“Because you're washing your own pots you can, yes,” Smith said. “In a restaurant, I'd be nicer to the dishwasher. Any other questions? O.K., starch!”
Bianca and Travis would be making potato pancakes, potato chips cut into gaufrettes, and basmati rice pilaf. All clear.
Chef Smith asked sauté what can be done to save time on the sauce.
Several people shouted out, “Reduce the cream.”
“Do
crème double
to save time,” Smith said. He wrote it on the board
behind his desk. “Or, if you're from Ohio like me, double cream.” He wrote this, too. “If you're doing two hundred covers a night and you're in charge of twelve burners, you don't have time to spend ten minutes reducing the sauce. With double cream, service comes up like
that
.” He snapped his fingers.
“Does the cream keep as long once you've done that?”
“It keeps better,” Smith said. “More fat, less water. Vegetable entrée!”
Ben asked, “How many peppers should I roast?” He and Adam were on vegetarian entrée and had come up with the idea of a quesadilla pizza, flour tortillas with a smear of goat cheese, roasted garlic, rosemary, and black olives topped with roasted red, yellow, and poblano peppers, and cheese with a sundried- and roasted-tomato sauce.
“You're making sixteen portions? You're using poblanos?” Smith asked.
“Yellow, poblanos, and red.”
“I'd use about three peppers each.”
And after veg entrée, they were off, the kitchen aclatter with activity.
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rica was on veg, a high-volume station making all the vegetable side dishes for every plate. Though she was taught in Skills how to prep asparagus, she called the chef over. “I want to make sure I do it right,” she said. Smith grabbed each end of the asparagus, bent them together, and the asparagus snapped in two. Erica said, “O.K., yeah.”
Chef Smith attended to the broil station, explaining to Melissa how to butcher the strip loin. “At a family restaurant that's selling a strip for twelve-ninety-fiveâwith a vegetable, baked potato, a slice of pecan pie, and coffee for dessertâwe'd leave this on.” He pointed to the gristly fatty tail of the strip steak he'd cut from the loin. “White-tablecloth restaurant, twenty-two-fifty for the same steak, we wouldn't leave this on.” Nor should Melissa; the scraps would go to Greg on braise, who would trim what he could and add it to his beef stew.
Smith returned to Erica's station to show her how he wanted the roasted beets cut. When he tried to slice one, it mashed in his hands. He glared at the paring knife he'd picked up and said, “Whose knife is this?”
“Mine,” said Erica, looking down.
“Go sharpen it,” Smith said. “Don't ever come to class with a knife like that again.” He walked away.
Erica retrieved her steel, gave the paring knife a few desultory swipes. Disheartened, she dug a stone out of her kit and used the time she needed for prep to try to get an edge on her knife, something she had yet to master.
Meanwhile, Bianca overcooked the potatoes. She showed Chef Smith. He could tell by looking, shook his head, and said, “Will everyone now stop what they're doing and take a few minutes to tourner three new potatoes? Use the largest ones you can find. Do a good job with them.” And everyone did, immediately.
Smith stopped by Erica's station again. She had a potato in her hands. He took her knife, slid it through a potato. He felt the blade. Then he ran a finger along the potato. He sliced the potato again and felt the potato. He put the knife on her board and said, “Tomorrow, I want this sharp. This is not sharp. Feel how rough this is.” He offered the freshly cut side of the potato to Erica. “It should be smooth as glass.”
Smith walked away, glanced at the clock, which read seven minutes after five. “In eight minutes, I want this set for service,” he said, slapping the steam table.
The sous chef hustled the steam table into place, plugged it in, retrieved the hotel pans. He called out, “It's five-fifteen. Everything should be set for service.”
“We are late!” Smith shouted. “Get that line set up!”
And so it went until three minutes after six, when the kitchen quieted and everyone readied their stations to start cooking. Soon they were off.
“Fire two broils!”
“Firing two broils!”
“Fire two sautés.”
“Firing two sautés.”
“Fire two roasts!”
“Firing two roasts!”
Smith tasted vegetables as they were cooked or reheated to check doneness and seasoning. He watched for errors in plating and sent them back. Otherwise he stood beside the sous chef like a marine, his expression one of concrete, eyes bloodshot and narrow in his face.
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fter service, the class had a half hour to eat, then return to the kitchen to clean before lecture. Lecture began with an evaluation of the day's work and product. “The end result was good but the way we got there
wasn't,” Chef Smith said. “I don't think it was the worst day. The plates
looked
wonderful. What's disappointing is the types of mistakes that were made, methods you learned at the beginning. The energy wasn't positive; it wasn't negative but it wasn't positive and focused as it should be.”
Then he moved into specifics, beginning with sauce fine herbs. “The sauce was a little thick and pasty. That means it wasn't skimmed”âMelissa tried to interject in her own defense, but Smith simply raised his voiceâ“and that started with the
stock
. If you've got a perfect stock, you can make a perfect sauce. If you've got a mediocre stock the
best
sauce you can make is a mediocre sauce. Skimming is the key to a good brown sauce, and finally to a good derivative.” Smith paused. “You know how with wine the flavor stays in your mouth? With sauce you don't
want
hang time. You want it to dance around in your mouth.” There had been no dancing of sauce fine herbs today, even after Smith tried to hop it up a little with some rice wine vinegar.
“Culinary fundamentals is what it's all about,” he said. “Everything else is fluff. These fundamentals will carry you through your entire culinary career. Searing your meat, cooking your vegetable to the right amount of doneness. It's the fundamentals at every level.”
On Route 9G between Hyde Park and Tivoli stood a white house, by all appearances your basic ersatz postwar colonial/ranch-style house with a separate garage in back and, usually, a car or two in the driveway. What caught my eye, every time I drove to the Culinary and every time I returned, was a large teepee pitched on the lawn beside the house. It appeared to be made of some sort of shiny blue synthetic material, was, I would guess, twelve feet high, and would accommodate one person comfortably. A folding metal chair was visible through the entrance. I could not pass this house without thinking about Chef Smith, often wondering if this was where he lived and if, on particularly cold February nights, he would gather his battery-operated light, CD player, water bottles, really good sleeping bag, and make a night of it.
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A
genuine madman ran Fish Kitchen.
His name was Corky Clark, he'd served in Vietnam, wore a U.S. navy tattoo where most people had watches, and looked ten years older than his forty-nine years. He'd graduated from the Culinary in 1971. “We didn't have to know why something happened,” Chef Clark said, recalling the
Culinary Institute of America at its initial location in New Haven, Connecticut. “They'd say cook this and we'd cook it. We did what we were told.” He'd been a teacher here thirteen years and he'd been in Fish Kitchen for eight years, near as he could figure. His breath smelled of wintergreen tobacco, and a small wad peaked over the top of his lower lip when he talked. His hair was white and very short and he wore a stretchable chef's hat that hugged his round forehead and included a top, perhaps to keep the heat in. He spent much of his day behind the kitchen in the fish butchering room, which was kept at 45 degrees. Corky Clark had a scratchy voice and when he got excited, which was every day from seven A.M. through service at eleven-thirty, his voice would reach octaves that were virtual squeaks. And he rarely stopped moving, darting about the kitchen, first to broil, then to deep-fry, then to poach, grabbing a handful of toasted almonds and popping them into his mouth, dashing back to the phone, then to the computer. His main function as a chef-instructor was twofold: one, teach students how to identify, purchase, butcher, and cook fish, and two, make this as difficult as the students could possibly bear for seven days.
Whereas Skills lasted twenty-eight days and Intro lasted fourteen, the next three blocks would be halved. Every seven days you'd find yourself in a new kitchen with a new chef who made new demands within the framework of a new cuisineâAmerican Regional and Fish, Oriental and Charcuterie, Breakfast Cookery, and Lunch Cookeryâall but Charcuterie were production kitchens meant to produce the majority of the four thousand meals the Culinary Institute served each day. This was by no means a staggering figure. The twelve-hundred-room Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort in Atlantic City, for instance, might do as many as twenty thousand meals a day. But here, each kitchen was completely restaffed every seven days. And all of the food was high-end, or at least attempted to be. Day One work for Corky Clark's Fish Kitchen included broiled swordfish with anchovy butter, trout almondine, and poached salmon with hollandaise sauce. Most residential colleges contracted a food service company to feed the students. Here food was a by-product of the education.
Clark's kitchen did fewer covers than other kitchens, about forty, because half the class spent the day butchering fish. If you were one of the day's butchers, you might cut, say, twenty whitefish fillets for sauté and fabricate twenty-five pounds of bluefish. You would do well to wear your long underwear. The walk-in beyond the 45-degree butchery was kept at 32
degrees. Forty thousand dollars' worth of fish moved through this kitchen each month; it acted as a sort of in-house purveyor to all the other kitchens at the Culinary.
But as in every kitchen, it was the chef who set the tone for both the mood and the food, and the tone Chef Clark mainly set was one of panic. He seemed to thrive on it. The kitchen would open for students at six-thirty A.M.; the fellow, Clark's assistant, would be there at six. (The four restaurants and Fish Kitchen hired fellows, graduates who wanted to stay on at the school to work for six months.) Clark didn't get there till seven but if you intended to finish your mise en place by service, you got there at six-thirty. This would give you approximately forty-five minutes to begin your work; if any of your products took a long timeâif you were on soup and needed to cook out a velouté for the fish chowder, for instance, you'd better have that cooking before Clark began lecture. And you'd better get as much prep done as well because Clark wouldn't let you get back to work till nearly nine, giving you two hours before service.
“If you need an hour and a half to do something, he'll give you an hour,” one of Clark's students said. “He puts you in the weeds on purpose, but he's also there with you.” Clark loved weeds.
During lecture, you could see the worry creeping up on students' faces. People would nervously eye the clock as Clark rambled, pontificating and questioning. Sometimes the questions were practical, sometimes philosophical.
“Is it ever O.K. to lower your standards?” He repeated the question and waited. “Compromising is like telling a lie. It gets easier and easier. Each compromise you make,
that
becomes your standard.”
“Why is lemon traditionally served with fried fish?” he asked a few minutes later.
Someone answered, “To cut the fat?”
Clark smiled and shook his head. He issued a disgusted chuckle. Someone always said that. And he could have told you that that guy in the back row, the one with about as much sense as a
goose
, he was going to be the one. He shook his head some more, chuckling. “Fried fish. This thing is
swimming
in fat!” Tall lanky Clark was squeaking like a mouse. “It's
served
with a fat-based sauce! A little lemon wedge is not going to cut the fat! We
like
the fat!”
In a calmer moment, he said, “Quality is a journey, not a destination. I
used to think that was corny, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense ⦠. You're never gonna get good enough, you're never gonna know enough, you're never gonna be fast enough.”
He paced the class, crossed his arms, leaned on the steel table. Out of the blue he asked for the definition of escalope. No one answered or even tried. He didn't answer the question for them, just shook his head. “What distinguishes a bisque?” he asked. He received nothing but dead, seven A.M. stares. “Stop torturing me!” he cried.
“You've got to know these things,” he said. “You've got to be smarter. How did John Doherty get the position of executive chef at the Waldorf at age twenty-eight?”