I narrowed the focus to Garde Manger. What in this class was fundamental to a cook’s education?
“One is to teach the students formulas,” she said, “so that they are working from basic ratios rather than recipes, and from that basic formula, how to taste whether or not it’s good. I truly believe in using ratios. And then once you have a foundation you can start going crazy. But until you know that one cup of flour and one egg will make pasta, and until you know that one cup of oil and one egg yolk will make a cup of mayonnaise, until it’s ingrained in your head, then you are tied to a recipe book that’s going to have various formulas that may or may not be true because they are not necessarily written by someone who has the technique … . A simple syrup. If you can take a cup of fruit, and you add a half a cup of sugar to that and let it sit overnight, it’s going to release all its juices, and you bring that up to a simmer, and when the fruit is tender, remove the fruit; reduce the juice down to the consistency you want by checking it on a plate. I mean you can then make preserves and jam, you have freedom … . Professionally you need to know those techniques so that you are liberated to do whatever you want to do.”
Clearly, part of food passion is a relentless curiosity. Chef Felder was the sort of person who did not simply read about foie gras, for instance. She would travel to the Dordogne region in France and spend several days on a farm that raised ducks and geese for foie gras, observing the entire process, from the forced feeding to slaughter.
“As a chef,” she explained, “I need to know how to cure a leg of prosciutto—it’s an inquisitive mind—how to cure a belly of pork to make pancetta or to make bacon, so that I understand the basics of cooking. What is it that this person in the south of France does? How do they make a jambon bayonne? I want to know how to do that. No one can tell me this. I know what it’s like to force-feed a duck now. I know what it’s like to kill a quail. I know what it’s like to kill and clean a squab. I know what it’s like to take down a full pig, to take down a full lamb. I’m not queasy about that, I can’t be. Because that’s the connection of working with food.”
I asked Felder if she thought great cooking was innate or could be learned.
“This is the million-dollar question,” she said, “and I get in so much trouble with this one. I believe that cooking is a craft. And it’s a craft that can be taught, it’s a skill that can be taught. I do not believe it’s an art. I think that if you have a good positive attitude and drive and focus and have your eyes set on a goal, then you can be trained to cook. If the passion is there. You have to have that passion, because it’s hard work, it’s hard on your body. It’s hard. It’s very physical.”
The difficulty of work, I sensed, partly contributed to a macho ethic in the kitchen. And it tended to produce, as far as I could see, a fair share of lunatics. I used lunatics, I explained, in the best way—lunacy, moonstruck.
“I do not like working in an all-female kitchen,” she said, “and I do not like working in an all-male kitchen. We feel like different species, we perceive the world totally, totally differently, and the beauty of that is to work in harmony, because the males are going to contribute something that only they can contribute, and the females are going to contribute something that only they can contribute. Wow! It’s outstanding! And if you have a whole male environment, it becomes a bunch of goats trying to get to the top of the mountain and kicking everybody off!”
She laughed loudly.
“I’m going through in my head and thinking about chefs I admire, and would I say it’s lunacy? I would say it is. It verges on a bit of an obsession … . If you have a passion for food then it’s not only your life and your avocation but it’s also your vocation and maybe that’s the lunacy.” She smiled thoughtfully. “Yeah, it can be a little whacky.”
We would break for the Fourth of July weekend (after an ice-carving class, picks, chisels, and chain saws ripping away in the ice-carving shed out back by the Dumpsters), and return to prepare immediately for Grand Buffet, a three-day operation. Felder’s Grand Buffet philosophy combined a highly stylized main platter with casual, eccentric side platters. One team, for instance, prepared pork tenderloin pâté en croûte, turkey mousseline with smoked pork tenderloin, and a foie-gras-and-sweetbread terrine for their main platter, while grilled vegetables with a grape-leaf salsa and herbed flat bread with romescu sauce—an outstanding Spanish base sauce made from roasted tomatoes and ancho chilis—spread across their side platters. Contrived and casual, classical and modern.
My table’s assignments were salmon mousseline pâté en croûte (each table was required to do a pâté en croûte), saffron mousseline and scallop terrine, and a salmon-and-lemon terrine. Our side platters would be ricotta-and-Parmesan-filled ravioli with a cherry tomato vinaigrette and salmon pastrami. Each table was required to write down and compile all the recipes that went into their platter; these would be graded. In all, about seventy-five recipes would be executed for Grand Buffet.
Chef Felder, the day before, commanded all to work clean, look good, be professional. “You’re representing the CIA. Pres Metz will bring the graduation speaker through,” she said, then reminded us that for tomorrow we needed “impeccably clean jackets” (Erica would have to buy a new one), “no apron, no gloves, no side towel.” She led us through the journey from our downstairs kitchen to Alumni Hall, pointing out danger spots where trays can be upended by unforeseen door openings and corners.
“I want you to taste everything,” she continued. “If you’ve never had fresh sardines before, taste the damn things.” A friend and cook in New York City had told her where she could get her hands on fresh sardines; Felder got the storeroom to work on obtaining the order, and she concocted an intriguing side platter of grilled sardines wrapped in grape leaves. Adam, who did the grilling, said this was a nuisance because the heads kept wanting to fall off. “President Metz will come by and ask you questions,” Chef Felder continued. “‘How do you make a mousseline?’ ‘What’s the difference between a mousseline and a mousse?’ ‘What temperature did you cook your mousseline to?’ If he stops in front of you, regain your composure and answer him. Don’t panic. You will panic, but regain your composure and answer. He’s a very, very nice man and he’s very proud of this stuff.” Felder was perched high on several stacked stools, and with her toque extending her height, knees up high, she seemed like an odd Cheshire cat expounding in her ecstatic way on food. “We have a big day tomorrow. We have the Grand Buffet. We have the president’s reception. We have Gourmet in here watching us. We’re also having a foie gras tasting. Taste the relish with it. It’s very good, but just a little bit to balance the richness of the foie gras.”
A photographer and art director from Gourmet magazine, which was preparing an article on the CIA’s fiftieth anniversary, did appear to photograph some of the more ornate and visually dazzling pâtés and terrines, lending our exercises an increased air of importance. At six P.M., we carried our platters, all checked by Chef Felder, to Alumni Hall, where two long rows of tables waited. Beyond us, giant mirrors served as platters for Patisserie classes. In the wings, Intro, Fish, and Oriental kitchens set their serving stations. A line formed at the doors; no one was allowed in until Mr. Metz—who in a few months would be judging the culinary olympics in Frankfurt—arrived to survey each platter, ask questions, point out errors, praise, and more or less sanctify the occasion as he did every third week without fail.
“Very nice, very nice,” he said in all but a whisper as he viewed our platter. His eye moved to each item, locked on it for a moment, then moved to the next. He asked Ben Grossman, “Where are you doing your extern?” Ben said, “La Grenouille.” He caught an error in one group’s platter, a pâté overlapping in the wrong direction. Only after he had surveyed every platter in both Garde Manger classes, both Patisserie classes, and the items from Intro to Oriental, did the doors open and a stream of students and faculty pour in carrying plates and asking questions about what we’d prepared.
The class would spread out through the entire country for externship and would not be back till the blizzards of January struck again.
It was for me a peculiar sensation, watching the school that never stopped empty and shut down. Now, it felt very much like a school, with school’s seasonal rhythm, the acute sense of transition and growth. As I walked to my car in the vast parking lot in the bright warm evening, I found myself missing my Skills class, remembering Chef Pardus (safely landed by then in São Paulo), his voice still clear in my head—This is your Skills kitchen for the next six weeks, keep it clean; notice my fingers are curled, I’m not gonna cut myself, I’m not goin’ to the nurse, I’m not goin’ to the hospital, I got other things to do!—and wanting some sort of closure for it all. But there was rarely closure in this business, and there was no closure here at the Culinary. Service was over, the kitchens were clean. Everyone, almost all solitary, packed and left the campus.
And I thought about Felder’s final message to the class—or plea, rather—to be responsible for the earth as much as we could possibly be; examine whether or not herbicides affected our water supply, find out if our agriculture will sustain us, care about what we dump in the ocean. We were on the banks of the once bountiful Hudson River, a literal example of her warning. General Electric had all but killed it with chemical sludge, and while it was once again showing signs of life, huge concentrations of toxic PCBs still contaminated the river bottom. “Care about the earth,” she said, “it’s what our livelihoods are based on.” She was right. If we completely screw up the earth, we’ll have rotten food.
Externship
Adam Shepard got a long weekend off after Garde Manger and began work as a lunch-line cook in mid-July at the Monkey Bar on East Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan. Adam worried that lunch would be less interesting than dinner—again, lunch, the poor stepchild of real food. About a week later, Adam said to his wife Jessica, “I think I love my job.” This was an eyebrow-raising statement, according to Jessica. “I haven’t heard Adam use the word love for anything,” she said.
“It’s nutso,” Adam told me. “Absolutely fuckin’ nuts. Today, from quarter to one till two, we probably did a hundred thirty lunches. We-got-slammed. Hammered. Absolutely unbelievable.” Adam had shown up for work on a Tuesday and was alone on his station by Friday. He loved it, admired the chef, John Schenk, but people were still taking his tongs when he needed them. I wondered if it were the ghost of Eun-Jung. “Fuckin’ Tony does it,” Adam said. “Tony the grill cook takes my tongs all the time. If there were six tongs on our one oven door, he’d wind up with all of them. He just puts them down wherever he goes. He’ll take a bunch of fries out of the fryer, put his tongs down, grab some salt, walk over to his station, leave his tongs behind him, then grab another pair, and then I don’t have any.”
Adam, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, carrying coffee mug and a knapsack, arrived at the Monkey Bar at seven-forty-five, having taken the F train from his home in Brooklyn. He descended the stairway to the cavernous basement below the restaurant. I followed. He grabbed a pair of pants and a jacket from the laundry room, handed me the same, and we changed in a dark ancient locker room, long and narrow. The lockers were marked with graffiti. He removed a chef’s knife, a small Chinese cleaver, and a serving spoon from his black briefcase, closed his locker, and headed to his station. The first thing he did was turn on all the ovens. He set out a bain-marie for tools. He got me slicing celery root first while he looked for the key to the walk-in and the only twelve-ounce ladle in the kitchen (“It’s exactly one order of soup,” he explained).
I’d asked Chef Schenk if I might trail Adam for a couple days. Schenk chuckled and said, “Sure, I don’t mind.” Adam didn’t mind either since I could help with his mise en place.
“A lot of mise en place,” Adam told me. “Like crazy amounts of mise en place. Cutting and cooking and setting up and just all kinds of stuff. I have to dice peppers, mince shallots, and then I have to take the corn off five ears of corn; I have to small-dice a large handful of haricots verts; I have to fry a ton of julienned leeks, I have to make probably fifteen pounds of mashed potatoes. I have to make eighteen potato cakes; I have to prep asparagus for soup, sauté half a case of oyster mushrooms; I have to fill all the oil bottles, refill the stock bottles, set up my bain-marie with all my sauces, bring the soup up to temperature, cut potatoes for the soup set, prepare the meat for the soup set, pick thyme for the chef; and I have to cut shallots for the chef as well, along with a bunch of miscellaneous other things, like I have to clean and slice and fry four celery roots for celery-root chips for the cod plate.”
Adam got to work on the potato pancakes, using last night’s mashed potatoes and two old baked potatoes, a big handful of chopped sage, butter, and cream, all of it bound with flour. He molded them to the size of a baseball, flattened each to about an inch thick, and cooked them on an electric flattop. These would serve as the base for his pan-roasted chicken, huge chicken breasts that he’d sear off in butter and olive oil at around eleven.
Vinnie Flauto, the thirty-one-year-old A.M. sous chef from Atlantic City, had arrived an hour after Adam and did not seem to be in a good mood. “I’m sick of this fucking shit,” he said. “I’ve got to make this sauce and I have no wine. This is a fucking restaurant and I have no wine.” A woman from the front of the house eventually got him two bottles and he dumped them into a giant kettle.
Generally though, there wasn’t much talking, just cutting. As Adam had said, a lot of mise en place to get through. I’m not sure why, but I was surprised by how much like a CIA kitchen this was. It was 90 percent mise en place. It would take all morning and by service Adam’s station would be set with frisé, grilled white potatoes, oven-dried cherry tomatoes, haricots verts, a ratatouille of diced haricots, corn, red pepper, and roasted carrots, and plastic containers filled with roasted carrot strips, cooked Swiss chard, julienned leeks, and containers of small towels, rolled and soaking in water to wipe plates, and still more containers of dill, chives, rosemary, asparagus, and diced carrots. A bowl of mashed potatoes covered with waxed butter wrappers. Steak sauce, chicken sauce, barbecue sauce for the salmon, and lamb jus, all of which he kept in a hotel-pan water bath.
“I saw Susanne yesterday,” I told Adam as I brunoised red pepper for his ratatouille, which went with the lamb chops. I’d stopped by to say hello to Susanne and see how she was liking Gramercy Tavern.
“Spellacy?” Adam asked, excited.
“Yeah.”
“Did you work there?”
“No.”
“Did you eat?”
“No.”
“Aw, man,” Adam said.
Susanne was on desserts and the first thing she did after changing was make caramel for the peach Tatin. She made a blackberry and blueberry compote, mascerated raspberries with sugar and thyme. She made peanut brittle and a cornmeal pound cake. Claudia, the pastry chef, wanted everything very fresh, Susanne said, so each day she began anew. Susanne gave me a tour of the kitchens, the walk-ins, then her station. She ducked into a lowboy to show me a little white espresso mug filled with a gelled mixture of buttermilk, cream, and sugar, an old Italian country-style dessert she called panna cotta. “James Carville had one of these today, and I made it,” she told me with aggressive pleasure.
She showed me the dessert menus. Reviewing it, I said, “So this is your day.”
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br /> “That is my life,” she said. And she liked it. “I’m all alone,” she said. “It’s kinda like Pardus. You’re all alone, it’s a lot of production, plenty of room.” She was relying heavily on McGee to figure out how and why her sugar was behaving as it did.
Ben Grossman was on the amuse bouche station at La Grenouille. First couple days he was there he was making terrines and mousses. “Just like we did in Garde Manger class,” he said with surprise. “Same ratios and everything. They do a caper-and-foie-gras terrine. They did a cauliflower mousse and we made them into quenelles and served them with cumin oil and basil oil. They were all right; there was a little too much cumin flavor. But I was like, ‘Hey, I know how to do that. No, really, I know how to do that. I can do that, no problem.’ Same way we did it in class.”
Monkey Bar chef John Schenk arrived shortly before twelve. Schenk, named one of the ten best new chefs of 1995 by Food & Wine magazine, had staged in Paris, worked four years under Alfred Portale at Gotham Bar and Grill, been executive chef at two restaurants before the Monkey Bar, and would soon move downtown to head the kitchen of Clementine. Forty-one years old, he had been a cook for twenty years and busyness swirled around him, even when the kitchen wasn’t busy. He was tall, had dark short hair, wore a bandanna during service (as Adam had taken to doing). I asked him about Adam. “I wasn’t going to hire him,” Schenk told me. “I don’t know why I did. His schedule just happened to work out perfectly.” Schenk shook his head. “But he’s really come into his own. He had plenty of training and he thinks. That’s good.”
“He thinks,” I repeated.
Schenk said, “Let’s just say this business isn’t filled with Einsteins.”
The Making of a Chef Page 22