“What do you mean you don't know?” I asked.
“I don't
know
,” he said. “I don't remember how it happened or why it happened. I thought everything was fine.” He made a quick suggestive motion with his hands, pushing a three-quarter-inch plank of plywood through a table saw. “But I chopped off half the fingers on my right hand.”
Adam had liked cooking and restaurant work and had been curious about the Culinary Institute of America. In November 1993, he and Jessica, then living in western Massachusetts, visited the Culinary. They had dinner at St. Andrew's Cafe, a restaurant (one of four at the CIA) devoted to nutritional
cuisine; for this reason, it is not the Institute's most popular restaurant, but it happened to be the only place Adam and Jessica could get a last-minute reservation. Adam would remember it as one of the best meals he would have at the Culinary.
Three weeks later, on November 30, he cut his hand. “He said to me the day he was injured,” Jessica recalled during one of the weekends she spent in Hyde Park, “that as long as he could hold a knife to cut vegetables, he would be O.K. He said it to me as soon as they'd given him the injection of morphine.”
Adam corrected her: “I was saying that as soon as I left the wood shop.”
For two years Adam underwent reconstructive surgery and physical therapy. They'd been married for two months when the saw redirected Adam's career, and the recovery was hard on them both. For someone who worked with his hands, who was most fulfilled when crafting something, Adam had to learn how to spend time not making anything. He watched cooking shows on the Discovery channel. When he regained, gradually, some use of his right hand, he began to cook for Jessica. Eventually, he would cook two elaborate meals a day for her. When his right hand was strong and he felt sure he could wield a French knife, he applied to the Culinary and began Culinary Math and Introduction to Gastronomy in December 1995.
The injury scarcely seemed to affect him nowâ“I have trouble tournéing, that's about all,” he saidâthough I wondered if this might be the source of his anger. Our conversation the night of the brown sauce was not long. He had a two-and-a-half-hour drive south ahead of him and it was after nine-thirty. I too looked forward to being home.
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“T
hese are
à la minute
sauces,” Chef Pardus said, as we clustered around him for the day's demo. “Derivative sauces, you make them at the last minute.” Chef Pardus checked the mise en place neatly arranged in a hotel pan by Table Three. “You can make them in quantity, but they're best if finished at the last minute. You make the brown sauce or the demi-glace and finish the sauce
à la minute
, at the moment, in the pan that the item was cooked in: sautéed cutlets, sautéed pork chop, or a piece of pork loin that was pan-roasted. Sauce Robert is traditionally served with pork.”
We had done just what he'd said, made our brown sauce and from that made our demi-glace, equal parts veal stock and brown stock, the veal
stock first reduced by one third, then all of it simmered and skimmedâthe highest refinement of the brown sauce. To me it didn't taste so good. Didn't taste much like anything except brown. Brown sauce actually tasted brown, and that was about it. The demi-glace simply tasted more brown.
Chef Pardus sweated some minced onion, then, lifting a bottle of white wine, said, “You add the wine.” He stopped. “You add the wine off the fire. We talked about this. Why?” He had taken his sauté pan off the flame but had not yet poured. “Because you don't want that flame to jump back up into the bottle, blow the back of the bottle off, and cut the guy
next
to you. It's really scary. Has that happened to anybody in this class? I saw it happen once. It's pretty much of a disaster. First of all it frightens everybody; somebody can get
hurt
. Second, you've got to shut the
line
down because there's broken
glass
in everybody's
mise
en place. And in the middle of Saturday night, that's a real drag. That's when you start comping dinners, buying lots of drinks, giving away lots of wine.” He paused. He still hadn't poured. “One person's carelessness cost your restaurant a thousand dollars, or more.”
Paul Trujillo asked, “How do people avoid that? By using plastic containers?”
“No!”
Pardus said. “You avoid it by taking it off the fire and adding your volatile liquid
off
the
fire
.” Paul nodded quickly. Pardus returned the pan to the flame till the onion began to sizzle, removed it, and poured out a couple of ounces. “Reduce your white wineânot all the way down, by about half. You want to retain some of the liquid there. You can adjust it down if you want to adjust it down.” Four ounces of demi-glace had been put in a white paper cup. Pardus had to squeeze the cup and shake it hard to snap the congealed sauce into the pan. It quickly thinned and began to bubble. “We don't want to reduce it much more. It's a light-sauce consistency, it just barely coats the spoon. It's liquid, it flows, you can't draw a line in the bottom of your pan at all.”
He passed the pan around so everyone could see the consistency. He drew a line down the middle of the pan with a wooden spoon and the line vanished immediately.
“At this point we're going to add our reconstituted mustard. Do we have a whisk?” Adam handed Pardus a whisk.
Almost there, just needed a little pat of butter for flavor and texture and what is often called mouth feel, though some people wince at that phrase.
“Monté au beurre,” Pardus said. “Bring up the temperature a little bit
more to swirl it in.” As the butter became first a bright swirl in the dark brown sauce, Pardus left K-8 in his mind and said, “I would do smoke roasted pork loin in my pizza oven in CaliforniaâI'm gonna add a little bit of salt and pepperâa slow-roasted pork loin.” He swirled the pan some more to incorporate the salt and pepper. “And I would do a sauce very similar to this and finish it with a whole-grain mustard. I would make a brown pork stock and reduce it, monté au beurre, and finish it with whole-grain mustard.” Silence, then, as we all reflected.
“This is the proper consistency,” he said, removing the pan from the heat. He strained the sauce to remove the chunks of onion, needing only their infusion. “You might choose to leave the onions in there, if you wanted a more rustic presentation. I wouldn't see a problem with that. In a very refined restaurantâsomeone was talking about La Caravelle last night, a very refined classical French restaurant in New Yorkâthey would certainly strain it. Escoffier room, they would certainly strain it. Across the hall here at Caterina, if they were making a sauce like thisâItalian cuisine is a little more rustic than classical Frenchâmaybe they wouldn't strain it, leave the onions in for a little textural interest and a little more flavor.”
He passed the sauté pan around and our silver spoons descended like a fleet of little dive-bombers.
I can only say that what happened in my mouth was a revelation. No heaviness, no pastiness, but instead the opposite: lightness. The mustard was sharp and distinct, the wine rounded it out, the butter had made it rich and velvety. This would go very well with pork, I thought. Suddenly, there was nothing at all brown about this sauce. It was like magic.
“This is about what this would taste like,” Pardus said, himself pleased. “You see how this would go well with pork? This would complement pork well. It's a nice sauce, it's got a nice flavor, a nice texture, it's got some depth to it. It's a nice sauce primarily because you started with a good demi-glace. If we had not cooked the brown sauce properly, if we had not cooked the demi-glace out properly, it would be a bit gloppy, it would have a kind of starchy feel in the mouth. But we don't have any of those bad characteristics because we took care of making a
good
demi-glace, from a
good
brown sauce. That's why we have to be particular all the way down the line. If you make a lousy stock, you're not gonna have a good Espagnole. You don't have a good Espangole, you can't make a good demi. If you don't make a good demi, you're not gonna have a
good
finished
product
.
“O.K., the next oneâthis is like falling off a
log
.” He took a clean sauté
pan and set it on the flame. “Sauce Madeira, all you need to do is start with a good demi-glace, heat that demi-glace up, and finish it with, what's it call for, two ounces of Madeira? One ounce? Yeah, this looks like a little bit much.”
As the wine sauce bubbled, Pardus turned to us. “The recipe says don't reduce. If you have a high-quality Madeira, it's a good idea not to. And if you have a
bad
-quality Madeira, it's a good idea
not
to. If you have a poor-quality Madeira, why wouldn't you want to reduce it?”
Adam's voice rang out immediately: “You reduce the poor-quality flavor. It's really concentrated poor quality.”
“
Exactly,
Adam.”
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T
hat day, Day Eleven, I had experienced another revelationâone beyond the sauce Robert, though that in itself was a kind of high, like finding the key to a hidden room. Knowing that a sauce that tasted brown one minute could be refined to the point of flavorful, exquisite delicacy in thirty or forty seconds, well, if this were trueâand I had seen and tasted itâwhat more was there to learn? Part of the elation, a balance and counterpoint to it, was shame. I could never be smug again about food as I had been about the roux-based sauce. If I didn't know how sauce Robert workedâperhaps the oldest sauce still in useâif I didn't know the qualities and behavior of a demi-glace, the queen mother of French sauces, then truly I knew nothing.
A
friend of mine once described what it would be like for mortals like us to take a single blow from a world-class heavyweight boxer: “It would be like a ceiling beam falling on your head.” This, I believe, is an accurate way of describing how snow hit the northeast that winter. And the blows kept falling. They began a couple days after the new year. A week later the Blizzard of '96 struck. After the Eastern seaboard dug out of that one, another storm would blow in about once every third week. The block before Skills had ended with a winter storm watch. Exactly three weeks later, Day Thirteen of this block, another storm began.
As I watched the snow fall that March morning, I thought twice about heading down to the Culinary at all. My little Nissan Sentra was not much heavier than a pie tin. I decided to leave an hour early to make sure I arrived on time, and out into the whiteness I went, toting my knife kit and shoulder briefcase. By the time I arrived at the Culinary, an hour and a half later, my main concern was not the knife cuts practical but just getting home. I devised my plan as I hustled to class. The knife cuts practical happened first. Afterward there was just a dry run through tomorrow's sauce practical. I could miss this practice.
Shortly before two-fifteen, Chef Pardus said, “Begin.” We had twenty minutes to mince one onion, slice one onion, concassé a tomato, and chop one bunch of parsley. You had to hustle but timing wasn't meant to be the issue. No one cut themselves and everyone did about the same as I did.
Minced onion, good but a little too big, the sliced onion a little uneven. Three points off on each. The chef found two tomato seeds in my concassé, a point off for each seed. Parsley was good, but the chef was skeptical that I'd done a full bunch. It did look a little shy. He picked through my trim to make sure I didn't throw away too much onion. I finished on time and my hand positions were good, so my grade came to the equivalent of 97.5 out of a hundred. Chef Pardus admitted that it was an easy test.
I packed up my knives as he finished grading the final hotel pans of onion, tomato, parsley, and trim. He stood behind his desk, back straight, eyes wide behind his gold-rimmed glasses, expressionless.
“Chef,” I said.
“Yes!” he said.
“I'm worried about the snow. I'm gonna bolt.”
“Fine,” he said.
I think he knew I was going to say what I did, and I suspected, from his posture and lack of expression that he was thinking something. When he didn't speak, I said, “See ya tomorrow.”
He said, “See ya tomorrow.”
And I was gone. I actually jogged through the snow to my car because I knew that every second that passed more snow was piling up on the roads from here to Tivoli. It was mid-afternoon but the sky was so heavy with clouds that there was a crepuscular winter grayness to the light and the heavy snow further reduced visibility. I waited at the stoplight hanging at the exit of the Culinary parking lot; my wheels spun before catching and I turned left onto Route 9, my back end swinging out slightly more than it ought to have, but the car righted itself easily and I was on my way.
The road through Hyde Park is one lane and a steady stream of cars motored along at about twenty-five miles an hour. Just beyond the next town, Staatsburg, Route 9 becomes a divided highway, two lanes on each side. Normally this was your lucky chance to pass the Sunday drivers, but today, no one was passing. The roads were completely white, not even tire tracks visible, and everyone stayed in one lane, snow beginning to drift in either passing lane. I felt the Nissan drop slightly as I veered off the lip of the road invisible beneath the snow. I slowed to below twenty, gripping the wheel tightly. I turned the wheel just a bit to get back on the road, and I felt the back tire catch on the lip. I gave a small jerk to the steering wheel to get this back wheel onto the road. I overcompensated, and the back end of the
car faded into the passing lane. I turned the wheel counterclockwise and the back end straightened but then kept going. I turned the wheel again. There seemed to be no friction at all and I had the experience of an astronaut floating through space. But part of me knew I was on a four-lane highway as I slid across the passing lane and over the rough brick divide, smoothed with snow, into the southbound lanes, and eventually came to a halt facing the opposite direction. I managed to maneuver perpendicular to traffic and someone actually dared stopping, a hazard itself given that you'd be relying on all the other cars behind you to stop as well. But all did. I pulled into the traffic and crept prayerfully toward Tivoli, thinking only then that I was fortunate to have fishtailed into the oncoming traffic at a moment when no traffic happened to be coming on to halt, with a muffled thunk, my graceful spin.
In earlier years, a little drive like that would have been more fun than anything else. But this sort of fun ended when I became a parent. Kids change the way you behave; new instincts engage. One of them is self-preservation. A friend of mine who lives in Manhattan, for instance, remembers he began walking closer to the insides of the sidewalk, farther away from the curb, once he became a father. When I spun out on Route 9, floating backward into who knows what, I didn't think of myself but rather of my daughter's face. That's what gets you back in the right direction. Then I thought how mad my wife, Donna, would be if she knew what had happened. I'd have hated to have been injured or even killed on account of a desire to make brown veal stock. I told Donna how glad I was to be home; I hugged her, hugged my beautiful daughter, then snuggled up to the warm glow of my computer to catch up on a backlog of notes.
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T
he next morning snow fell. It hadn't stopped so far as I knew. I paced the room. I stared out the windowâone blanket of snow all the way down to the Hudson River. Through the pattern of ice crystals on the window the scene looked like a Currier & Ives print. I couldn't believe it was still snowing.
Had it been any other day, I wouldn't have been so angry at the weather. But today was the final day of Skills One. I needed to be there to record this. There was a cooking practical. I wanted to take it. I'd already missed the written test yesterday. How could I miss the last two days of Skills One? But
there was even more snow now than there had been yesterday afternoon when my car did its ballet on Route 9. Attempting the journey would have been foolhardy.
I had a small hope. I called the main switchboard at the Culinary. “Yes, we're open,” the voice told me with what I sensed was bemusement.
At 12:30, with the snow still falling, I called Chef Pardus.
He answered his phone. He sounded quiet and subdued, as though he were very tired.
“Hi, Chef, this is Michael Ruhlman.”
“Hi, Michael, what's up?”
“It's still snowing up here. I don't think I'll be able to make it in.”
“That's up to you,” he said softly.
“I'm sorry,” I said.
“Hey, that's O.K.,” he said, almost a whisper.
I paused. I needed him to know I wasn't blowing this off lightly. I said, “I am sorry. I really want to be there.”
Silence on the line. Then, still quiet and weary, he said, “Michael, I don't want you to take offense at this.” He searched for words. “I was going to say this yesterday. Maybe I should have. I don't want you to take offense at this.”
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W
hen I hung up, I wasn't sure exactly what had happened or why I was feeling so strongly. I paced. Then I sat down and tried to think about the conversation.
“Part of what we're training students to be here is chefsâand when chefs have to be somewhere, they get there,” Pardus had said calmly and evenly, not as judgment but as fact.
“Chefs are the people who are working on Thanksgiving and Christmas, when everyone else is partying,” he said. “Or at home with their family.”
He didn't stop there: “You're cut from a different cloth,” he told me. At that moment, I believe, I stopped thinking as a writer and just listened to what he had to say. There was a hint of snobbishness in his voice. I knew every now and then during class he would look at me trying to figure me out, when I argued with him about whether or not my hollandaise had too much lemon juice. He would grow pensive and just stare. He had told me he watched the way I carried myself. He never said this, but I could see it in his eyes and hear it now over the phone: College boy. White collar. Smooth.
Writer.
I sensed that part of him envied this and part of him was amused by it. He was a smart, articulate man. But he was a cook through and through. We
were
different. But I resented his saying that weâand it was a cumulative we, meaning himself and everyone in that class but meâwere cut from different material. As if I were satin gown or Oxford cloth. As he went on, he seemed to grow less tired. He was getting worked up, too.
“We're different,” he said. “We
get
there. It's part of what makes us a chef.” I was quiet. “We
like
it that way. That's why this place never shuts down. And we're teaching the students this.”
He knew I was doing a different job, he said. This wasn't meant to be a criticism. He just wanted me to understand. He had his job to do, and I had mine, he said. I said I understood. I asked him, if I were a student and was making this call, didn't make it in, what would happen? He told me if I were a student and didn't show for Day Fourteen, I'd fail.
This is a physical world. The food is either finished at six o'clock, or it's not. You're either in the kitchen or you're not. Much of what one learned here was why food behaved as it did. But sometimes there was no room for why. Sometimes
why
didn't matter. It wasn't simply that excuses were not accepted hereâexcuses had no meaning at all. The physical facts in any given momentâthat was all.
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W
hen I entered K-8âthe cooking practical in full swingâChef Pardus's eyebrows rose above the frame of his glasses and he strode immediately toward me, shaking his head. “I didn't mean to
shame
you into coming,” he said.
I said, “I know.” I told him what he'd said had angered me. Then I said, “Can I still take the practical?”
“You happen to be in group two,” he said. “Group two starts in a half hour.”
On Day Fourteen of Skills One, Chef Pardus divides the class. Half do their practical, the other half cleans pots, cleans the kitchenâno jockeying for burner space, no running to the sink to wash a pot because your béchamel sauce was scorching and the pot room was empty. The school simply wanted to see that each student knew how to make a consommé, a stable emulsion. After an hour and a half, the groups switched.
My name was on the board in the second group. It was significant, I think, that he'd written it down at all.
I was an hour and forty-five minutes late but had made it in time not only for the practical, but I also had an extra half hour to take the written test I'd missed yesterday. I stowed my knives and briefcase beneath my station, my heart still racing, and accepted the test. I sat outside in the hall between K-8 and K-9. I forgot to write my name on the test. I had gone from my warm room in Tivoli twenty-five miles away to the Culinary; I was not certain why I had done it or why I was here, and I was not certain why I was so furious. But again, this was not a place that concerned itself at such times with
why
. I read the first question on the test: “Describe the procedure for making brown veal stock. List ingredients in sequential order.”
I paused and thought. “First, you rent your house in Cleveland and move your family hundreds of miles east to the Hudson Valley ⦠.”
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C
learly, something had changed but I had no time to reflect. Twenty-five questions to answer in that many minutes, occasionally interrupted by a student giving a tourâthe Culinary receives about two hundred thousand visitors a yearâwho would move down the hall (“And this is a Skills kitchen, students' first kitchen experience at the CIA, and behind you is the kitchen for the Caterina de Medici restaurant ⦔). The moment I finished, I hustled into the kitchen.
David and Bianca had prepped their stations and gathered their mise en place. Their consommés were already at a simmer beneath sturdy rafts of ground meat, egg white, tomato, and mirepoix. They nodded, said hello. I asked them if we were going to have enough room hereâfeeling a complete outsider now, I didn't want to screw up their practical. I wasn't a real student, after all. David was confident and welcoming. “No problem,” he said, “plenty.”
I was a little behind because of the test and because I hadn't prepared to be doing this at all. We'd done everythingâa quart of consommé, a quart of béchamel, a three-yolk hollandaise, and a one-yolk mayonnaise (we used an ounce of a pasteurized yolk out of a carton)âin class many times, so much of it felt like rote. I grabbed three bowls from the cage and on my way to my station picked up a healthy ten ounces of meatâPardus would be looking for flavor, no time to skimpâwhipped three egg whites, dumped in the meat, cut up some mirepoix, and carefully measured the tomato pasteâ
short that and you've got a cloudy brothâpoured in the beef stock, whipped it some more, then got it heating. Slowly. Plenty of time now that the consommé was on the flame. As soon as the raft had formed, a perfect thick flesh-colored disc, I got the béchamel started, first cooking the flour in clarified butter till it had a nice pastry-crust smell, added the milk and seasoned it, and put it on the flattop on a ring of aluminum foil to keep it from burning. The foil wasn't enough and I scorched it three times, each time dumping it into a new pot, bringing the scorched one to Travis; Travis was at the helm of the sink, so I knew there would be plenty of pots.