?”
“He treated me like shit in here.”
Erica seemed to think Pardus was harder on her than anyone else, that he made fun of her (scrambled eggs, burning roux), and that he was a lousy teacher. I had witnessed none of this but Erica could not be convinced otherwise.
“When it says ‘What could the instructor do to improve?’ I was gonna put ‘Quit.’” She paused. “But that woulda been too mean.”
When Len heard what she was saying, he shook his head and said to no one, “They’ll never believe her, not when they look at her grades and the other comments.” Len said he thought Pardus had been a great instructor.
Susanne would remember Pardus’s class as the best she had. Travis, who was still working mornings at Burger King, had wondered openly on his evaluation if Pardus deserved a raise.
Adam was mad. While most people couldn’t wait to get out of Skills, to leave the monotony of the standard daily mise en place and brown sauce and start cooking for real, Adam wanted the class to be longer. “We only panfry once,” he said. “Sautéeing or shallow poaching once is not enough.” And the daily grading annoyed him. It was far too woolly, he said. While he admired Pardus for his teaching, Pardus was, Adam felt, too subjective; from one plate to another, from the first plate graded to the last, the grading of food had been inconsistent.
Pardus returned after Ben had sealed the evaluations and distributed an easy test. We departed as we finished and the next day were back again for the final day of Skill Development—the cooking practical (brown sauce, béchamel, rice pilaf, and duchess potatoes). The mood was festive. Erica brought a camera. So did Dave. Dave asked me to take a picture of him with the chef, “for my CIA scrapbook,” he said happily.
Big Lou smiled from ear to ear. “I really feel like I’m getting somewhere,” he said. This was exciting; I could see it in his eyes.
Erica was hugging people, camera in hand. She said to me, grinning unself-consciously, “I know it’s high schoolish, but it’s the last time were gonna be together as a group.”
This was true. The group was to be split in half, each half rejoining with half of its sister group, which had been in a separate Skills kitchen, boiling the heck out of their consommés. That something significant happened, not just to me, but to everybody in a good Skills class, is supported by the reluctance of the students to split up afterward. Almost everyone dreads it. Some groups appeal directly to President Metz and Senior Vice President Tim Ryan, claiming that they are different, they are special, they have formed a unique bond, and it would be criminal to break it. “They all feel that way,” Ryan said, and the Culinary never altered this rule.
No one looked forward to joining a new group partly because friendships had solidified here, but also because you wouldn’t know how good the other people were, how fast they were, whether or not you could depend on them. And this was precisely why the Culinary re-formed groups after Skills. It’s in the nature of the work to move around, to work with people one doesn’t know. Learning to work with strangers was part of the education. The group that they became beginning next block would be the group they remained until they left for their externships in July.
I would not be joining either group. The entire program lasted about twenty-one months, including a four-and-a-half-month externship—four years for those who move straight into the bachelor’s program. I ha
d deadlines of a different nature than my Skills comrades. I hoped to rejoin them later, just before they left for their externships; I would move through the courses at the Culinary at an accelerated rate, working with many other groups, but I would feel an affinity with none more than the people I’d gone through Skills with. Something significant happened to most everyone in Skills, not unlike that which happens to strangers who endure a catastrophe together—a plane crash, say, or a shipwreck. There is a common and permanent bond that will remain no matter where they go.
Roux Decree
The last product I made in Skills was brown sauce. I happened to be the last person to finish the practical that ended Culinary Skill Development, bringing my bowl to Chef Pardus after Bianca handed in her duchess potatoes (doomed from the start by her failure to make them big enough to hold enough steam to keep them fluffy inside). Bianca shrugged and left the kitchen. I presented the final bowl. Pardus lifted a spoon and tasted; mine was a good brown sauce, made from a good brown roux; he could not find fault with it. There was, however, just a touch of bitterness, he said.
“Sometimes you want a hint of bitterness,” he continued. I agreed. Bitter was a flavor component that could be used well.
Rudy Smith entered the kitchen, surprised to find it empty. Pardus apologized for letting everyone leave. Chef Smith normally used this day to talk to his new class to prepare them for Day One of Introduction to Hot Foods, the first production kitchen, the students’ first chance to cook for people other than themselves. Most people were nervous moving into Chef Smith’s class. Travis, who was scheduled to be sous chef on Day One, was, he said, “scared shitless.” Chef Smith’s demeanor did not help matters. Smith never smiled. He lacked that mischievous streak you saw in Pardus. We all saw him every day, presiding like a drill sergeant over K-9 as we passed through, picking up our broil, our roast, our sauté; he stood militarily at ease, head cocked slightly back; his eyes were lidded, almost sleepy, but ready to attack in a flash, and his nose in profile seemed to me incongruously aristocratic. He was young, tall, fit, a no-nonsense corn-fed boy from the flatlands of Ohio.
The Making of a Chef Page 14