The Making of a Chef

by Michael Ruhlman

  Our forcemeat, made from the marinated dark meat of the chicken, pork butt, and fatback, was spread in a long strip down the skin; we would lay two chicken breasts on top, then cover the breasts with the remaining forcemeat, into which we had mixed dried cherries and pistachios. We would wrap it all tightly in the chicken skin so that it formed a cylinder about nine inches long and about three inches in diameter. We would then secure the cylinder with cheesecloth and butcher’s string. Chef Felder tied the string at both ends, then supported the cylinder in three places with more string, saying, “Little cummerbunds. Gentleman, you know what a cummerbund is—holds the tummy in.”

  “Not necessary, Chef,” said Ben, serious as a marine.

  We would poach our galantine in 170-degree chicken stock to an internal temperature of 160 degrees. We would cool it in the stock overnight, then remove it from the cheesecloth, paint it with glace, roll it in finely chopped pistachios, and then it was ready to slice. Each piece, rimmed in green, would contain a chunk of moist white chicken breast surrounded by forcemeat that was brightly dotted with red and green of cherry and pistachio, the secondary internal garnish. We would serve the slices with a bright cranberry-orange coulis, rice, and poached pears.

  Not a recipe for the working, single parent of three, perhaps, but an intriguing classical preparation. “This is a basic galantine,” Chef Felder said. “I want you to learn the technique first. Once you’ve got the technique, you’ve got the world by the toes.”

  After the chicken galantine—a two-day preparation—the lobster salad would be a no-brainer, or so I thought until the mache didn’t show up in the order. Mache, a small light-green leaf at the end of a pale twisting stem, had a fresh delicate flavor perfectly paired with lobster, both in looks and taste. Without mache, we had no lobster salad.

  I found Adam, food steward for this block. He said he’d ordered mache but hadn’t seen it come in; we checked the order sheet, which showed the storeroom had filled this order. I went to the storeroom. They didn’t know anything but promised to send the mache as soon as it came in. I explained the problem to Chef Felder upon my return and she went to the storeroom. She tangled with these folks all the time—this was how she got heirloom tomatoes, how she got both fresh sardines and very expensive anchovies packed in salt and imported from Italy.

  She returned, subduing indignation, and said to me, “Mr. Metz has taken our box of mache.”

  The mache the Culinary bought was hydroponically grown by a nearby farmer and shipped in plastic bags inside sturdy brown boxes; it grows in dense bunches and these are intact when shipped. It’s a beautiful product that’s usually plentiful here, but with the summer break approaching, the storeroom had cut back on ordering perishables. Felder made another call, then gave me instructions. “I want you to go up to the functions office, across from Fish kitchen,” she said quietly. I want you to pick out eight perfect, beautiful bunches of mache without disturbing it. Talk to Dora.” Chef Felder told me to bring a half hotel pan with damp paper towels and reiterated that I was to gather the mache bunches as delicately as possible, so that one would scarcely notice their absence.

  I assumed she’d worked all this out with Dora, who was in charge of filling Mr. Metz’s order, but I’d failed to notice the subversive hush in her voice. When I arrived at the functions office I was met by a woman with dark hair wearing business attire. I had often seen this woman in the halls; I didn’t know where she actually hailed from, perhaps Latin America, but she always reminded me of the spooky Malaysian matron who blackmails Betty Davis in The Letter. In real life she was probably as generous and kind as Mother Teresa—she always seemed friendly when she appeared in Pantry for Mr. Metz’s utabaga, or popped into Coppedge’s bakeshop to pick up Mr. Metz’s sourdough. I told her I was looking for Dora.

  “You’re looking for Dora?” she said. “Well, that’s me.”

  I said my name, explained I was from Chef Felder’s kitchen, and that Chef Felder had told me she, Dora, would be able to help me out. I fully thought she would say, “Yes, I was expecting you,” but instead she shook her head. “This is all we have.” She pointed to a box on a rolling cart loaded with food. “We ordered from the storeroom two pounds and they sent us this.” The box read two pounds. Dora removed its contents, two plastic bags filled with mache, and put them on the scale, which acted as a paperweight for Mr. Metz’s order. Each bag weighed ten ounces, twelve ounces short of two pounds. She shook her head saying, “Mr. Metz doesn’t mess around with boxes.”

  I asked if I might be able to remove—very delicately, one would scarcely notice—eight perfect, very very beautiful bunches.

  She said no. But she told me to wait while she made a phone call.

  An assistant appeared and began to go over the order being placed on the cart.

  “Wouldn’t it be possible for me to take just a little?” I asked the assistant. “Do you really need all this?”

  The assistant said yes.

  “Could we call Mr. Metz and find out if he needs all of this?”

  The assistant smiled and said, “Sure, go ahead. Call him.” This was clearly a dare.

  “Would he be at home?” I said.

  “He’s probably still in his office.”

  Something told me then that it would not be cute if I called Mr. Metz’s office asking how much mache he planned to use. But I kept trying anyway, for the heck of it, the paper toweling in my hotel pan growing dry.

  “Is he using it now, tonight?” I asked.

  “He’s taking it with him.”

  “Where is he going?”

  “I believe he’s going to his home in Pennsylvania.” This would make sense. We were one day away from a four-day Fourth of July weekend. I remained focused on the task at hand.

  “It’s summer,” I said. “Mache is in season. Surely there’s a farmer’s market near his home in Pennsylvania where he can pick up some freshpicked mache.”

  The assistant shook her head.

  “Surely he can buy it somewhere.”

  She smiled at me, still shaking her head, and said, “I don’t think he’s been to a grocery store in his life!” Then she turned her head completely away from me, chuckling in disbelief at what she had just said. (Heaven forbid she would slander President Metz!) This was undoubtedly one great perquisite of being president of the Culinary Institute of America—having the Culinary storeroom at your disposal. I wouldn’t spend much time in the Shoprite either.

  “I only need eight tiny bunches. I’ll settle for less.”

  More grave shaking of the head. I sensed she was growing weary of me, but I pressed on blindly. “Perhaps we could FedEx Mr. Metz some mache tomorrow.”

  This suggestion was not taken seriously. Dora returned, saying the storeroom was completely out of mache.

  “I need just a little bit, and I need it by six o’clock.”

  “We need this by four o’clock, which is right now,” and onto the cart went the box of mache, and off I was sent with my little empty hotel pan.

  I began to beg at other kitchens. Chef Kief, in Pantry, had a box of mache, winced at its contents, and said, “I need all of this. This has to garnish fifty plates tomorrow.” Then he sighed, pulled one bunch, pulled a second and a third, put his fingers on a fourth, then thought better of it and said, “That’s really all I can spare.” I wanted to say “Bless you,” but I only thanked him.

  When I returned and explained to Chef Felder what had happened, she rolled her eyes thinking, “If Mr. Metz knew that we needed it, he’d surely give up the few sprigs we needed,” but she only sighed. She decided that we would do four lobster salads instead of eight.

  I saw why she liked to use mache for this dish: she directed us to plate the appetizer with the lobster tail, in thick slices but apparently intact, as if the lobster were alive in a tangle of seaweedlike mache. The presentation was a good one, especially with the black truffle slices sprinkled on top in vivid contrast to the orange lobster. I had never p
eeled a truffle and asked Chef Felder how I should do it; as I watched her peel one—she had wrinkled her nose that we had to use canned—she said, “When you get fresh truffles, which are about eight hundred dollars a pound, store the truffles in rice. The rice pulls flavor out of the truffles. Then put two eggs into the rice and store it in a cooler. The eggs will absorb the flavor of the truffles. They breathe. And then here’s what you do. You gently scramble those eggs. Gently, gently scramble those eggs and put them in the middle of the plate and serve them with pain de mie toast and champagne. It is a very romantic New Year’s Eve supper for two.” Having finished her story and her truffle, she departed.

  Garde Manger students, outgoing students, ate on stage, as did incoming A Blockers, and students in the wines and menus block of the curriculum. Stage—the raised platform of the former chapel’s alter—was served by the Classical Banquet Cuisine class, which prepared classical European cuisine; student waiters, in their first table-service class, used silverware to nestle fresh rolls onto your bread plate as you sat down, and they refilled your coffee after dinner. In our whites, we could at six-thirty have dinner on stage and be served, for instance, a mikado salad (rice with oysters), followed by game consommé, followed by osso buco with freshly made noodles.

  Many students skipped stage altogether because it took too long (and left no time for a smoke afterward) or because they had had enough rich food. Adam never missed stage, nor did I, so I typically ate with him. Usually we talked about food, but this was also the only time outside class I had to hear how my old Skills class was doing and where they were headed.

  Over a plate of poached sea bass Adam and Susanne talked about their externships. Adam had the night before called John Schenk at the Monkey Bar and found out that he got the job. Susanne had trailed at Gramercy Tavern and had gotten the externship there that she’d hoped for.

  “I trailed at four places,” Adam told her. “Lutèce—they didn’t want me—Match, Oceana, and Monkey Bar. They didn’t want me at Lutèce.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I dunno. I called Eberhard and he said”—Adam intoned a deep German accent—“‘We have no positions available right now.’”

  “What did you think of Oceana?” Susanne asked.

  “I liked it a lot. I liked Rick, I liked Rad; he’s the night sous chef.”

  Susanne said she’d heard the kitchen at Oceana was too macho. Adam said maybe, but Lutèce was more so. “At Lutèce,” Adam said, “the poissonier burned himself while he was trying to plate about twenty plates at the same time. Everybody came all at once. He burned himself, and the sous chef said, ‘If you’re going to burn yourself, do it quietly. If you don’t want to burn yourself, you shouldn’t have become a cook.’” Adam chuckled and shook his head. “He wasn’t anybody. He was the sous chef, he wasn’t even the chef. He was just standing there expediting. He wasn’t doing a thing.”

  One night I sat beside Eun-Jung, who picked mussels and scallops out of her coquilles St.-Jacques to drain off the sauce. “I miss Korean food,” she said sadly. Too much butter and cream here. Of Garde Manger she said, “Reception food is not our culture. This is very new to me.” Eun-Jung was not allowed to work in the United States, and thus not allowed to extern, so she would move straight into Introduction to Bread Baking after Garde Manger. When she returned to Korea the following spring, she hoped to work in fine hotels while she earned a master’s degree; then she hoped to teach.

  “Yeah, me too,” Erica joined in. “That’s what I want to do.”

  Erica would be heading south to Marcel Desaulniers’s Trellis Restaurant and Cafe in Williamsburg, Virginia.

  The subject of Adam’s photography came up as we finished the sea bass, and waiters arrived to whisk the plates away. He often brought his camera to class and photographed finished plates. He said he hoped to photograph food not for magazines or cookbooks, but rather as fine art. “I think photography and food have a lot in common,” he said.

  “Such as?” I asked.

  “Contrast,” he said without hesitating. “Textures. Light and dark. Emotion.”

  “What emotion is in food?” I asked.

  “Every emotion there is,” he said.

  “What emotion was in our sea bass?”

  Adam smiled and shook his head. The fish had been overcooked, the sauce pale and weak.

  A stranger at the table, listening to our conversation, said, “Hatred.”

  Adam said, “I have a thing for shooting people while they’re eating.” Adam explained that whenever he went to dinner parties, he carried a little disposable camera with him and photographed people as they were putting food into their mouth. “People don’t really like it,” he admitted. At home he had an entire envelope stuffed with negatives of such photos. He had not made a print of a single image. Apparently, it was the subversive act of the picture-taking that was important.

  When Chef Felder introduced herself on Day One, she had done so in an uncommonly elegant way. She had begun by saying her name and origin and then, invoking the name of her mentor, Alice Waters and Waters’s command that cooks must support the farmers near them, Felder told us about what she’d done the day before. She had gone to an organic strawberry farm and picked strawberries. She had then gone to a farm that grew peas, and she picked peas. From there she went to a farm that raised chickens and bought chickens that had been butchered that morning. She returned home, snagged some grape leaves, lettuce, and herbs from her garden, and, surprised by all this Hudson Valley bounty, asked six people to dinner. “That is what food is all about,” she said. “Food is about community. It’s about the earth and really taking care of the earth.”

  Erica sat spellbound—she had never heard such things before. She had never before considered that food had an emotional and philosophical element to it, and while Chef Pardus and Chef Smith and no doubt several other chefs had at least implied such ideas, something in Chef Felder made this knowledge accessible to Erica.

  “Garde manger takes time,” Chef Felder said to us. “Cooking … takes time. I don’t care how much you like burning and turning on the line. If you don’t take time to pay attention to details, you’ll never be great cooks.”

  Sometimes I imagined that Chef Felder more or less materialized out of ether but when we met for an interview at her cubicle, she was huffing from the hike up four flights of stairs, clearly mortal and carrying a wrinkled brown paper sack filled with fresh new potatoes from a farm near her house, the dirt on them scarcely dry. I had asked to meet with her outside class to know her better and because I thought she might have unusual thoughts on what made a good cook, how one became a good cook. Ratios, of course. Ratios had to be grafted into your bones. Technique, the physical skill, skills of the craft, combined with the knowledge of how food behaves, that too. And experience. But there was something more, and I hoped Chef Felder might lead me there.

  Eve Felder grew up in the “low country” of Charleston, South Carolina, within a family that loved food and cooking. She knew all along that she wanted to cook, but her parents insisted she get a college degree. After she received her bachelor’s in psychology from the College of Charleston, she found that her desire to cook remained. “I always wanted to cook,” she explained, “but, you see, I was a Southern lady, and cooking was domestic work.” She would therefore receive no encouragement from her parents here; she learned to cook by herself and eventually, through sheer determination, found her place at Chez Panisse.

  “I learned so much,” she said, referring to the seminal chef-farmer restaurant. “Mostly that you need to develop relationships with farmers. At Chez Panisse, we bought our fish from Paul Johnson. Paul worked at the restaurant when he was younger and they’ve been buying fish from him for twenty years. Alice helped set him up. Steven Sullivan, with Acme Bakery, used to bake in the restaurant. Now he makes a lot of money in a bakery and provides bread for the restaurant twice a day. Most of all I learned that what is most important is to mainta
in those relationships so that you are building community within your restaurant as well as outside your restaurant. And that the bottom line is: what does the food want?

  “What does the food want? What does it taste like in its unadulterated form? As young chefs, you’ll notice, certainly in my class, I have a group that wants to continue to add more and more ingredients to something—they want to smoke this, they want to do that—well, in fact, these potatoes are going to be delicious with just a little bit of sherry-shallot vinaigrette and roasted garlic. They are going to be delicious. And I think what they need as young chefs is to taste the food for what it is, and not to impose their ego upon it, but be with it. What does it need, and do I have the technique and taste buds yet to know what it needs? Taste it. I try to say, ‘Taste it, taste it.’ I will not use recipes because it needs to be tasted.

  “To taste,” she continued. “Most important is to teach students to taste, and expand their taste buds, to get them to know that when you buy olive oil it’s not about buying a brand of olive oil, it’s about tasting ten different olive oils and choosing the one that you’re going to use. Comparative tasting. Just because your child hates foie gras or your child hates caviar, I mean the child inside of you that has never had it—it’s an acquired taste—as a chef, you need to learn to distinguish what’s good. You may not like beets because you haven’t had the best beets, but for pete’s sake, don’t turn yourself off.”

  It was a beautiful July noon and we’d taken a seat at a table on the St. Andrew’s terrace. Craig Edwards, the St. Andrew’s fellow, appeared to ask if he could get us something to drink. Craig told me he was infatuated with Chef Felder. She had “this incredible aura,” he said. When he brought us some sparkling water, Chef Felder, in her best Southern-lady accent, said, “Well, I’m honored,” and Craig beamed.