Back at the table, after deadline had come and gone and the kitchen calmed, Adam said, “I'm sorry, Eun-Jung.”
Eun-Jung said, “Yes, yes,” not looking at him.
“I'm sorry I got so mad at you.”
“Yes, yes.”
Adam looked at me with frustration and said, “She doesn't even understand what I'm
saying
.”
“Yes, yes,” she said, “I am
sorry
, Adam.”
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very now and then, despite my own underlying competitiveness with Adam, we would share a moment of sympathy. Fennel big as cabbage had arrived from the storeroom (we would eventually braise it), and its size got us talking about vegetable gardens. I said to Adam, as I could not say to
Erica or Len or Eun-Jung, “Cooking food you have grown is an almost unequaled pleasure.”
Adam nodded immediately. Then he said, “Lettuce. Everyone knows what a good fresh tomato tastes like. Whether you grew it yourself or got it from a market. The freshness holds. But lettuce pulled straight out of the gardenâthere's nothing like it. It is so tasty if you can pull it out of the ground and have it on the table in ten minutes.”
Pardus had picked up on Adam's sensibilities as well. When he lectured on potatoes, the various starch-to-water ratios of baking, chef's and new potatoes, new potatoes having high water content resulting in their creaminess, he noted that new potatoes just dug from the ground and cooked right away were a genuine treat. “Has anyoneâI bet you have, Adamâhas anyone eaten freshly dug new potatoes?” he asked. “Just steamed and with a little butter. It's a really wonderful thing.” I looked back at Adam, who nodded
Sure have
.
And it was Adam who explained to the class during Chef Pardus's lecture on deep frying that you could run a diesel engine on a mixture of equal parts kerosene and Fry-Max, the deep-frying oil used at the school.
Adam was a cook, I began to think, in the very best and most unusual ways. It wasn't a matter of desire alone, or ability, I began to realize, but rather something in one's chemical makeup and psychological wiring that made this so. In my notebooks I wrote down something Adam said that revealed an elemental part of himself. He said, “I can be having a bad day, a
really lousy
day. But as soon as I get into this kitchen I get a boost; it all changes.”
There had been in our group a young guy named Matt from a small coal town in the middle of Pennsylvania. He was the one who had told Pardus on the first day of Skills that he didn't know why he was here. Matt, a friendly, wiry fellow, was always the last to finish. When he broke his consommé raft, he wouldn't do it just once. It would take him forever, it seemed, to emulsify his mayonnaise, even though he whipped it like a madman. Midway through Skills Two, Matt didn't show up for class and the rumor spread that he was moving to Hawaii. The next day I called his room. There was loud music in the background. Yes, he said, it was true.
Matt was simply uncomfortable in a kitchen. The physics didn't come naturally to him.
Adam, on the other hand was apparently more at home in a kitchen than anywhere else. I grew to suspect that some people, maybe most people, who
became good professional cooks didn't
choose
to be that way. They were simply fulfilling something that was in their nature to begin with.
The night of the lamb shanks ended a long week. Adam headed off to Vassar down the road to hear a band called Morphine. Ben and others were off to drink anywhere but Gaffney's, the local CIA watering hole. I headed up icy Route 9 toward Tivoli, wondering about my own chemistry, my own choices.
C
ulinary Skill Development Two rarely veered from the basics. Vegetables, Chef Pardus instructed us, once an afterthought, now contributed nutritional balance to a plate, added flavor, provided color and textural contrasts. “Sort of like a
sauce
, huh,” he said. “It's part of the whole picture now. It's not just a garnish, it's part of the meal.”
We had braised shank to learn the technique of braising, and we had roasted chicken to learn the technique of roasting.
“What is the difference between baking and roasting?” Pardus asked. “Today, roasting is done in an oven. So is baking. What's the difference?” Various answers were shouted out simultaneously.
Adam said, “Essentially, they're the same except they're different products.”
“Essentially the same, just different products?” Pardus said and stopped to consider this. The class nodded, thinking Adam had got it right. “Nope,” Pardus said. “There
is
no difference. It's a semantic difference.”
Adam, peeved, said, “I thought you were talking about bread and meat.”
“There's no difference,” Pardus continued. “We
bake
bread. We
roast
meat. Right?” Pause. “What do you do to a
ham
? You
bake
a ham. So it doesn't always follow.”
And when we learned to braise and sauté, one question seemed to occur to all.
“Now what about searage?” Pardus asked, his back to the range as we circled around him.
“That's what I wanted to know,” Adam said.
Ben said, “To give it color and flavor.”
“You sear meat,” Pardus said, “to give it color and flavor and aroma. All of those things come from caramelization. It does
not
seal in juices. There are people who teach in this school who will tell you that it does. I thought that for a long time. I'm sure most of you thought that for a long time. Sounds good, sure. Seizes up the outside, makes a crust, must seal in the juices.
It doesn't happen that way.
If you don't believe me, read McGee.”
We learned deep poaching and shallow poaching; we learned how to use a court bouillon and how to use a cuisson. We even learned how to boil pasta.
“We're going to fit some pasta into this little routine today,” Pardus called out on Day Nineteen. “Ratio. How do you cook dried pasta? A lot of boiling water, right? The boiling water should be
salted
. It should be salted to the point where it tastes like a seasoned consommé.” This was news to me. I had never tasted the water before I dumped the pasta in. But this is what Pardus wanted us to do. “I've got two pots over here. One is properly seasoned. One tastes like a mouthful of the Atlantic Ocean. You want the water to be salted properly; if it's salted properly you're going to have properly seasoned pasta.” Pardus told us when he was chef at the Swiss Hotel, teaching his cooks to properly season their pasta water was a constant battle. He used to walk down the line saying, “More salt, more salt, more salt, not enough salt, more salt.”
After that class I occasionally added aromatics, such as bay or sage leaves, to my pasta water as well as salt. We poached salmon in a court bouillonâmost commonly, acidulated water seasoned with mirepoix. Escoffier listed salted water as his sixth court bouillon, which he recommended for poaching sea perch and mullet. Why not, then, cook pasta in a similarly seasoned liquid? Why not infuse the pasta with specific flavors that might complement or add to the final dish? I had never given much thought to how my pasta water tasted but now it concerned me, and I would always have a spoonful or two to ensure that was how I wanted the final pasta to taste.
Chef Pardus focused on mind and method. “You cook with your senses,” he said when someone did something stupid. “And one of those senses is
common
sense.”
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B
ut something happened to you in Skills class that was greater than learning how to season pasta water or braise shank. It was more than technique, more than ratios, and more than knowledge. Something was slowly being woven into one's very fiber, something that extended out and into everything one touched. I couldn't name it. I'm not sure it had a name. I could only point to parts of it.
Efficiency: no wasted movement. This idea, this will, bore not only on one's actions in the kitchen; it extended to one's life outside that kitchen. It changed how I packed for a tripâI tried to diminish the number of times I moved from closet to bureau to suitcase just as I learned to minimize my trips to the pot room or dry storage. I didn't make two trips to the hardware store because I forgot something or failed to have foreseen a potential problem. I didn't go from the bedroom to the living room, stop before I got there, and go back to the bedroom because I
forgot
something. And if I did, it made me mad. I solved problems differently. When we awoke one morning with no electricity and therefore no way to run the coffee machine, for instance, I thought immediately to put a pot of water on the grill on the deck out back for coffee. I am certain this wouldn't have occurred to me before Skills, because I had been in identical situations before Skills and didn't think, “No electricity for coffee? I'll just get a fire going out back.” Certainly not at seven A.M. And the coffee had a nice campfire flavor to it, too. With efficiency of action, one also wanted speed, efficiency's ultimate goal. I tried to do everything faster. The faster you workedâin the kitchen, in lifeâthe more you could do. Whoever did the most the best, wonâno matter who you were or what you were doing, even if you were just playing against yourself.
The physical world grew more friendly because we were learning to harness and manipulate it. Look what we could do with heat and water and a steel surface. This created a sense of strength that I had not felt before. Control over propertiesâhot, cold, wet, dryâbecame a metaphor for control over oneself, one's actions and thoughts.
Embedded in this control was a sort of anger and fierceness that I saw move very close to the surface of Adam as I worked beside him every day. This fierceness was necessary for the perfection he sought. You cannot be blasé and achieve perfection. You must be in relentless pursuit of it. You can never stop. If you stop, you lose. We know that the physical world tends
toward disorder and that energy is required to create and maintain order. Perfection was the highest degree of order there was, and if you didn't bring a ferocity to your pursuit of perfection, you simply wouldn't have the energy to finish the job at hand well; you'd be too tired because this was hard work and a lot of it. The work in a kitchen, the perfection, we learned, began with the even roasting of veal bones and a good caramelization of the mirepoix and a long, slow simmerâjust the occasional bubble rising to the surfaceâuntil your roasted veal stock had perfect flavor and body, and then in the color and flavor of your roux, and skimming all the time till your brown sauce felt perfectly smooth on the palate, and skimming again till the demi-glace was rich and free of impurities. That was the beginning and you never let up. Not if you intended to be a good cook. You couldn't
not
do this. It was like driving a car. Once you pulled onto the road, you didn't just sometimes drive and sometimes stop paying attention, or fail to make a turn when you knew in order to reach your destination you had to make that turn; you didn't simply ignore things like red lights because you were too tired or you didn't feel like it or you'd
do
it
later
.
Many potential metaphors orbit what there really aren't words for. I have no doubt that people felt the effects I'm trying to describe in various degrees, and those who did not, or did not like the effect, such as Matt, left the school. Skills differed according to the instructor, whose personality inevitably set the kitchen zeitgeist, but in order to be successful in a Skills kitchen, you had to engage these ineffable forces. Once you did, you couldn't simply turn them on at two o'clock when class started, and turn them off when you left. They became permanent structures in your mind. They became, finally, all of them together, an ethic, and something more: a system of valuesâa morality.
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“O
f course!” Susanne cried, stomping into the kitchen wearing a winter overcoat over her uniform. “Of course. We can't end a block without a winter
storm
watch!” The snow fell heavily, and I had left early to make sure I had plenty of time. Up to ten more inches were expected. The snow was wet, the roads icy. Every block since January had ended with a winter storm. With April three days off, we were all getting fairly tired of winter storms. Susanneâformer Barnard student and advertising marketerâseemed to be having a tougher time of it than most with weather and kitchens. Her face appeared small within a dark orb of loose black
curls; her eyes were large and dark, worthy of a Hirshfeld drawing. She was the sort of person who somehow attracted accidents. She now carried four stitches in her left hand. She had been at home and a knife fell, point down, into and through the meaty flesh between thumb and forefinger. Her husband wasn't home; driving was out of the question, blood gushing as it was, so she had to call 911. When she cut herself in class, it wasn't just a Band-Aid-and-finger-condom nick; it was a cut that forced her to stop work, sit down, and wait out the bleeding, hand in the air, clamping a wad of towels to the wounded digit.
Though the block was ending, the usual kitchen chores such as making stock still needed to be done. The entire school depended on Skills' stocks, and we made them on test days. Susanne, having driven an hour and a half through another winter storm, had stuck a pot in an oven that was also being used to roast veal bones. Midway through class we heard a quick, piercing shriek loud enough to halt everybody. People could hurt themselves badly in a kitchen, so you never ignored such outbursts. The shriek had come from Susanne, who had been burned.
“I don't know!” she said angrily. “Something just spit out at me!” She walked swiftly to the stock-cooling sink and held her right hand, the one without the stitches, beneath cold water.
Pardus, like a private eye hot on a trail, was already squatting at the open oven. “I know exactly what happened,” he said. “One of the joints exploded. It filled with steam and popped. You can see it.” He pointed, and there, in the back, was a bright white cartilaginous veal-bone joint. This knowledge did not seem to comfort Susanne. With the burn apparently growing worse beneath the water, she left for the nurse's office and would soon return, her hand and wrist slathered with cream beneath a gauze bandage.
Later in the day, when production was over, Susanne and Erica compared burns, talked ointment. Erica's entire left arm was bandaged. Veal bones once again had been the culprit, but this time the victim could assign blame. It was David Scott.
“Erica,” I said when I saw her bandages, “what happened?”
She said, “Stupid-ass Dave did it.”
I got slightly different stories from both of them, but what was not in dispute was that Dave was transferring browned veal bones from one really hot pan to another. These bones and scraps have fat on them, so there's a lot of rendered grease in these pans. As Erica helped prod twenty pounds of bones out of the pan Dave was tiltingâsome had stuck to the panâthey all
fell at once and Erica was splashed with boiling oil. Huge deep welts covered her arm; the scars would be permanent. Dave said he had warned Erica away. Erica said that Dave had been careless. Every time I saw Dave after that, I shouted out, “Stupid-ass Dave!” And for a while, everyone started calling him that. Erica would cover her mouth and giggle, teeth clamped. Dave would always chuckle, a good sport, but plead that he'd
warned
Erica to be
careful
.
One tended to believe Dave, of course. Erica was still not a master of efficient action. And sweet as she could be, her mouth remained the foulest in the class. “I take a lot of shit around here,” she would say, with her customary delicacy.
But the next minute she'd disarm you.
“Michael,” she asked me once, just as class was beginning, “am I lovable?”
“Of course you are, Erica,” I said.
She was immediately suspicious of my response and said, “Is
everybody
lovable?”
“Well, uhâ”
“I don't think so. But I think I'm lovable.”
I concurred and she walked off to gather her daily mise en place.
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T
he day of the winter storm would see us all attempting to mince two onions and slice two onions in less than five minutes. This was the knife practical and it didn't sound hard until you realized it took two or three minutes just to
peel
four onions. Strategy was required. The task would be almost impossible unless you halved the onions
before
peeling, then ripped their skins off, not worrying too much about trim, and got cutting. Slice first; then mince like crazy till time ran out.