Several people sheepishly called out, “He worked harder?”
“Aww!” Clark said, his voice lowering for once. “Everybody
works
hard. You've got to be smarter, you've got to be prepared, you've got to know the answers. You may learn to cook like I did, by repetition, or you may learn to cook like John Doherty.”
Such pronouncements, for Chef Clark, were as good a segue into scombrotoxin or Dover sole or Atlantic salmon and aquaculture as any. After lecture, the class would pile into the butchery where Chef Clark would lecture some more, here with visual aids, real fish, and would end with a demo on, say, butchering flat and round fish. People would keep turning around looking at the clock. And then he would send them into their weeds and after class would shake his head. Scorn. Disgust. “The
mayhem
that we called
class
today,” he would say. “A hellacious mess.”
Clark was not mean. One student in Clark's class told me that in an earlier kitchen, a student had completely botched the chicken pot pies he'd been assigned to cook. Not only did he not have them ready for service; when they
were
ready, after service, he didn't realize the gravity of his error, and asked the chef where he should hold the now-worthless pot pies so that they would stay warm. The chef said, “I don't know, maybe you should stick them up your ass and hold them there.” That seemed to me rather harsh, though often the pressures of the kitchen brought this out. Clark was not mean like that. He was simply a madman, a cook by nature. Most of the time you didn't know if he was laughing or screaming.
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W
hen I arrived in Clark's kitchen, Day One after a three-day weekend, he didn't know who I was. I always showed up in code, knife bag
in hand and ready to work, but he hadn't been told I'd be observing his class for a few days and he ignored me. Eventually he found out what I was doing in his class, but it wasn't till mid-morning, when the class was engaged in the preservice scramble and I was asking Clark questions in the chilly quiet of the butchery that Clark stopped talking, tilted his head, and squinted at me. He ignored the question I'd asked, said nothing, just studied me.
“Who did you have for Skills?” he asked.
“Chef Pardus,” I said.
He touched his mouth. He said, “I think I heard about you.” He wagged a boney finger at me. “I think I know who you are.” He kept squinting at me, as though we'd met long ago, and he didn't like me even then. “I think I remember.”
I waited.
Then, in a quiet, almost hushed voice, he said, “It was the end of a block. There was a winter storm.”
That was all he said. He nodded slightly.
I said, “That's right.” He just kept squinting at me with his head cocked to the side. So I said, “I made it here.”
He nodded slightly and said softly, “I know.”
Then, in a manner that was not atypical, he paused for what seemed to me an inordinate length of time, then began talking again full steam, telling me I couldn't really understand what he was attempting to do in this class in just a few days; I should spend the entire seven days here. You could spend two years in this kitchen and not learn all there was to know about fish cookery, he said.
Clark, too, had made it the day of the storm. He happened to live in Tivoli, right around the corner from where I lived. And he'd made it when the Blizzard of '96 struck, a storm that had shut down the entire East Coast from D.C. to Boston.
“Why?”
I asked. I didn't need to, of course; I already knew. But I wanted to see his reactionâsurprised disbelief that I would even askâand hear his response.
“Why?” he said. “I don't know
why
! I just did.” The Blizzard of '96 was so severe that the Culinary shut down for the first time ever because of snow. When Clark arrived, along with a dozen or so other faculty, he couldn't believe it. No classes?! He said, “O.K., fuck you. I'm goin' home.” And he got back in his car and drove home to Tivoli.
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T
hese were the formative kitchens and they were formative in that all one's base skills began here. From Intro through Pantry (lunch and breakfast cookery), students manned production kitchens and cooked the meals for the fellow students, staff, and industry professionals taking part in continuing education programs at the school. For seven days students would hustle through Fish Kitchen, and in the middle of the week, on the eighth day, they would move into American Regional Cuisine in the Continuing Education building, which was attached to Roth Hall by an enclosed walkway. They would cook for seven days there; each day featured a different regional cuisine. One day was devoted to the Gulf States (sautéed fillet of grouper, for example, with a mango and avocado salsa, hoppin' John, and grilled scallions), another to Southwestern states (corn tortilla soup, grilled beef fajitas with salsa cru, lime cream, jicama salad, grilled sweet potatoes), and so on.
After a seven-day tour of the United States, they'd hustle back to Roth Hall, past K-8, past Chef Smith's kitchen, to Oriental. Here, for seven days under Chef Shirley Cheng from the town of Chengdu in Sichuan, they would cruise through Asian cuisines, a day in China, a day in Vietnam, a day in Thailand, and so on.
What students learned in Chef Cheng's kitchen was proper stir-fry technique and Asian ingredients. In a basic braise (chicken with mushrooms), the sachet d'épices contained no thyme, peppercorns, parsley, and bay, as it had in Skills, but rather orange skin, cinnamon, Szechuan peppercorns, and star anise. In Skills and in Intro, one julienned a carrot by squaring the whole thing off, cutting thin rectangular planks, then stacking them and cutting sticks, a time-consuming knife cut that left a lot of trim. Chef Cheng squared nothing off. She thinly sliced the carrot on a severe bias so that she had many long thin ovals of carrot; she then fanned them overlapping across the cutting board and simply rocked her knife lengthwise through the slices and in an instant had a pile of julienned carrot. Carrot julienned this way was uneven in length and therefore unacceptable garnish for Chef Smith's chicken broth, but if you wanted a lot of julienne fast with little waste, this was a new method.
Whoever made the chicken stock for the soup that day would begin by stir-frying garlic, ginger, and scallionsâ“GGS,” the Asian mirepoix that began many dishes in this kitchenâbefore dumping the water and chicken
bones into the wok. There was no lazy bubbling in Chef Cheng's kitchen. She instructed the soup station to boil it like mad and skim it often. She said this resulted in richer, creamier stock, faster.
All the dishes reflected basic cooking techniques and food concepts governing Asian cuisine. Most students would never work in an Asian kitchen, unless they spoke the language in that kitchen, so this was likely to be their only opportunity to learn in a kitchen properly outfitted for Asian techniques.
You had to pay attention here. If you weren't careful, you would miss Chef Cheng's boning demo. She could bone a chicken with a cleaver in fourteen seconds. It was all a matter of knowing where the joints were, she said. But even more impressive, Chef Cheng could take a chicken from living to cooked in less than three minutes. This, as Chef Pardus would say, was really wailing.
Upon leaving Chef Cheng's kitchen students would appear downstairs for seven days of Charcuterie, learning basic grinding and preparation of forcemeats for sausages and terrines, as well as brining, curing, and smoking techniques, the results of which were shipped all over the school. After seven days here, they hustled upstairs to Pantry.
These classes were sprints and they took their toll. I bumped into my Skills friends often as they moved through these kitchens and saw, as if through time-lapse photography, that their skin grew increasingly gray and their demeanors haggard. I spotted Dave and Lou, then in American Regional, waiting for the doors of Pantry to open. American Regional with Chef Griffiths was noted for interesting food and high volume. Larry Forgione, who had returned to his alma mater to do a demo in the Danny Kaye Theater and promote a cookbook a few days earlier, stopped by their class to talk with the students. But Dave said he was tired, had stayed up late the night before writing a paper on the cuisine of the American Northwest. “Food, food, food,” he said, “that's all you ever think about.” He looked dizzy.
Lou, who had dropped the kids at his in-laws at six-thirty this morning as usual, to be at IBM for his seven-to-eleven shift, was nervous. He was on veg today, one of the hardest stations because of the volume. He would be prepping kale, turnip, and other tough greensâlike, a
ton
, he saidâand he didn't know how he was supposed to prep them or how to cook them for service. And the zucchiniâthe course guide said grilled but the chef had told him the night before he'd be julienning the squash.
“You'll be sautéing it,” said Erica, also waiting for lunch. “We didn't grill any vegetables.” Erica, who had already gone through American Regional, was in Fish kitchen. Adam had been elected leader of her group when they'd moved to Intro and I asked about him. She scowled and said, “He's getting kinda militant.”
I later bumped into Adam in the quad. He wore a distant, half-there expression, as though he hadn't slept for a few days.
“I'm really burnt out,” he confessed. “I can't wait to get out of here.”
He still commuted to Brooklyn on weekends; this Saturday he would be trailing at Lutèce, hoping Soltner's former restaurant would make a good externship. Lespinasse, his first choice, had turned down his request. He was angry at the Culinary's curriculum. After American Regional and Fish kitchens, there was no sense of urgency. He was presently in Charcuterie, not even a production kitchen. “It should build,” he said. “You should be in the restaurants before extern.”
Lola appeared looking exhausted, ill, on the verge of tipping over right there. “I gotta question,” she said. “Did you think about duck at all?”
“Yeah, we're gonna dry-cure it,” he told her. “A nice piece of duck, the last thing I wanna do is soak it in
brine
.” Adam then elaborated on the sauce, hoping he could work currants into it, along with pistachios for some color.
Lola was visibly relieved that Adam had done the homework. She put a hand to her chest and said, “I got in my car and I thought, âOh my God.'”
I asked about Erica.
“Erica's doing well,” Adam said. “She's got an awesome externâthe Trellis.”
Lola and Travis, living together in Kingston now, remained a solid couple. Adam, she, and I talked a few moments longer; I discussed with Adam duck confit and a related question about whether it would be possible to make a puff pastry with clarified duck fat instead of butter. Lola's eyes glazed. People were tired. The overload of incoming data was understandable. A lifetime of study and practice would not result in a comprehensive mastery of gastronomy; the administrators and chef-instructors knew this and it merely increased their determination to get it done in a matter of months. And in all but Adam, food passions seemed to be ebbing.
T
he kitchen that cranks out the food at the Culinary is Pantry. There are two pantry kitchens, downstairs and upstairs, and the upstairs Pantry sits like an anchor in the center of Roth Hall, off the main hallway, just outside the dining chapel. It's a volume kitchen, serving between four and five hundred meals a day at breakfast and lunch. At twelve-forty-five P.M. Pantry doors open and students, identical in their white jackets, checked pants, and black shoes, and extending all the way back to the hospitality office, pour through; the sous chef, or aboyeur, stands at the door with a clipboard marking down orders and simultaneously calling them out: “Pick up one deli! Pick up one hot plate, pick up two, pick up three hot plates! Pick up one veg! Pick up one hot plate, pick up one deli! Pick up one, pick up two pastas! Pick up a pasta! Pick up a pasta!” There are no commands of order or fire. This is lunch cookery: there's a lot of it,
fast
âbetween 200 and 250 meals before the doors close forty-five minutes later, the bulk of the meals having been served in the first twenty minutes.
I'd stuffed my notebook onto a shelf of a rolling steel cart earlier in the day to julienne two pounds of snow peas and, eventually, to help plate the pasta: lo mein noodles seasoned with sesame oil, cilantro, and black sesame seeds, encircling a bed of sautéed vegetablesâjulienned peppers, carrots, shiitakes, leeks, water chestnuts, celery, bamboo shoots, seasoned with GGS, tamari, chicken stock, and rice vinegarâwhich formed the bed for two marinated broiled shrimp skewered in a yin-yang design. James faced
the stove, sautéing in batches of ten and broiling shrimp; K.C. and I plated; the orders fell like hail and the chef, Katherine Shepard, jumped in with a wet cloth to wipe our plates and slide them onto the steel counter where they were whisked away by a steady stream of students. Ours were tasty, good-looking plates. The noodles had been cooked the day before, but everything else had been prepped that morning and cooked at service. In a half hour we'd served fifty plates; amid the clatter a “no more pasta” and “eighty-six the pasta” sounded out; the sous chef wiped the item off the menu board and we cleaned the station.
There had been a single pause in the frenzy of service when the chef left us upon seeing a woman dressed in civilian clothes who had returned with a plate and a sour expression. Chef Shepard, short and plump, apologized profusely, turned toward the kitchen, held the plate at face level, and removed a hair from the potato salad. This was not good. Pinky aloft, Chef Shepard lifted the hair to the light and said, “The worst part is it looks like
mine
,” she said to us. “I'm the only one with long red hair.” Then, pleadingly, “And, I'm in
code
, too.”
Fifteen minutes later, the kitchen closed, having served more than two hundred plates. Reuben sandwiches with ill-fated potato salad; oil-brushed pita stuffed with Greek salad; meatloaf with a spicy ketchup gravy, garlic smashed potatoes, peas and carrots; a plate of fruit and cheeses; and the yin-yang shrimp. Pantry students picked up what they'd ordered for family meal, returned by two o'clock, cleaned and prepped for tomorrow's menuâpan bagnat with pasta salad, chef salad with fresh bread sticks, chickenfried steak with a spicy onion-milk gravy, sautéed greens and garlic cheese grits; a Middle Easternâtasting plate; and pasta fagioli with bruschetta.
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“S
ome people,” Chef Shepard said, “even within the industry, feel that the breakfast line and the lunch line are where you put people who aren't worthy yet of doing dinner.
“It's critical for a chef to think fast for lunch foods,” she continued, “to actually be able to manufacture foods at that speed because you don't have the cushion of, âWell, they're going to have aps, they're going to have soup.' They want to be in and out, they want it on the table ten minutes after they put the order in. So that's why, when somebody says âThat's beneath me' or âA real chef wouldn't cook like that,' well, I don't know that that's true. I think a chef has to be able to cook like that, in that environment.”
We'd taken a small round table in the dining hall, mainly empty since Pantry ate well after everyone else had been served. She removed her toque and let her straight bright hair fall. Behind her wire-rimmed glasses were eyes as blue as her hair was red. She had brought half a sandwich. “I'm on a never-ending diet,” she explained.
I was spending a few days in her class, working as much as I could and talking to the students. Half of this group had left Chef Pardus's Skills kitchen as my group had arrived (my group presently hustled through Fish and American Regional), and they were an unusually diverse batch. David had cooked on a kibbutz in Israel, Krista was a twenty-nine-year-old former human rights worker who had received a bachelor's from the University of Washington in anthropology; she'd always been pushed into cerebral areas, she said, and figured it was now or never to follow her passion for cooking; she'd worked in restaurants all through school and had come here because she wanted a broad, solid base fast. Jason had been, at his peak, the nation's eleventh-ranked hammer thrower. And Darren Sample, twenty-four, had spent the past four years as a cook on the USS
Michigan
, a trident nuclear submarine. He worked sixteen hours feeding four meals a day to one hundred fifty people. Noise was such a consideration under water that if he dropped a pot, he'd force the ship to change course and descend to a new thermal level. You could tell by the look in his eyes that this guy was not easily fazed. He was a good cook and a qualified torpedo man. Having been deprived of weather for four years, he now loved all weather, any kind; you name it, he loved it. The night before, there had been a cold rainstorm. Darren used the opportunity to go jogging.
He'd been sent to the Culinary while still in the Navy for a two-week continuing education course. The Navy didn't care much about teaching cooking and Darren learned as he went along; when he left the Culinary after the course he knew he had to come back: “I came here,” he remembered, “and anytime I asked why, everyone had an answer.”
Chef Shepard knew this was a solid group, and there were plenty of them to get all the work done. Occasionally a group of ten would arrive, not the usual seventeen or eighteen, to cook the same amount of food. Small groups were interesting, she said: “They either come together or they're a complete abomination.” And her students seemed to like her and the kitchen. This was not always the case. For years, some chefs and students looked at Pantry as though it were Siberia.
Timothy Rodgers, a 1981 CIA graduate and now team leader for various
kitchens including Pantry, said, “I'm on an individual campaign to change âPantry' to âLunch Cookery' and âBreakfast Cookery.'” He, too, lamented the fact that Lunch Cookery was looked down upon. Why should the time of a meal period determine its importance, he wondered, noting that it's one of the biggest selling meal periods? (Fifteen billion dinners are sold annually, according to the National Restaurant Association, considerably fewer than the twenty-six billion lunches sold each year.) The business is huge. “If I were going to do a book right now, it would be soups, sandwiches, and salads,” he said. But until a couple years ago, he noted, Pantry was “a lost area” usually staffed by chefs on their way to retirement or by a chef who was more “ethereal” than was desired of a chef at this school. Then James Maraldo, now teaching in the Catarina de Medici kitchen, arrived in Pantry and introduced food that Rodgers described as “atypical.” Rodgers jumped to reign Maraldo in, but when he saw what Maraldo was doing, he found the food intriguing and realized that Pantry chefs needed a lot more leeway.
Maraldo's dishes had a decided Italian bent. When Jean-Luc Kieffer was brought in, he added new recipes with French elements. Chef Shepard, a former executive chef at the Beekman Arms in Rhinebeck, kept Lunch Pantry rooted in the Hudson Valley. And soon, Eve Felder, a former Chez Panisse chef, would introduce Californian overtones and stress fresh unusual heirloom ingredients. Suddenly, Pantry was an exciting place to cook.
Part of what made Lunch Cookery distinct from other forms, Rodgers said, was the use of ordinary products; you couldn't sell lunch the way you could dinner. Also, it resembled banquet cooking given the high volume over a short time, requiring thought and organization as far as determining what can be cooked in advance and how farâ“There are good ways and there are negligent ways,” Rodgers said. Because of these differences, he added, “You learn how to think differently.”
Not only did Pantry produce some of the most interesting food in the school, the food seemed almost contrary to all the kitchens that preceded it. No more sautéed veal with sauce champignon and sautéed spinach. This was American bistro food that included a cross-cultural range of ingredients and methods. Students arrived to find on Day One's menu herb focaccia with Tuscan sausage, mixed greens and a balsamic vinaigrette, and vegetable chili with a cheese quesadilla and cilantro-lime rice. The students, Chef Shepard said, arrive thinking, “Finally, here is food I can
sell
.”
Classics were not ignored. Salad niçoise remains popular throughout the country despite its age and in this kitchen it fulfilled the Day Seven
composed-salad requirement. Every day there must be a composed saladâa main item, greens, dressing, and garnish. Instead of niçoise it might be a buffalo-wing salad with macaroni in a dill dressing. There was always a deli plateâtypically a sandwich. On Day Four, it was a cheeseburger with avocado, tomato, red onion with an herbed mayo-mustard, and Yukon golds cut to matchsticks and deep-fried. On Day Seven it was the ever-popular CIA Club. Knowing how to make a decent sandwich was important.
The Reuben, a traditional grilled cheese sandwich, was a good example. “We all used to do it however we ever made Reubensâthere was no science to it,” Shepard said. “One day we really did get a memo from the president that said, âIn order to produce a Reuben sandwich that is not soggy, this is the correct procedure.' That drawing in the course guide now reflects what has been determined by the president of this school, and all the other master chefs he powwows with, to be the way to make a Reuben that doesn't get soggy. It's all about putting the cheese in the right position so that the meat and the sauerkraut aren't in touch with the bread, so the cheese seals the bread off. How many people in life make Reubens that taste just fine without having this diagram?” She shrugged. “But the reason those diagrams are there is to produce a consistently better-quality product.”
The CIA club was another example of the importance of sandwich-making.
“There has to be a club because in the world of sandwich-making,” Chef Shepard said, “you have to learn how to make double-decker sandwiches.”
I asked her what distinguished the CIA club from your run-of-the-mill club.
She said, “I don't know that there was a decree that came down from upstairs that said, âAnd we shall have our own sandwich. Let it be known as â¦'” The CIA club used a combination of turkey and ham, that was all, but Shepard returned the discussion to technique. “Teaching how to make a club is very important, how to weight it so that the top isn't heavier than the bottom, so that when you cut it, it doesn't fall over; that's why you put the light stuff on top, the lettuce, tomato, and bacon.”
“The CIA club sounds like a piece of cake,” Chef Shepard began her double-decker-sandwich lecture. “It's not. It's a lot of work. Roast the turkey, bone and slice it today. Slice the ham. The recipe says two ounces of turkey and two ounces of ham. It won't work that way. We never get quite enough turkey, so portion out an ounce and a half of turkey and two and a
half ounces of ham. It says slice the ham paper thin. That
means
paper
thin
. You want to pile it, you don't want to fold it. Portion your meat ahead of time. You can get your bacon trayed up and get your mayonnaise done.” Garnish for the plate would be deep-fried root vegetables. “It's a lot of work. Whoever does it, it will take all morning to get them fried in our little baby fryer. We're going to have a meat tub full of chips. We need that many for sixty portions and for all the grazers. If you haven't tasted these, you will find that it's a pleasant experience. If you hate beets, this may totally change your life.”
The chef went to the board and diagrammed the production line for the club: toast, mayo, meat, toast, mayo, lettuce-tomato-bacon, mayo, toast. Sixty slices of toast at each point. Whenever she worked a lunch line, the chef said, the club was what she hated. It took up all your work space. You'd have five other sandwiches to get out and club components cluttered your whole station. The number of parts and volume make it a challenge. When the sandwich was assembled, then came 240 toothpicks.
“This is critical,” she warned. “The most important part. They've got to go straight down through all layers. If they don't go straight down, the knife catches them and pulls the sandwich apart and the toothpick gets cut in half and whoever eats that half will not be a happy camper. The science of doing a club sandwich is really, really important.”
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antry began at nine-thirty A.M. in a classroom on the fourth floor of the east wing near Julia Hill's Culinary Math class and Jay Stein's Product Identification and Food Purchasing class. Students in their whites took seats and opened notebooks. Chef Shepard would first address each stationâdeli, pasta, veg plate, composed salad, and hot plateâto inquire where prep stood and address questions, then move to the following day's menu.