Spiced

by Dalia Jurgensen

  “Dad,” I lamented on the phone one day from work, “I just don’t feel like any of this stuff matters. The reports, the trade shows, the promotional materials. People only care about bottom lines. It’s not interesting. It’s not me. I feel stifled.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing I know for sure,” he’d said. “You only have one life. Whatever you decide to do, you should try and be happy. Don’t be afraid to take risks.”

  And that’s all it took. I hung up the phone and immediately gave my two weeks’ notice. I figured I’d find a job waiting tables for the next nine months while in culinary school. At least I’d be in a restaurant and not staring at a computer.

  A week later, I heard about the job opening at Nobu through Linda, a friend of a friend. When she revealed that she was a cook at Nobu, I excitedly told her about culinary school, my recent decision to quit publishing, and my plan to wait tables. Linda told me that Nobu was looking for a nighttime pastry person, an entry-level position. “You should check it out,” she said. It had to be kismet.

  A few days later I met with Mika, and I liked her immediately. I was encouraged by her kind tone.

  “I’ve wanted to cook for as long as I can remember,” I told her, banking on my enthusiasm, my only credential.

  It was the absolute truth. I have always loved to cook. At five, I stood on a chair at the counter next to my mother and helped her with the many Danish dishes she prepared, shaping frikadeller , peeling potatoes for bikser mad. For dessert, she showed me how to sprinkle bread crumbs, toasted with butter to a deep brown, in a fat layer over the apples she’d cooked down the night before. I watched intently as she magically whipped cream into a fluffy cloud and used it for another layer of the æblecage. And when she made bread, I waited anxiously for the ball of dough resting in a glass bowl on the stovetop to puff up until finally it would be time for my tiny fist to punch down the plump, airy pillow. Then she would knead it again, shaping most of it into two loaves and giving me my own bit of dough to shape in any way I wanted: a short braid, a pretzel, a turtle. And when the bread was done baking (my small shapes were always done first) we gobbled it down as soon as it was cool enough to handle, slathering it with plenty of butter and sometimes a sprinkle of brown sugar. For my thirteenth birthday, I received Anne Willan’s Grand Diplôme Cooking Course cookbook as a gift and read it over and over. Mesmerized by the photos, I attempted some of the less complicated recipes. After graduating high school, I still wanted to cook, but I was interested in so many other things, too. I wanted to study languages and literature, so I went to a conventional university. I kept cooking, but only as a hobby.

  “I spend all my spare time baking and cooking at home,” I told Mika. I still routinely pored over cookbooks, using my roommates and boyfriend as guinea pigs for elaborate dinners and brunches.

  Sitting across from Mika that day, I felt overdressed in the pale yellow linen pantsuit I’d worn to work that day—like an imposter. Mika seemed so at ease in her baggy white chef ’s coat. I made sure to tell her that I was starting culinary school in just a few weeks. As luck would have it, I had enrolled in the very same school that Mika had attended.

  ON MY SECOND TRAIL, I worked with Nobu’s other pastry chef, Jemal, in the hours preceding dinner service. Jemal was a good foot taller than Mika (and me) and not nearly as soothing. He gave me orders and corrected my mistakes—all business. We worked down in the basement, where all the preparation for the upstairs service kitchen was done. He gave me simple tasks like peeling Asian pears (much rounder and crunchier than regular pears, with a texture like that of jicama), picking mint sprigs for garnish, and weighing ingredients. He said we were doing mise-en-place, getting all the ingredients together. Every task, every dessert, it seemed, had its own set of mise-en-place.

  After a few hours of work, Jemal led me outside the restaurant, where we sat on the ledge of an old loading dock.

  “Your main responsibility if you work here,” he told me, “will be plating desserts—like what you did the other night with Mika. You’d also be responsible for setting up the mise-en-place for the station—all the little things, garnishes and stuff. In addition to that,” he went on, “you’d be doing some light production—simple cakes, phyllo cups, things like that. We’ll teach you that stuff.”

  So far, neither Mika nor Jemal seemed to mind that I had no experience and hadn’t even started school yet. They didn’t even seem to mind that I had enrolled in a culinary program that did not include pastry. The program at school that combined savory and pastry was too expensive, and I’d been forced to choose. I chose savory, thinking I’d be better at it.

  “Your lack of experience doesn’t bother me,” he said finally. “It just means that I can mold you any way I want. That you haven’t learned any bad habits yet.” He smiled, almost maniacally . I just nodded. I wanted him to teach me everything, especially since I wouldn’t be learning it at school. It was the perfect situation.

  “So,” he finally said, “the job pays four hundred dollars a week—that’s before taxes—and you’ll work Monday through Friday starting at two p.m. every day. You’ll work until the last dessert has gone out and the station is cleaned and closed down, which will rarely be before midnight. I want you to know exactly what you’re getting yourself into.” He paused while I took it all in. I couldn’t believe it. I was actually being offered a job, a cooking job, in a real restaurant. And not just any old restaurant but a great one. One in the spotlight.

  “You know,” he finally added, almost grudgingly, “Mika really likes you. We’re willing to give you a chance.”

  THREE

  Melting Point

  I abruptly stopped cutting my pineapple, crossed my fingers, and headed toward the oven.

  “Behind you!”

  From my position at the pastry station, which sat perpendicular to the end of the hot line, I declared my intention to enter the area of Nobu’s kitchen that was lined with dangerously fiery ovens, broilers, fryers, and stovetop steamers on one side; refrigeration, cutting boards, and countertops on the other; and four cooks, elbow to elbow, down the narrow middle corridor, one per station, mediating and mastering their respective areas. During lunch and dinner service, the line was the belly of the kitchen beast, a fury of activity bulging with dervish-like cooks, flying sauté pans, and food in various stages of preparation. But dinner service was still more than an hour away, and the line was in a state of relative calm as the cooks readied their stations for the impending battle: 298 reservations that night. I’d been a full-time, paid employee of the restaurant for more than five weeks, but I was still intimidated by the line: its power, its muscle, its cloud of testosterone. Its sheer foreignness. I hated going there, but the only oven in the restaurant sat midway down its path, and I had to check my génoise, the sponge cake we used for the chocolate maki.

  “Behind you!” I announced again, edging down the line as the cooks responded to my voice by leaning over their counters in order to let me by.

  “Behind you!” I went on, trying to increase the volume of my voice. You have to speak loud! Yuki, an older Japanese cook, had said. People have to know where you are, when you are coming, what to expect! Maybe someone gonna bump into you! If you don’t tell them, maybe you gonna get burned! Yuki was the de facto leader of the hot line, and he scared me.

  I had yet to suffer any physical injury, but the heads shaking in disappointed disgust and the harsh looks I’d received—especially from the sushi chefs, the stern, quiet commanders of the kitchen—had been injury enough. Speaking loudly and often did not come naturally to me, but then again, getting fired and allowing a golden opportunity to slip through my fingers wouldn’t feel very good, either. I tried my best.

  “Open oven!” I continued loudly, lowering the heavy bottom-hinged door of the hulking oven that, when open, almost fully blocked the path of the line, dividing it in two.

  I grabbed the first of the two wide, flat sheets of chocolate génoise from the ove
n, holding each side with a folded kitchen towel to protect my hands from the hot metal. Resting the sheet on the stovetop, I futilely checked the cakes for doneness, more for show than anything else. The génoise barely resisted the gentle press of my finger, confirming what the cake’s darkened edges (and my earlier panic) had already told me: I had overbaked the chocolate génoise. Again.

  Quietly swallowing my disappointment and hoping that the cooks would not notice my failure, I pulled the other sheet from the oven and set it on top of the first slightly askew so that I could carry them both down to the basement to cool in the pastry prep area.

  “Hot!” I yelled, balancing the large sheets of cake on one flat, upturned hand over my right shoulder, using my left hand to steady the edges. “Coming through!”

  “Hot!” I insisted every few steps.

  “Caliente! ” I barked in Spanish, one of the kitchen’s other languages, trying to keep my volume up, ignoring the inevitable response of “Como yo!” that came from someone in my path.

  “Funny,” I said back. My usual response. I had yet to come up with a better comeback. Revealing any irritation or indignation, I knew, would only encourage or, worse, amuse.

  “Hot behind!” I continued on my way.

  “I’ll say!” came the answer. It was an exasperating, losing battle, and I hadn’t gone more than a few yards.

  I turned the corner past the pot-washing station, taking a deep breath as I started down the precariously narrow stairway that felt to me, with two hot sheet pans awkwardly balanced over one shoulder, more like a death trap: the final obstacle before having to announce my failure to the two pastry chefs who had, in a moment of probable desperation, hired my wholly inexperienced ass. Whatever honeymoon period I’d enjoyed those first few exciting days was soon overshadowed by my ineptitude. What I did quickly learn was that nothing was easy in my new world, a world into which I’d so eagerly and happily jumped. Something as simple as walking through the kitchen required a specific vocabulary and a new attitude. And that was just the beginning.

  I didn’t just make cakes anymore; I made génoise. To do this, I separated eggs and whipped the yolks with sugar until they reached ribbon stage. I sifted AP flour (not to be confused with bread or pastry flour) with cocoa powder before folding it into the yolk mixture. Virtually everything was weighed in grams, not measured in cups or teaspoons. After dividing the finished génoise batter between two parchment-lined sheet pans, I smoothed it as evenly as I could, given my rudimentary skill level, with an offset spatula. Finally, I baked the cakes. For how long? And this is where things really got tricky. Until they were done. That’s what Jemal said. Use your internal clock. Timers, I found out, were frowned upon as crutches used only by home cooks—loser amateurs in the outside world. Meanwhile, my own internal clock was in some serious need of calibration, as was the quickly eroding state of my ego.

  “Coming through!”

  I descended the stairs into the basement, a small crowded factory of preparatory movement. The sushi chefs dominated the basement until service started, at which point they had to take their places in the dining room behind the sushi bar. Until then, they lined up at long cutting boards stretched across deep stainless steel sinks, where they swiftly inspected and butchered fish and pummeled open par-cooked lobsters in order to remove their tender flesh, which, much to Jemal’s dismay, inevitably led to an indiscriminate spraying of milky lobster juice around the prep area. They sharpened their expensive knives often, sliding them swiftly back and forth across a small rectangle of a two-toned stone, swish-swash . . . swish-swash . . . swish-swash. For the most part, the sushi chefs kept to themselves, pausing in their private conversations only to bark out orders at Kim, the sushi commis, a low-level apprentice, who seemed to me more of a whipping boy. He did any and all of the sushi chefs’ dirty work, waiting for the day he would be deemed “ready” even to touch the fish, let alone begin learning the precision cuts. Clearly miserable, Kim was usually downright unpleasant with me. I got the feeling that his one joy in life was having someone in the kitchen who was lower down the totem pole than he was. When he did, on occasion, offer a rare friendly word, I was suspicious. As for the rest of the sushi chefs, they hardly ever acknowledged me with anything more than a sniff.

  “Hot!”

  Jemal and Mika looked up as I made my way toward them. I was still trying to figure out the hierarchy of our small pastry department. Both Jemal’s and Mika’s names were printed at the bottom of the dessert menu and both held the title of pastry chef, but I was confused about who was ultimately in charge. Jemal certainly assumed that position, with his air of confidence and absolute opinions, and it had been he, not Mika, who had officially offered me the job. But Mika had all the knowledge of traditional Japanese desserts, and it was she to whom the waiters, and sometimes even the sushi chefs, turned when they wanted to treat special customers to dessert, especially Japanese customers. I didn’t want to risk embarrassment or offend either one by making any assumptions, and there wasn’t anyone else I could ask. Linda, the woman through whom I had initially gotten the interview with Mika, still worked at Nobu, but she had little time for me now. It turned out that the job opening that she had told me about, the job I currently held, was actually her old job. She’d been cooking for years, a veteran of high-end restaurants like the River Café in Brooklyn, and had taken the lowly entry-level job of pastry cook just to get her foot in Nobu’s enviable door. The only way she could move onto the hot line, where she really wanted to be, was to find someone to take her position. Once my arrival facilitated that, she became focused on proving herself in the all-male kitchen and quickly began to make her mark. The few pointers she gave me were sporadic and, at the time, cryptic: Always stir a cooling pot . . . anticipate your chef’s next step . . . it’s all about timing. She might as well have been speaking Swahili. I navigated the hierarchy of the pastry department on my own.

  Mika and Jemal were aesthetic opposites. Mika, Japanese and diminutive, was quiet and calculated in her movements and had a voice that cooed, never betraying even a tiny trace of arrogance. Jemal, on the other hand, multiply pierced and tattooed, towered above both of us and had a booming voice that he was not shy about using, despite frowns from the more reserved Japanese chefs in the kitchen, who kept their chatter to a minimum while prepping in the basement. He had a flop of hair that alternated between electric blue, platinum, and clown red. Before Nobu, the chef/owner of the eponymous restaurant, offered Jemal the job of pastry chef, he had had one final question: But why do you do this to your hair, your ears? Jemal was resolute and unapologetic with his answer: I’m a creative person. Despite having such diametrically opposed personalities, Mika and Jemal had an identical response to my overbaked génoise: an exasperated sigh. What are we going to do with her?

  “Just put them on the rack,” said Jemal dismissively.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, sliding the sheets onto the short cooling rack in the corner of the pastry area. What else could I say?

  “Should I make another batch?” I offered. Jemal glanced at his watch.

  “Just do the mise-en-place,” he said. “We have enough maki for tonight.”

  “I’ll make it tomorrow,” offered Mika, inspecting my overdone cakes to see if they could be salvaged at all, maybe reincarnated as miniature rum balls as she’d done before. It was a small consolation.

  “Is my chocolate melted yet?” asked Jemal, not looking up from the plastic stencil he was creating using an X-Acto knife and the top to a tub of sour cream.

  Oh no. My eyes widened. The chocolate!

  “I’ll check,” I said, trying to hide my panic. I had completely and utterly forgotten about the chocolate he’d asked me to melt. I was supposed to stir it often, making sure the heat remained low. Pastry items left unattended on the stove among the cooks’ many pots had the potential to get messed up, I’d been warned. Cooks don’t care about pastry. They don’t appreciate what we do. How long had it been? I curs
ed my faulty internal clock.

  “Behind!” I yelled as I raced upstairs, back to the inside of the line. The dark chocolate was right where I’d left it: melting in a stainless steel bowl, resting on top of a large pot that had a few fingers of water in it . . . over high heat. Always melt chocolate gently, over low heat, Jemal had said. Getting it too hot changes the way it tastes, the way it acts. I was supposed to lower the heat to a slight simmer as soon as the water came up to a boil and then periodically check on it. How long ago was that?

  I flicked off the burner. Using side towels, I grabbed the large bowl of chocolate and noticed that the edges of the chocolate looked dry and crusted over.

  Oh no.

  With horror, I noticed that the pot underneath was completely out of water and must have been for some time. For so long, in fact, that a tiny hole—an actual hole!—had been burned through its blackened and ashy bottom. I was in a stupor, holding the bowl of chocolate. This was worse than overbaking the génoise. Much worse.

  “Oh . . . my . . . God!” said Herman, a line cook, looking over my shoulder and into the pot. He lingered over each word, accentuating his disbelief. He bit his lower lip and sucked in a long breath. I just stared at the pot.

  “You made a hole?” asked another incredulously. I nodded. I had. I had made a hole. I really had. Not only had I burned the chocolate (failed task number two of the day), but I had actually burned it so successfully, forgotten about it so completely, that I had etched an actual hole in a metal pot.