“How ya doin'?” Travis asked as I passed him.
“I'm a little disoriented,” I said.
The two emulsions were simple, though the mayonnaise could take time; one of the big problems with the mayonnaise was that we had to whip the heck out of it, and if you whipped too much, the mayonnaise would turn gray because of the old steel bowls we used. I liked the hollandaise best, so in the middle of the practical I relaxed a bit with that, took my time, cooking my eggs over water till they were a nice sabayon consistency. Pardus said he'd seen people cook eggs on a flattop and once seen a hollandaise cooked in a deep fryer. The double boiler was safest so long as you didn't let the water boil. I added some lemon juice first, then whipped in warm clarified butter. It took more than eight ounces and I had to reheat it before I brought it to Pardus.
Chef Pardus, behind his desk, regarded my sauce. “It's got a nice color,” he said. “It looks a little flat, though. It could be more fluffy.” He was right; I didn't argue. He lifted a spoonful and let it fall in a thick slow ribbon. “Good consistency.” He tasted it, didn't move. Then he nodded. “This is a good hollandaise sauce.” He squinted at me and said, “It's just a little light on acid. You could have added a little more lemon juice.”
“All week I've been adding too much lemon juice,” I cried.
He shrugged and said it was a minor point. He took off a point for the flat appearance. It would be the only point I would lose during the entire practical. Everything else was perfect, and the mayonnaise was best of all, a perfect body, “exactly what I'm trying to teach them to do to make it a great base,” Pardus said, and it had a perfect balance of salt and acid that gave it “a real brightness.” With fifteen minutes remaining, I'd gotten a 199 of 200 points. My head was now clear. I'd crushed the test. Cut from a different cloth? I'd absolutely crushed it.
Â
Â
T
he question that now pressed on me: Had I gotten out of hand? Had something snapped?
I don't know. A few days later, having mentioned in an E-mail to a friend what had happened, he sent a chuckling response: “I can't wait to read about how, leaving wife and daughter on the hearth, you drove twenty-five miles through a snowstorm to make a béchamel sauce.” I could understand, from a distance, that the situation had comic possibilities, but at the time it wasn't funny to me. Something had happened.
After the phone call with Pardus, and having reflected on the situation, I'd gone into the other room to talk to Donna.
“So he basically called you a wimp,” she said, deftly assessing the situation.
I started, then said, “Yeah, I guess you're right.”
“This is really upsetting you,” she said.
“I guess it is.” I paced the room awhile, hyperventilating.
Then Donna, who watched me as one would a tennis game, said something that upset me more. “Michael, you're
not
a cook, you're a writer.” I ignored the angry subtext of her statement (
Don't even
think
about going out in this weather
), and said, “I
know
that, I
know
that.”
This, of course, was a lie. I didn't know that at all. In fact, and it wasn't until that day and that snowstorm that I fully understood what had gradually taken hold of me since the moment I pushed through the door of the stall, dressed not in jeans and sweater, but in white chef's jacket and houndstooth-check trousers.
I wanted to be a cook.
I wanted to
be
a cook
. That's why I was angry beyond reason. Pardus's I'm-tougher-than-you got to me. His snobbishness ran so deep it was blasé.
I seethed.
I would show him.
The second problemâwhat lent confusion to my angerâwas that I
was
a writer, and I had certain obligations in telling a factual story. Pardus had thrown my entire modus operandi into question, had revealed me as a kind of double imposter. I was not solely an observer, a recorder dressed in student gear, to learn what it was
like
to learn to cook. I now intended to play, too. I wasn't here for recipes. I was no longer here to learn how to make a great veal stock. I knew that now, and that wasn't the end. I needed to know what it took to be a professional cook. But in order to know this, I had to relinquish what made me a credible reporterâmy objectivity, my serene
writerly distance. And yet it became clear to me that day that I could not know what it meant to be a cook from a distance, simply by watching. Pardus had upped the ante by saying I could neither learn to be a cook nor write completely about what it took to be one. Pardus had told me I couldn't know, because I wasn't one of them. Cooks
git
there.
And if I couldn't know, didn't live up to it, wasn't tough enough,
didn't git
there, then I was failing as a student and as a reporter simultaneously.
I had promised my wife that I would turn back if the road grew too dangerous, and headed out into the snow. That day changed me: I
would be
a cook. I didn't have the experience, I wouldn't have the time, and I would be forced to jump around in the curriculum and stay true to my reportorial obligations, but somehow, someway, I was going to prove myself as a cook.
F
ollowing the catharsis of the cooking practical and still unsure why I had behaved as I did, I suggested to Chef Pardus that we talk, preferably before he began his three weeks of doubles next week.
With no lecture on Day Fourteen, with the kitchen cleaned, and with no failures, class ended shortly after seven o'clock. As we pushed out the doors of K-8, I told Pardus how furious I'd been earlier. This interested him. I said I didn't know if I could explain, but I told him what Donna had said. Pardus chuckled. “I guess she was right,” he said. “I kind of was calling you a wimp.”
Now, as we headed through the dining hall, down a flight of stairs into the mailroomâPardus checked his boxâand into the chefs' locker room, a narrow, carpeted chamber with seventy-six slim green lockers, I asked
why
?
“Wow,” Pardus said. “This brings up a lot of stuff for me.” He began to unbutton his chef's jacket, then stopped. “It's sort of like therapy for me. I get goose bumps thinking of it.” I expected him to smile, but he didn't.
“I think part of it is protection.” He tossed his chef's jacket into a hamper. “Protection against feeling like you don't have a normal life. To protect you against all the things you give up because of this work.” I nodded but he stopped changing and turned to me to say, “I haven't had a Thanksgiving since I was a
kid
. Till
this
year. This was the first. Mother's Day? I didn't
spend
it with my
mother
. Busiest day of the year. I've lost a lot for this work. And I'm not happy about it.”
He put on jeans, a green sweater, tied the laces of his shoes. I hadn't really thought of it while he was changing but the transformation was startling. He looked like a grad-school student in his jeans-and-cable-knit attire, trim, clean-shaven, short wavy brown hair, preppy wire-rimmed glasses. It was only then that I realized how powerful a uniform can be. Then I suggested that life as a cook must be like a cross between life in the military and life in a traveling carnival.
Pardus laughed, said the analogy wasn't off the mark, and we headed into the cold. The storm had passed; the roads had been salted and appeared dry. The night was frigid but clear. Pardus said he might be a little behind me, he'd have to dig his car out of the snow. He'd slept at the Culinary last night to ensure the storm didn't waylay him in Germantown. Susanne, who lived an hour south of Hyde Park, had stayed the night in Eun-Jung's room. Everyone had gotten there.
Â
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W
e met at Starr Cantina in Rhinebeck, a cozy little town midway between Hyde Park and Tivoli, populated on summer weekends by New Yorkers but, in cold early March, happily unfashionable. The bar, too, was slow on this Friday night, though a couple at the next table called out “Hi, Michael” to Chef Pardus when he sat down; he introduced me to former students heading into Garde Manger.
This was the first time Chef Pardus and I had talked outside class. I knew he'd worked in New Orleans because our bad posture, hunched as we were over our SMEP at Table One, led him to tell us about working garde manger station at a hotel in the French Quarter, cutting all day. “I blew out my sciatic nerve,” he told us, which had caused him to collapse to the floor. Weeks of tai chi got him back in shape, he said.
I knew that he had traveled in France, eating. “You know that moment in
Amadeus
,” he told us, a memory sparked by the bright green germ of a garlic clove on my cutting board, “when Salieri says God speaks through Mozart? That's how I felt when I left Robuchon's restaurant.” He had said that attention to detail, such as removing the germ from the garlic if you weren't going to cook it well, was what distinguished a good restaurant from an excellent one. And Jamin, the three-star restaurant of Joël Robuchon, a chef known for almost machinelike perfection, had proven to be Pardus's own private mecca, food holiness he had never before encountered.
And I knew that he had an abiding love for northern California, where he
could forage for wild mushrooms, where farmers' markets were so abundant he would sometimes drum up business at his restaurant in Sonoma simply by walking out the front door to the market across the street and buying a few unusual ingredients. Shoppers, attracted by his uniform, inquired what he would do with this or that and he would create some daily specials on the spot that they might try for lunch or dinner if they cared to stop by the restaurant.
I knew that he worked hard, was ambitious, focused, thoughtful, an occasional braggart, that he kept McGee,
Le Guide Culinaire,
and the latest issue of
U.S. News & World Report
on his bedside table, and that he was intensely competitiveâhe got there.
Still throbbing slightly from the unusual events of the day, I tried, at his request, to explain why I'd gotten so mad. Because I was responding to something he had started, though, I returned the focus to him and a particular sense of loss: namely, Vicky, his former wife, who had begun A Block at the Culinary just as Pardus was about to graduate. She too became a cook. The marriage lasted eleven years. It ended in part, he believed, because in a line of work requiring such long hours from two people who were by nature perfectionists, and who therefore worked even longer hours, lines of communication broke down. About a half year later, he fell in love with a woman several years older than himself, the mother of a ten-year-old boy. They discussed children of their own, she was getting old (“Now or never,” she said), but Pardus didn't feel stable in his career at the time; later, when he did, she said he'd waited too long, that she was too old. Not long after that he began to feel that he had “topped out” in the chef world, would never hit the ranks of celebrity that would make the long hours and work worthwhile, and he felt he'd burn out if he continued to cook. At the same time, the Culinary's Greystone campus neared completion, a spectacular state-of-the-art facility in a nineteenth-century winery built of volcanic rock in the Napa Valley, for the continuing education of professional cooks. This, he knew, was where he wanted to be. So he began a long-range plan to get there, the first step being to apply to the Hyde Park campus for a job.
Feeling he'd grow bitter if he did not make this career move, he packed his car and left the woman he loved and her son, whom he had all but adopted, and returned east, realizing, he told me, “I had nothing to show for thirteen years of my life.” Not his former wife, nor his current love, only, as is true of many cooks, a long résumé of restaurants scattered from the East Coast to the South Coast to the West Coast. The work of a cook can be
almost medieval in its itinerancy, and this has its repercussions. “A big chunk of me is still back there,” he said.
We drank beer, I ordered a basket of fries because I hadn't eaten dinner, and Pardus explained how and why he came to be where he was. There is no typical chain of events that leads an ordinary human to become a chef, but Pardus's path and personality contained elements similar to many chefs'.
Michael Pardus was born in Wilimantic, Connecticut, in 1957 to an elementary-school teacher and an employee of the local telephone company, and he grew up in Storrs, Connecticut. Most chefs I had met had some sort of formative kitchen experiences with a woman in the family. In Pardus's case, it was his father's mother. Pardus described her as the sort of woman who would bake 140 dozen cookies at Christmastime. “She knew
exactly
how many there were,” he said. She taught him about the care of food. His grandfather, who had cut the grass flanking highways for a living, tended a beautiful garden, and from him Pardus learned the pleasures of fresh produce.
Pardus grew up to be a rebellious teenager not atypical in the mid 1970s. “I looked like Ted Nugent when I was fifteen,” he said, referring to the rock musician who would leap about on top of giant speakers during performances, brown frizzy hair trailing like a banner behind him. He took a job as a dishwasher at an old-age home to support his skiing habit and found that he got along in kitchens.
Michael Pardus hated high school and avoided it whenever possible. During his junior year he took courses at a branch of the University of Connecticut and managed to accrue enough credits to satisfy his high school's graduation requirements. Thus, on the day when his fellow classmates were beginning their senior year of high school, Pardus filled his backpack, actually watched his school bus pass by, then said, “Hey, Mom. I'm going to Boston. I'll see ya later.”
He hitchhiked there, he told me, found a nineteen-dollar-per-week room with a hot plate and a kettle-washer job at Massachusetts General Hospital. He still felt an affinity for kitchens. “It wasn't that I had a love of food,” he said. “I had a love of chaos.” He was soon joined in Boston by his girlfriend and another friend. “It was a gas,” he said, but eventually their lives turned rather dissolute and “weird” and as he moved into his twenties, it dawned on him that washing steam kettles was not satisfactory long-term employment. He knew about the Culinary Institute of America, found out how much it cost, and asked his parents for tuition money. His father, who had
already paid for a year at Boston University that his son didn't show up for, said no. But, his father continued, he could have his room back if he wanted; this would allow him to save money. So Pardus returned home and worked till he could apply to cooking school. When the CIA had no openings, he began a small campaign to get in.
“I badgered them,” Pardus recalled. “Every week I'd call them up and say, âThis is Michael Pardus. Do you have any openings?' It got so they expected my call. âNo, Michael, we don't have any openings yet.'” Late in the summer of 1979, when he had just turned twenty-two, the Culinary called to say they had an opening if he could get to Hyde Park in late October. Pardus sold everything he owned, including his stamp collection, and moved to Hyde Park. It became a new home.
“It was the first time in my life where I found a whole lot of people like me,” he said. “They were brothers and sisters. We'd get up and talk about food. We'd go to class and
study
food. We'd eat lunch together and talk about food. At night, we'd drink beer and talk about
food
.”
And yet it wasn't the food he was hooked on. He learned what the chefs taught at the Culinary in the early eighties, classical French cuisine (he never butchered a fish here, never used a fresh herb, he said), wondering to himself,
Why would people eat this?
“But I followed the party line,” he said. Pardus admitted that he was still the sort of person who thought Long John Silver's was a fancy restaurant.
He did his externship at a resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, which among other things offered a gigantic buffet every Saturday that served a thousand people at twenty-five dollars a head. When the cook in charge of the buffet quit, Pardus, in the middle of his cooking-school career, took over. “I'm a sucker for responsibility,” he told me.
Here he learned organization. He had one job: feed one thousand people each Saturday. He would roast forty or fifty prime ribs, forty or fifty pork loins, clean and cook thousands of shrimp. “American continental crap,” he said. “Food was still not the thing. It was a vehicle for being organized.” He loved being organized. His prep list ran pages. Other people wouldn't and couldn't do what he did. And each week, when it was over, Saturday night, it was time to unwind. Or as Pardus put it, “Fifth of gin, fall asleep in some bathtub with a waitress.”
He returned to the CIA and graduated in 1981, taking a job as a line cook in New Orleans at the Royal Sonesta Hotel on Bourbon Street. He
moved quickly to garde manger. It was here that he filled an eight-foot-long ice canoe with ten thousand shrimp and blew out his sciatic nerve.
When Vicky graduated from the Culinary, they married. “You can't do much in New Orleans without a drink in your hand,” they agreed. “Maybe we should think about somewhere else.” Eventually, that place was Dallas, where Vicky had landed a job at the Four Seasons. She helped her husband find work at a new country club called Las Colinas Sports Club (“same old American continental crap,” Pardus said). She arrived in Dallas first and began work; he followed a few days later, arriving at the hotel where Vicky had been put up while searching for a place to live.
That first night, they decided to order room service. Room service was a turning point in his culinary career.
“That first meal blew me away,” he said. “It was room service from the grand dining room. I realized, âThis is food.' It was incredible.” Genuine nouvelle by a good French chef. Not bullshit nouvelle, he said, but the real thing. He had no idea food could
be
like this. It was the early eighties when nouvelle
was
nouvelle, and good, and Pardus was twenty-four years old. “This was really cool stuff. I knew how to make a
mousse
. It never occurred to me to make a mousse with
lobster
and wrap it in a cabbage leaf and steam it and serve it with basil sauce and a beurre blanc. Basically you've got lobster and butter, which is a classical combination, and playing around with it.” He and Vicky sat on the bed staring at the plates, picking apart the food, examining it, scrutinizing it, verbally dismantling it, and putting it back together again. “It was beautiful,” Pardus told me, “and I said to myself, âHey. I know how to make all these components. I never knew they could be put
together
this way.' It never occurred to me that you could
do
this.”