The Making of a Chef

by Michael Ruhlman

  Mr. Metz loved blanquette de veau, Chef Smith continued, directing his words to Lola, who would be making it. He always had some. The blanquette was similar to the fricassee, which Ben had done the day before, but there were distinctions. The blanquette was a highly refined white stew: chunks of veal were blanched to remove impurities; the sauce was strained; it was a bright, elegant dish. Small attention to details would make a huge difference in the outcome. When Mr. Metz ate stew, it was this highly refined version. “It’s real important for you to understand the difference, where they came from,” he said to Lola.

  This was the group’s first Grand Buffet and Chef Smith ran down general rules. “Nobody eats before Mr. Metz. Make sure you know the whole menu. Be proud of what you know; share it with him. One thing you should not do is try to bullshit the man. If you even think about it he’ll know.

  “The man plays to win,” Chef Smith concluded. “He cooks that way. He’s a damn good cook.”

  Lola, clearly anxious, asked, “What should we call him.”

  “Mr. Metz,” Smith answered, unsmiling. “He’s a man. He’s a damn good cook, but he started out just like you.”

  Chef Shepard remembered the day Mr. Metz, on one of his periodic tours through the school, stopped by her kitchen. She was then teaching introduction to Hot Foods. “We had made quiche,” Shepard recalled, “and Mr. Metz was talking to my students about the menu and he wanted to know how we made the quiche.” They told him the chef had instructed them to sprinkle cheese into the quiche shell. Mr. Metz said, “Did she? Why did she do that?” The students were unable to answer. “We hadn’t had the lecture, so they didn’t know why,” Shepard said. “And he told them, ‘That’s how you produce a quiche with a crisp crust on the bottom. By putting the cheese on the bottom, the egg batter doesn’t penetrate so quickly.’”

  She remembers with equal clarity an “unpleasant” call from the president, “something I did not want to hear.”

  As a pantry chef, she was in charge of the student, the specials tournant, who prepared a morning snack for the president. “He likes things very plain,” Shepard said, “very simple. Carrots, turnips, rutabaga, and celery sticks, that’s it.” An easy assignment—revealing, even, in its spartan crispness. On one occasion, though, her kitchen was under a heavy production load and had only ten students. The specials tournant was to prepare Mr. Metz’s crudité. The vegetables were a couple days old and the chef asked the tournant how they looked. The tournant said O.K., then prepped and plated them, and covered them with plastic wrap. Shepard checked them but not carefully. They looked fine beneath the wrap but were in fact somewhat dry and limp. Crudité would not seem to be the pressing issue in Pantry with only ten students. The crudité then sat for several hours at room temperature before Mr. Metz got to them.

  Shortly thereafter, the pantry telephone rang. It was Mr. Metz. He asked Chef Shepard what she had sent. She apologized, made excuses, knowing no excuse was adequate. The crudité were bad and she had sent them to President Metz. Those were the only facts that mattered. He said, she recalled, “If you didn’t have time, you should have said so. We could have made other arrangements.”

  She knew this was true. But it was also true that you did not say no to Mr. Metz. That, too, was losing.

  I quickly became fascinated with this man—who loved blanquette de veau for its rich refinement and ate raw turnips for breakfast—because of his effect on people. One almost never saw him, except at graduation time, less so now than ever given the two campuses on separate coasts. But everyone wanted to please him, and everyone wanted to impress him. I was once walking with a young, tough, cocky student. We passed Mr. Metz in the hall; the student’s eyes enlarged and he turned to me, did not speak, but mouthed the words That was President Metz.

  Mr. Metz set the standard. That standard was perfection. Pantry had access to fresh turnip, rutabaga, carrot, celery; there was no reason not to serve them. There was something both gentle and ferocious in his tone and it remained in Chef Shepard’s mind. “If you didn’t have time, we could have made other arrangements.” Do you understand what I am saying? If you can’t do it perfectly, we will find someone who can.

  Nothing short of perfection was acceptable. Would you serve President Metz burned root vegetables? Never. Therefore, you should never serve to anyone burned root vegetables. Here was the morality of cooking and service, and at the CIA, it rose to an almost religious dimension. Eventually, I grew to understand that the source of this perfection, this wanting to do it right, the anger at not living up to the task, the deep gratification when you did well—whether in Pardus’s Skills kitchen or Shepard’s Pantry—was Ferdinand Metz.

  Part III

  Keepers of the Food

  Garde Manger

  “Eve Felder,” Chef Pardus had told me during Skills, “is a food goddess.” Felder currently taught Garde Manger, the last block of the first year of the CIA curriculum, and I had the good fortune to rejoin my old Skills class—Adam, Erica, Lola-and-Travis, the silent Bianca, Ben, Paul, and Greg—and watch this woman in action.

  Her class was their final block before they left on their externships, and they all ached to flee Hyde Park. The dizzy fatigue that began in Intro had only increased as they moved into Garde Manger, and all seemed to be counting the days till the end of the block.

  A similar mood ran through the entire school; this was the final block before the seventeen-day summer recess when the Institute shut down to clean and repair itself. Students and faculty alike, all of whom began this half-year stretch in a series of blizzards, would end it in lazy, hot July as if leaning into a marathon finish-line tape and a heavenly stretch of rest.

  All except for Chef Pardus.

  On my way out of Alumni Hall, carrying a lunch tray with the remnants of my calamari salad, I passed Chef Pardus, who stopped to tell me the news.

  “Guess what I’m doing over summer break,” he said, almost smirking.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Teaching Skills.”

  “Skills?”

  “In Brazil,” he said.

  The Culinary has a certification program at a hotel in São Paulo, with many of the same courses taught exactly the way they were here. The main difference was that the students stayed in one kitchen, and CIA instructors rotated in. When Chef Pardus finished Skills, Rudy Smith would fly down to teach Intro. Pardus, ever the squeaky wheel, had gone to scheduling Chef Bob Briggs and asked when was he going to get one of those nifty overseas assignments? Briggs said, “What are you doing summer break?”

  While others fished, lounged, weeded their vegetable gardens, and cooked squash, corn, and new potatoes, Chef Pardus would be simmering beef bones at a lazy bubble, tasting brown sauce after brown sauce, and building consommé rafts.

  But almost all the rest were anticipating the restorative weeks of summer. Garde Manger was not a production kitchen serving daily meals, but instead served prepared-in-advance-food, so the work was mainly prep with no last-minute scrambling—a fine way to spend the final three weeks of school.

  Classically, Garde Manger handled cold items, hors d’oeuvres, some desserts, and decorations such as ice sculptures. Today, Garde Manger, or Pantry station (the term is French for pantry, and loosely translates as keeper or protector of the food), does much of the same. Garde Manger would be in charge of hot and cold appetizers, salads, sandwiches. Our Garde Manger class would focus on cocktail canapés, plated appetizers, and finally, buffet platters of cold food, attempted at near-competition level and served on the Thursday before graduation to Mr. Metz and guests at the Grand Buffet.

  But, Chef Felder explained in her Day One lecture, “Forcemeat is the backbone of this class.”

  Forcemeat is defined very generally as cooked or raw meat, ground or minced. The word derives from the French farcir and farce (to stuff and stuffing), but I could never hear or use it without a small shudder. Such a crude word. On either side of this term one found only elegance. At th
e scientific or molecular level, for example, classical forcemeats are often emulsions of meat, fat, and water—a complex colloidal system. On the other side of this dreary term were the types of emulsions, delicate on the ear, even regal-sounding: galantine, ballottine, pâté de foie gras. Mousselines, mousses, quenelles, and terrines were all … forcemeats! Even the hearty-sounding sausage and the American hero, the hot dog, were better than forcemeat. And that’s no baloney.

  But all the above were forcemeats and forcemeats we would grind and roast and bake and poach.

  Chef Felder, of course, had a deep respect for forcemeats. She called forcemeat “a liberator.”

  Indeed, it provided a method for using leftover meats that would soon be past fresh, and this was the soul of garde manger—to protect what is to be eaten.

  Chef Felder said the first garde mangers were cavemen. American Indians were garde mangers when they packed fish in salt to cure and preserve them. Duck confit, legs cooked in, then submerged and stored in, their own fat was a garde manger technique. A garde manger kitchen relied more than any other on seasoning and spices because the food was usually served cold and therefore needed a flavor kick to replace the steamy aromatic effect of hot food. Garde manger techniques flourished in the Middle Ages when spices, a sign of affluence, were the rage. The meat is cold, molded, and is often suspended in aspic; the first thing many people think when they hear these words is Spam, so the food had to be beautiful, visually enticing as well as tasty.

  “You have to see taste,” Chef Felder said. “‘Look at what they’re eating. Oh my lord, it looks delicious. Look at that carrot, it is cut to perfection. Look at that terrine, look at that pâté en croûte, look at all the garnish that’s in it!’ It has to scream out for the customer to want to eat it. It has to invite the customer in. In the garde manger kitchen, we garnish heavier, we season heavier, our knife skills have to be beautiful so that the flavor becomes visible. President Metz will come through on the Grand Buffet and press the meat to see if juices come to the surface.

  “One of the most exciting things for me,” she continued, “I am going to teach you how to utilize, without a recipe, leftovers. So if last night we had a duck left over, I’m going to teach you how you can turn that duck for two or four servings into sixteen or twenty servings by making a forcemeat.”

  “Y’all?” she asked. Chef Felder was from Charleston, South Carolina, and used y’all the way a writer uses a tab key to begin a new paragraph. “Y’all, how do you make a forcemeat without a recipe?”

  Ratios, of course. Ratios and proper technique freed you, she said. Know the ratio and you were golden. How much meat, to how much fatback, to how much water. A typical emulsion used five parts meat, four parts fat, and three parts ice (everything—including the grinder itself—must be cold as ice; if the mixture became hotter than 40 degrees, the proteins and fat might not bind properly and result in a broken forcemeat). This emulsion was named after its ratio; it was called a 5/4/3 forcemeat. Commoners know the 5/4/3 forcemeat as knockwurst, frankfurters, and other fine-textured sausages.

  Chef Felder was in her early forties, slender, with short wavy brown hair, almost all of which could be contained within her toque. Her complexion had the familiar heat-baked texture of a chef. Her dark eyes pointed down slightly toward her narrow nose, like two upended teardrops; when she talked about food, her eyes sparkled, and her entire body and mien grew pixilated.

  Chef Felder was a self-taught cook. In Omaha, Nebraska, she worked her way up from restaurant manager at Cafe Eggspress to executive chef of V. Mertz Restaurant. She read everything she could, and began following a column in Cooks magazine written by Lindsey Shere, Alice Water’s partner and pastry chef at Chez Panisse, who spoke eloquently on the necessity of chefs and farmers to work together. Shere’s words enchanted Felder, and she grew determined to work at Chez Panisse. With this single hope, she enrolled at the CIA. She kept her sights on the beacon of Chez Panisse, the landmark Berkeley restaurant. She wangled an externship there, and when she graduated in 1988, she returned to Chez Panisse and stayed seven years, until a former teacher invited her to take the chef’s practical at the Culinary.

  On this Day One, Chef Eve Felder talked about forcemeat almost nonstop for five hours, then flew to Wisconsin for the rest of the week. We would have a different chef the following day, while Felder taught basic cooking techniques to public-school kitchen workers, in a joint effort between the CIA and the USDA to improve school lunches throughout the country.

  Our stand-in chef was Mark Ainsworth, the A.M. Garde Manger instructor who would do doubles till Felder’s return the following week.

  Now, I don’t know if it was the strain of doing doubles, if it was the fact that this was a cold kitchen, or maybe that Chef Ainsworth spent too long in the Virgin Islands (executive chef at Passers Landing in Tortolla), but Chef Ainsworth, a tall thirty-seven-year-old with feathery brown hair, was placid. Calm. Mellow. He’d worked at La Bernardin. That had to be intense. He’d been the chef on the Yorktown Clipper, of Clipper Cruise Lines, a tiny kitchen on a speedy clipper ship with little storage space but all the demands of a production kitchen and gravity going every which way while you’re cooking. This, I would imagine, was nerve-racking. But you could not faze this guy. Sometimes he would raise his eyebrows, sometimes he would smile and nod. That was about it.

  His near-deadpan tone somehow made him a great storyteller; he passed along a lot of information by story. We would be diligently at work on our cocktail reception canapés and Ainsworth would call out “Demo!”

  Time to cure salmon, gravlax cure and smoked cure. Among the information he imparted on the subject of salmon—farm-raised versus Alaskan, his buddy who started an Alaskan salmon business and how he makes money by smoking the fish, how this friend figured a way to smoke salmon fat to make money off what used to be trim, how sea lions can see from a quarter mile what kind of salmon were caught in his friend’s net—was that David Burke, the star chef of Park Avenue Cafe, made salmon pastrami. “It’s mainly marketing,” Chef Ainsworth said. “You guys know how to cure pastrami. What are some of the seasonings?” Students called out answers they learned in Charcuterie and Ainsworth said, “Right, it’s simple. David Burke does the same thing with salmon, sells it as a salmon pastrami, and is making a fortune.

  “The relationship between the salt and the sugar is important,” he continued. “Seasonings, the bay leaf, cloves, allspice, that’s not really important. You want a Southwestern cure, add Southwestern seasonings. You want an Oriental cure, add Oriental seasonings.” Ratios, again, were all important. Gravlax, cured only one day, would need two pounds of salt to one pound of sugar. For salmon that will be smoked, we used less salt. “Why?” he asked. “Because it’s a three-day curing job.”

  He had a good story for everything. Adam Shepard had recently trailed at Lutèce, now led by Eberhard Muller, and Chef Ainsworth stopped to listen to Adam describe his night in that kitchen. They hadn’t let Adam do much, but he watched and tasted. “The food going out of there was perfect,” Adam recounted. “Perfect. Everything. I tasted everything that went out of that kitchen and I could not think of one thing to improve any of it. His lobster stock was incredible. It was the best lobster stock I’ve tasted.”

  Chef Ainsworth nodded. Eberhard had amazing taste capabilities, Ainsworth said. He’d worked with Eberhard at La Bernardin. The cooks there were making lobster stock once, but they couldn’t get it right, the taste wasn’t quite there. So someone added a smidgen of chicken stock base. “There was maybe ten gallons of this stuff,” Chef Ainsworth recalled, “and we added a tablespoon, and Eberhard tasted it and said, ‘WHO PUT BASE IN THIS STOCK?!’”

  The world of the Culinary often seemed so hermetic that it was gratifying to hear stories like these from the outside.

  We learned food tips in Garde Manger. The fresh marinated mozzarella balls, occasionally called buffalo mozzarella (in Italy, some mozzarella is made from the curd of buffalo
milk), now ubiquitous in gourmet delis for ten bucks a pound, were simply cheap cheese curds melted in salt water (five or six ounces of salt per gallon) that had been heated to 160 degrees. You worked the curd in the water, with your hands if you could stand the temperature, or with spoons, till it was gooey as taffy. Then you could do anything you wanted to it before cooling it. Form it into large balls and marinate them in oil and herbs. Roll them into a long tube, wrap the tube in plastic wrap, and tie off little one-inch sections for bocconcini, or, as Chef Felder liked to do, serve the little mozzarella balls with roasted red peppers and a red-wine-balsamic vinaigrette. You could smear the gooey cheese curd into a thin sheet across your cutting board, spread some pesto on it, roll it into a tube, and slice it for mozzarella-pesto swirled discs. Chef Ainsworth had my table (we’d been divided into groups of four) make this for a cocktail reception for prospective students, but half the sheet would be spread with an intriguing vinaigrette: to the red-wine-and-olive-oil base we added four roasted red peppers, a head of roasted garlic, and two chipotle peppers.

  No end of canapé innovation could be found in salt water and two-dollar-per-pound cheese curd. Of the gourmet deli counters selling it, Ainsworth nodded sagely and said, “It’s quite a racket.”

  We would bone out a lot of meat for our forcemeats, which we began to make on the second or third day, and Chef Ainsworth—more or less in passing—said sometimes it was fun to bone out a chicken from the inside, leaving the chicken intact, then stuff it and roast it, so that it appeared to have all its bones. Something to do for Mom, he said. “We bone out a quail this way,” he continued. “Some of you may have seen the Euro quail we get here. Like that. Then we do it to a hen and put the quail in the hen, and then we put the hen inside a pheasant, and the pheasant inside the duck, and we roast it.” Sometimes he stuffed the initial quail with foie gras molded around a truffle. As he said this, Adam smiled and nodded, which he rarely did. Then Ainsworth told an apocryphal tale, from the more decadent years of ancient Rome, about the practice of continuing this idea: the cook wouldn’t stop at the duck stuffed with hen stuffed with quail stuffed with a wren stuffed with foie gras around a truffle; Romans would then stuff the stuffed duck into a boned chicken, and the boned chicken into a suckling pig, and so on all the way up to cow. They would roast it for hours and hours and hours and when it was done, the Romans would share the truffle and throw the rest away.