Classics were not ignored. Salad niçoise remains popular throughout the country despite its age and in this kitchen it fulfilled the Day Seven composed-salad requirement. Every day there must be a composed salad—a main item, greens, dressing, and garnish. Instead of niçoise it might be a buffalo-wing salad with macaroni in a dill dressing. There was always a deli plate—typically a sandwich. On Day Four, it was a cheeseburger with avocado, tomato, red onion with an herbed mayo-mustard, and Yukon golds cut to matchsticks and deep-fried. On Day Seven it was the ever-popular CIA Club. Knowing how to make a decent sandwich was important.
The Reuben, a traditional grilled cheese sandwich, was a good example. “We all used to do it however we ever made Reubens—there was no science to it,” Shepard said. “One day we really did get a memo from the president that said, ‘In order to produce a Reuben sandwich that is not soggy, this is the correct procedure.’ That drawing in the course guide now reflects what has been determined by the president of this school, and all the other master chefs he powwows with, to be the way to make a Reuben that doesn’t get soggy. It’s all about putting the cheese in the right position so that the meat and the sauerkraut aren’t in touch with the bread, so the cheese seals the bread off. How many people in life make Reubens that taste just fine without having this diagram?” She shrugged. “But the reason those diagrams are there is to produce a consistently better-quality product.”
The CIA club was another example of the importance of sandwich-making.
“There has to be a club because in the world of sandwich-making,” Chef Shepard said, “you have to learn how to make double-decker sandwiches.”
I asked her what distinguished the CIA club from your run-of-the-mill club.
She said, “I don’t know that there was a decree that came down from upstairs that said, ‘And we shall have our own sandwich. Let it be known as …’” The CIA club used a combination of turkey and ham, that was all, but Shepard returned the discussion to technique. “Teaching how to make a club is very important, how to weight it so that the top isn’t heavier than the bottom, so that when you cut it, it doesn’t fall over; that’s why you put the light stuff on top, the lettuce, tomato, and bacon.”
“The CIA club sounds like a piece of cake,” Chef Shepard began her double-decker-sandwich lecture. “It’s not. It’s a lot of work. Roast the turkey, bone and slice it today. Slice the ham. The recipe says two ounces of turkey and two ounces of ham. It won’t work that way. We never get quite enough turkey, so portion out an ounce and a half of turkey and two and a half ounces of ham. It says slice the ham paper thin. That means paper thin. You want to pile it, you don’t want to fold it. Portion your meat ahead of time. You can get your bacon trayed up and get your mayonnaise done.” Garnish for the plate would be deep-fried root vegetables. “It’s a lot of work. Whoever does it, it will take all morning to get them fried in our little baby fryer. We’re going to have a meat tub full of chips. We need that many for sixty portions and for all the grazers. If you haven’t tasted these, you will find that it’s a pleasant experience. If you hate beets, this may totally change your life.”
The chef went to the board and diagrammed the production line for the club: toast, mayo, meat, toast, mayo, lettuce-tomato-bacon, mayo, toast. Sixty slices of toast at each point. Whenever she worked a lunch line, the chef said, the club was what she hated. It took up all your work space. You’d have five other sandwiches to get out and club components cluttered your whole station. The number of parts and volume make it a challenge. When the sandwich was assembled, then came 240 toothpicks.
“This is critical,” she warned. “The most important part. They’ve got to go straight down through all layers. If they don’t go straight down, the knife catches them and pulls the sandwich apart and the toothpick gets cut in half and whoever eats that half will not be a happy camper. The science of doing a club sandwich is really, really important.”
Pantry began at nine-thirty A.M. in a classroom on the fourth floor of the east wing near Julia Hill’s Culinary Math class and Jay Stein’s Product Identification and Food Purchasing class. Students in their whites took seats and opened notebooks. Chef Shepard would first address each station—deli, pasta, veg plate, composed salad, and hot plate—to inquire where prep stood and address questions, then move to the following day’s menu.
Most days there was no time to spare. Lecture ended at 10:15 and you had two hours to prep before the chef began demo plates. But on Day Seven there was no lecture so we had plenty of time. And the chef looked nervous. She said, “It’s an oy vey day. Too much time.” Rarely a good thing in a kitchen. The chef would spend most of the morning, she said, “putting out little fires.”
Tim, who was making the ciabatta, forgot to put the counterweight on the scale to compensate for the weight of the bowl he had the flour in and consequently the Hobart whipped up bread dough that looked like cake batter. The chef told him to add more flour, watching as he did, till he reached the right consistency. Then she asked him why the herbs and calamata olives weren’t in there. He rolled his eyes—oh, yeah. Tim dumped them in but the moisture from the olives ruined the consistency and he needed more flour.
He was headed home to Minnesota after the next block to extern at a country club and also to help open a friend’s restaurant; he couldn’t wait to leave, he said, and he wasn’t focused.
This was what happened when you had too much time. The creamy, black pepper dressing for the niçoise kept breaking. The mayonnaise for the club, a gallon of it, was soupy. James, who had the job of deep-frying the root vegetables in the little baby fryer, found that they took so long he had to remove them before they were done in order to get them all cooked by service. Here I did something that would become instructive: I said nothing. Vats of chips waited to be deep-fried. I’d cut half of them, on the mandolin, myself. Taro root, sweet potatoes, parsnips, carrots, potatoes, and beets—twenty-six pounds in all. When they were fried properly, they made a beautiful hill of red, orange, and golden brown chips. But James was loading up the tub with soggy masses of starch. I was part of the team working on that plate, but I wasn’t really part of the group and didn’t want to overstep my bounds.
I continued helping with the construction of the sandwiches. As service approached everyone began to work a little faster. We still had a lot of sandwiches to make. Cutting them in quarters was indeed the tricky part, as the chef had said. James had almost finished all the chips, such as they were. As service approached it grew more and more clear to me that unless somebody did something, we were going to have to put soggy, undercooked chips on the plate. At last, about five minutes before service, right after the chef and the hammer thrower tried to reemulsify the dressing for the niçoise, I asked the chef if we could serve the chips like this. She shook her head, partly to say no but partly in disbelief. She glanced at the clock.
I said, “We can refry them at service. They’ll cook fast.”
“We don’t have any choice,” she said.
The doors opened and the chef herself began to refry the soggy chips. Everyone else on the deli plate was occupied, two people constructing, one person on toothpicks, another cutting, and I rushing them from our station to the service counter that ran the length of the kitchen, as the volley of “Pick up one deli! Pick up a deli! Pick up a deli!” descended. A frenzy reminiscent of Chef Clark’s kitchen took hold. No time. Get it out. I had donned latex gloves to plate the chips that Chef Shepard was refrying, along with pickle and olives. The fryer, which James had cranked for mass loads, had grown too hot and the blanched chips burned before Chef Shepard could get them out. There was little the chef could do. It would take time and several batches to drop the temperature of the oil. I continued to plate the burnt chips as fast as I could and they disappeared as soon as I put it on the counter. It seemed as if everybody wanted the club today.
The phone rang and the chef was called away. I took over the fryer, just now starting to cool. Tim, whose herb-ol
ive ciabatta had come out nicely in the end, stepped in to help me with the chips.
“What is this?” a voice across the counter asked.
It was Chef LeBlanc, formerly executive chef at the Ritz and Maxwell’s Plum in New York City, now the P.M. instructor in Charcuterie. He had a round head, dark hair, dark eyes, and a mustache. He leaned on the counter to display to Tim and myself a very crisp, dark chip. “What is this?” he repeated.
Tim looked carefully at the chip pinched between LeBlanc’s thumb and forefinger. “I believe,” Tim said, pausing, “it’s a parsnip.”
“It was a parsnip,” LeBlanc exclaimed. “Now it’s burnt!” With that, LeBlanc took his club, pickle, two olives, burnt root vegetables, and departed.
As this was Day Seven, the class prepped for the incoming class’s Day One. It was important to prep well for the new students since they’d be walking into a new kitchen with two and a half hours to prepare lunch for two hundred fifty people. After prep the class moved next door to Burns Demo, one of the original demonstration kitchens in the building. Chef Shepard herself had sat in this kitchen-cum-lecture-hall as a student straight out of high school. The Culinary relocated from its New Haven, Connecticut, location in 1972, and when the young Katherine arrived, wire still hung from the ceilings. Her first classes were putting the kitchens together. It was a time when students would sit for six hours watching Chef Czack or Chef Weissenberg cook (both 1958 graduates still at the school). The next day students would watch another chef cook, asking questions and taking notes, but never tasting (unless it was MSG, which they were required to taste, since it was an oft-used flavor enhancer at the time). The Culinary then was a learn-as-you-go place; you picked up knife cuts as you needed them.
Chef Shepard would be doing doubles next for the rest of the block, teaching A.M. Pantry to her current group, beginning at three-thirty, and then sticking around to teach a new group in P.M. Pantry.
Eighty percent of A.M. Pantry was egg cookery, which she loved. Adam Shepard, who was no relation and who would not enjoy Chef Shepard’s A.M. Pantry, told me, “She sleeps with her omelet pans.”
Chef Shepard’s goals in both classes were similar: to encourage a respect for these forms of cookery, to teach the ingredients and methods of these forms, which often differed from P.M. Cooking, and to develop in her students speed and agility required of a volume kitchen. “When you’re cooking eggs that take one and a half minutes per order,” she asked, “how slow do you think you can move? How much time can you take to do that job? It should take a minute and a half to two minutes to make an omelet. Period. If you can’t do it that fast, then you’re not good enough.”
On graduation day, two of her students would be chosen to make omelets in the president’s dining room for Mr. Metz and his guests, including the graduation speaker, typically a prominent figure in the food industry. “Mr. Metz is right there in front of you,” Chef Shepard told me. “Mr. Metz likes to show off his students. It’s an exciting feeling to cook for, maybe, Robert Mondavi.”
Chef Shepard distributed a test (among the questions: list the components of a composed salad; list the steps for preparing and holding salad greens for service; define three types of vegetarianism). Everyone would arrive tomorrow morning at three-thirty for Breakfast Cookery. Students who lived off campus, the chef warned, should beware of drunks and deer on Route 9 as they headed into class.
I couldn’t stop thinking about LeBlanc and the burnt parsnip. I’d told the chef about what had happened when she got off the phone. She felt bad and mad and asked me if I thought we should bring him some properly cooked ones. I said yes. I put a handful in a bowl I’d lined with a paper napkin and strode into the dining room. LeBlanc was eating with Chef Reilly, his back to the dining room.
“Chef LeBlanc?” I said, holding out my offering.
He turned, looked at the chips. He managed to convey surprise, scorn, and irritation with one expression. He said “Thanks” and took the chips. I returned to the kitchen to finish service.
This small gesture made up for nothing in my mind; LeBlanc was simply receiving what he should have had in the first place. I couldn’t shake the image of him pinching that burnt chip in our faces. Why the chips burned was easy. A chain of bad decisions: James’s hurry to finish the chips; my decision not to say anything when I saw he was undercooking them; the chef’s cooking the chips in oil she knew to be too hot; and finally my decision to lift these burnt chips in my own gloved hand and float them into the center of a plate containing four triangles of juicy club sandwich. For me, a series of bad judgments had condensed into one crisp black parsnip chip.
The fact that LeBlanc and the parsnip ran on a loop in my mind was not, I believe, the result of some inner sensitivity of my own; rather, it was in the very nature of the Culinary Institute of America and the changes it wrought in its students. Unlike many educational institutions these days, this place dealt not only in knowledge and skill but also in value judgments. It taught a system of values that was almost religious in scope and beautifully concrete, physical, immediate. And because of this, a great human dilemma bound itself up in me and that parsnip chip.
I’d served numerous people chips I knew very well were burnt, that I myself would leave on the plate had they been served to me. I decided to do this. Why had I given them something visibly inedible? Wasn’t this a question of morality? It was wrong, I knew it, I did it anyway. Wasn’t this the very kind of decision that defined a mediocre cook?
I returned to Pantry kitchen the next day. Chef Shepard was in her first day of doubles, had been in the kitchen since three A.M., and was finishing up her P.M. class.
“I can’t stop thinking about those chips,” I told her.
She nodded immediately and said she was still mad at herself for that. “If this had been a real restaurant,” she said, “those chips wouldn’t have gone out.”
“Why did you send them out then?” I asked.
I wanted to know for myself. I could follow my own moves through service. It was always the same: the day started out slow, and the pace picked up, and then suddenly you’re in the weeds without knowing how you got there and all you can think about is get the plates out, get ’em out. You don’t have time to think—if you stop to think, you’re buried, so you simply act. You give people burnt food.
I continued to press Chef Shepard. “Why did you send out burnt chips?”
Finally, clearly troubled, she said, “I didn’t want to lose.”
President Metz
I had been at the Culinary for three months and had yet to meet the man who ran the place, Ferdinand Metz. At first this seemed odd. I was a writer who was being given fairly broad access to a large institution with an operating budget of $65 million, an institution that influenced the enormous food service industry, an institution that he cared a lot about. He had chosen not to meet me. And I had chosen not to meet him, at first because my questions would be fruitless before I knew the school, but also because I felt I was getting to know him better by not meeting him.
Details, anecdotes, what people said about the man, how people reacted when they passed him in the hall, how people reacted to the mention of his name, my own glimpses of him—these small bursts of information, as they accrued, began to form a silhouette of the president of the Culinary Institute of America.
That he was thoroughly corporate, for example, solidified in my mind from the beginning. When I first met with Senior Vice President Tim Ryan my first day at the Culinary, Mr. Metz called from, I believe, the West Coast. Leaving to take the call, Ryan guessed aloud and with a friendly chuckle that Metz was calling from his StairMaster.
Metz, always perfectly and beautifully dressed in stylish but not corporate attire, was tall, trim, athletic. His fine gold hair never seemed to move it was so well coiffed. He wore a tidy mustache. His eyes were slivers, his cheekbones angular and high above concave cheeks. His was a presence that never failed to arrest me, fix me, as though he were a c
elebrity, or maybe dangerous. Though one caught glimpses of the corporeal Metz maybe half a dozen times a year, one couldn’t get away from the idea of Metz if one tried. His spirit was omnipresent.
If his name came up in conversation with a chef-instructor, I always probed for thoughts on the man. One of the instructors said simply that Mr. Metz was walking perfection and there was nothing more to say on the matter.
Among the spare details I knew of his history were the facts that he had spent his first twenty years in Munich, Germany, and that he retained a distinct German accent. I knew that he had worked at Manhattan’s famed Le Pavillon shortly after he arrived in the United States in 1962, that he was subsequently banquet chef at the Plaza Hotel, and that he had left his job as senior manager of new product development at Heinz U.S.A. in 1980 to become president of the Culinary.
Once a month, on the Thursday before graduation, the school put on what was called the Grand Buffet in the dining chapel, a formal buffet dinner featuring competition-style platters of galantines, pâté en croutes, roulades, terrines, and cured salmons from the Garde Manger classes, and vast perfect mirrored trays of cakes, tortes, candies, and petit fours by Patisserie classes. Intro, Fish, and Oriental also served food at this buffet. The chapel would remain empty until Mr. Metz arrived with the graduation speaker and guests to tour the food. Mr. Metz often stopped to ask questions of the students about the food they’d prepared.
On Day Twelve of Intro, after dinner, Rudy Smith said to the broil station, which was preparing salmon for the Grand Buffet, “I’ll bet you Mr. Metz will ask you how he can tell whether it was salted before it was cooked.” The salt, Chef Smith explained, drew concentrations of protein to the surface of the meat; protein is what caramelizes; if the salmon had a good deep caramelization on the grill marks without being overcooked, it had been salted before cooking. “Mr. Metz wants you to impress him,” Chef Smith said. “He wants you to impress his guests.”
The Making of a Chef Page 18