Instead, I had to learn from Coppedge by intuiting his urgency, an urgency in his tone rather than expression or movement, an urgency that made me pay attention. Chef Coppedge would be loping, no hurry, toward his desk; he would stagger that lope for an instant as his eyes looked at the air. Then, resuming the long slow stride, he would call out, “You're going to be using ice water today. Twenty-five percent of your water you will weigh as ice.” Later that hot day, he had a student throw a bowlful of ice directly into a tub of dough to try to keep it cool.
Coppedge brought books for the students to peruseâone had time to read in a bakeshop. He seemed to like a new one just out, Nancy Silverton's
Breads of La Brea Bakery
; it was the best on theory, he said. But he was also vaguely dismissive of books.
He sat and, as we perused, he said, “You've got to experience bread. You can't say, âI tried her recipe and it didn't work.' To understand bread, you've really got to hang out with a baker for three to six months.”
I recalled Pardus's remark that the difference between baking and cooking was purely semantic. But here I realized that cooking and baking were two different processes entirely, as distinct as Eastern and Western philosophies. In baking, there were so many things you had to be able to see that weren't visibleâmoisture in the air, yeast, the components of flour. You never heard a cook complaining about how humid it was in the kitchen. If a consommé wasn't clear, you could
fix
it by making a new clarification, this time with more acid and protein. Baked stuff was harder to fix. The pressure in baking was all beneath the surface, underground, within the crust, and would remain there until you hit the thermal death point. If the pressure
ever became visible, it was too late. If you scaled your dough right, you were fine, but if something was out of balance, what you had on your hands was a disaster because there was not time to mix, ferment, scale, rest, shape, proof, and bake more. The pressure here came from within and, in a bakeshop as in bread, the secret was to create and maintain that pressure.
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y friend Jason Dante from West MON-roe, Loosiana, had been a lively partner in bread baking, as I sneezed away and gouged my knuckles into my liquid eyes. As we rebuilt the rye starter, he'd look at me and say, “Man, I dig this fermentin' shit.” He liked all things fermented. As a teenager he and a buddy made moonshine (they never drank it, fearing they'd made something lethal). In his room at the Culinary, Dante had fermented cabbage into sauerkraut. Bread baking was his favorite class, he said. All week he'd been bugging the chef to let us do a chipotle pepper bread. On Day Six, the chef, perhaps from fatigue, relented and ordered four cans of chipotles packed in adobe sauce, twelve poblanos, and several heads of garlic, and told us to go to it.
As we roasted the poblanos and garlic in the deck ovens, we discussed what kind of bread we were in fact trying to make. Jason, unsure of himself, suggested sourdough. I reminded him that the frito diabloâwith the pine nuts, red pepper flakes, and raisinsâhad been done with a lean dough and suggested we stick with that. Chef Coppedge, ambling by, stopped to listen to our uninformed conversation. “Poblanos and chipotles,” he said. “Southwestern, isn't it?”
“I was thinking about adding corn,” Dante offered vaguely.
Chef Coppedge nodded and said, “I'd add some cornmeal, soaked. Make like a porridge.”
“You mean ⦠,” Dante said, narrowing his eyes.
“I'm stepping in here now,” the chef said.
“Oh, no, Chef!” Dante exclaimed, as if being taken out of the game.
“I'm stepping in here,” he continued. “Use twenty-five percent cornmeal, cooked in equal parts water. You're gonna make a porridge. Add it to the basic lean dough.” He leaned over our course guide opened to the lean dough grid and pointed to the smallest quantity resulting in ten pounds of dough. “One and a half times this,” he said and ambled off.
We cooked the cornmeal, peeled, seeded, and chopped the poblanos, and Dante took to fine-chopping the chipotles. He lifted one from the can
and said, “These look like little dried turds. They
do
.” He saved the adobe sauce to add to the dough as it was mixing. He licked the top of the can before throwing it away.
Once you had the basic lean dough, and understood the texture of the dough you neededâif you could stretch it till it was nearly translucent, you could actually see the gluten pattern, the web in the doughâthen you could flavor it with just about anything. The chef, while a purist as far as method was concerned, did not think ill of flavored breads, so long as the flavors didn't overpower the fermented flavor of the bread itself. Coppedge noted that New York City, for instance, was killer competitive, and artisan bakers had to have some way of distinguishing their bread from another baker's bread. In America, you could not distinguish yourself with a plain baguette, even if your baguettes happened to be ethereal.
Our chipotle-poblano bread was indeed distinctive. We had added the right amount of chipotles and adobe sauce for good smoky heat, the roasted poblanos speckled the dough with their flavor, the cornmeal came through robustly; we had dusted it with cornmeal to impart some rustic grittiness.
I stayed with Coppedge to bake the last loaves of it while Dante went to lunch. The chef examined the finished loaves, which we'd shaped into ciabatta and foccacia. He noted it was a little flat and had overproofed just a little; also, he said it smelled just a tad heavy on the salt, which Dante had already told me he'd gone heavy on. But Chef Coppedge admired it nonetheless. “I like what you got here,” he said. “I may send some of this down to the Bounty as a test. If they like it ⦔ He shrugged.
When I told Dante Chef Coppedge would be sending our bread to the Culinary's best restaurant, Dante whooped and gave me a high five.
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C
hef Coppedge would release various teams to lunch depending on when their bread was finished. This meant a staggered departure and return, but Coppedge always arranged it so that he would have fifteen or twenty minutes alone in his bakeshop. Sometimes, he would have a bite to eat at his desk. Sometimes he would lean against his desk, arms folded, and stare at the bread baking perfectly in his hearthstone deck oven.
A bakeshop was a different kind of place. A white patina seemed to cover everything, softening the room, making it almost dreamlike. It was gentle here. Cool. Calm.
Poof,
flour into a mixer.
Puff,
the croissants rise.
Shhh,
the dough is resting. And Coppedge was a baker. You could see it in his stride, in the way he thought, in the stories he told.
He always had a loaf or two of sourdough into which he had incorporated sauerkraut and chunks of red onion. This was a regularly featured bread at the Culinary because of President Metz. About three years ago, Coppedge told me, Metz had gotten crazy for bread. One day, the president's secretary summoned Chef Coppedge to Mr. Metz's office on the second floor of Roth Hall. When Coppedge arrived, the secretary handed him a piece of sourdough bread from a restaurant in San Francisco. Mr. Metz wanted to know, the secretary said, if Chef Coppedge could re-create it. Coppedge said the president now eats about a half a loaf of sauerkraut-and-onion bread each day: “He likes his dough really sour.” Then, in a manner reflecting a dichotomy perhaps common among bakers that balanced extreme humility with extreme hubris, Coppedge added, “It's a matter of educating him.”
This sort of talk about the president could only have come from a baker. Coppedge could say this because he was a baker and Mr. Metz was a cook. Bakers and cooks were two different creatures entirely.
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pon leaving Baking one would enter the more refined Patisserie, an even colder kitchen. Much of the work was done on chilly granite. Here students learned how to make vanilla sauce and ganache, how to temper chocolate, bloom sheets of gelatin, make linzertortes, marzipan roses, and pastry cream. They learned how to cut and roll parchment into a tight cone for fine-line decoration on their petit fours, designs they practiced nightly on cardboard cutouts. After these six weeks of Baking and Patisserie, they hung up their whites for six weeks of lecture and book work for the wines-and-menus chunk of the curriculum.
For these students, it felt odd to be out of the kitchen for so long, but those who intended to earn their bachelor's degree would spend two years out of the kitchen.
I'd had a chance to sit in on several bachelor's classes and to enjoy the polished hardwood floors and muted carpeted bachelor's classrooms on the third floor of Roth Hall's west wing. Bachelor's students dressed in street clothes, though they were older and neater than your average college students. Bachelor's candidates, who had gone through the associate degree here, paid about twenty-five thousand dollars for seventeen months of study
and a six-week food-and-wine tour of California. The program, which began in August of 1994, had a capacity of 250 students and had yet to live up to the Culinary's expectations regarding enrollment. By the end of fiscal 1996 it had admitted a total of 225 students and graduated 106 students. The numbers were increasing, though, as many incoming students now arrived intending from the outset to spend four years here.
The emphasis in the bachelor's program was on food service, unlike other schools geared more generally toward hospitality and management. In addition to classes such as “Accounting and Budget Management” and “Marketing and Promoting Food,” there were also foreign-language requirements, English composition, and other general liberal arts courses. It was almost disorienting to find oneself in a classroom in the Culinary Institute of America, listening to an intricate lecture on Japan's rise as an economic power. Krishnendu Ray, the instructor of the class called Asian Culture, was a deft lecturer; he could, in the middle of a class on his native India, posit the notion that all religion was an attempt to control women's fertility and man's jealousy of that fertility, be convincing about it, then return the focus to Western stereotypes of Indian society. One felt far from the madness of Fish kitchen and burnt root vegetables here.
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fter students in the associate's program had passed Menus and Facilities Planning, Management of Wines and Spirits, and Restaurant Law, they once more donned whites for International Cookery, Advanced Culinary Principles, and Classical Banquet Cuisine before moving into the final nary Principles, and Classical Banquet Cuisine before moving into the final four blocks of the CIA curriculum, restaurant row. Here, students were playing for real; these were public restaurants, and if you called for a reservation at any one of them, you were likely to be told that there was nothing available for at least two weeks.
These restaurants were the true measure of what the Culinary Institute of America could accomplish in as little as a year and a half. They were reviewed in newspapers and magazines, were well regarded, and often displayed awards and citations they'd won. The most remarkable thing about these restaurants, though, was not that they were good restaurants but that they changed staff every seven days. Every seven days, the entire staff of the restaurant would depart, and eighteen or so new waiters and eighteen or so new cooks would arrive to begin work for the first day.
T
he bright warm day permitted the preâDay One meeting to be held on the terrace of St. Andrew's Cafe around glass tables shaded by white-and-green-striped sun umbrellas. Craig Edwards, a tall, natty man with an immaculate smile and a mischievous lift of his black eyebrows, was in the final stage of his front-of-the-house fellowship under table service instructor Philip Papineau. The new class, arriving piecemeal in green aprons, had finished Introduction to Table Service, waiting on their fellow students for the past seven days in Alumni Hall, the dining chapel. Craig welcomed everyone and ran through dress requirements, homework assignments, and general timing. I was the only one in whitesâfinishing up Patisserieâbut a stranger in the group was commonplace; students regularly made up classes or dropped behind into a new group because of illness or failure.
“You're actually going to be waiting on humans, live people,” Craig began. This, he said, would be different from anything we had done so far at the Culinary. “Shoes,” he continued. “You can wear your skid busters, but make sure there's no food on them. Wear your chef's jackets to class; they'll keep your apron clean. Please wear T-shirts; it's starting to get hot and they absorb moisture, O.K.?” He asked that the maître d' of the day dress conservatively; bar people were to dress for regular service. Black pants, of courseâeither CIA-issued polyester or black trousers of your own, but please, no cotton Dockers, which tend to fade, unless you planned to dry-clean them. A sign-in sheet would be in the foyer and served as the
attendance sheet. Day One began at six-thirty, Day Two through Day Seven began at seven-forty-five. Setup till eight-thirty, lecture ended when family meal came up at ten-thirty, final inspection at eleven-twenty, and the restaurant, St. Andrew's Cafe, opened for business at eleven-thirty. We must learn the buzzwords he'd handed outâshorthand terms for all menu itemsâbefore we arrived for Day One.
“You're free to smoke,” he said, “but please do it on your own time, and do it in the back entrance. We have customers going through here.” He pointed to the entrance doors. This was important information; nonsmoking students at the Culinary were the exception, or so it would seem given a glance at the quad. “If you do smoke, please wash your hands and use a breath mint afterward. Mr. Papineau is very serious about this. If he smells it, he will instruct you to do something about it.”
Craig, his toothpaste-advertisement smile shining brightly, had repeated this information exactly once every seven days since his graduation nearly half a year ago.
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n preparation for St. Andrew's Cafe, I had taken my wife and daughter to the restaurant for lunch to sample the fare and get a feel for the place as an anonymous customer. St. Andrew's Cafe, the only restaurant with a building of its own (the General Foods Nutrition Center was its proper name), formed one side of the quad where, in clement weather, hoards of uniformed students hung out before class or inhaled after-meal cigarettes. One entered into a vestibule that contained a large maître d's desk where menus and the reservations list were kept; beside this homey item was a large glass window looking into the kitchen where students sautéed and grilled and the chef or his fellow called orders into a microphone.
We were greeted by Philip Papineau, a tall dapper man with a smooth dark Mediterranean complexion. His manner was formal but at ease. No, he said, reiterating what he'd told me when I'd made the reservation, an eleven-month-old was not a problem at all, and he showed us to our table, the student maître d' being engaged in a similar activity across the room.
St. Andrew's dining room reminded me of a large sunroom where much bridge playing might be done from the comfort of its bentwood-and-stretched-leather chairs. In warm weather, French doors opened onto the terrace, separated from the quad by a low brick wall. The facing wall, mostly window, allowed plenty of natural light to play upon the rich blue
carpet and daily-polished silverware. The bar was tucked back against the observation kitchen and faced a large fireplace and oak mantle on the far side of the room.
After the smoothness of Mr. Papineau, our waiter seemed Cro-Magnon. He welcomed us to St. Andrew's Cafe, nodding slowly, as if trying to sell us on the restaurant we'd already chosen. He asked if we'd like anything to drink. I said we'd be having a bottle of wine with lunch and would order that in a moment. Our waiter nodded, holding a steady pen to his waiter's pad. I had ample time to notice his lips, which curled out to expose his broad teeth. He kept nodding and staring at me, pen still perched on the pad. At about the time I considered saying, “I'll need a
moment
,
thanks,
” he raised his eyebrows, gave me a slight smile, and continued his slow nodding. Then, in the manner of a hulky wrestler leaving the mat, he walked away and stood in the corner beside another waiter, with his hands behind his back.
When you dine with an eleven-month-old, you must, upon sitting, reset everything except the tablecloth on the far end while the eleven-month-old throws her body across the now-barren landscape, grasping, inevitably, for the knife as passionately as she would the tree root that would keep her from plummeting off a cliff. No sooner had we accomplished this than another waiter arrived bearing a small plate of Chef Coppedge's delicious bread. He asked if our daughter could have some (our bread would be delivered in a basket along with flavored olive oil and a white-bean spread soon). Favorably impressed, Donna said, “You must have children.” The waiter said, no, he didn't, but another member of the class did and had suggested that we might want bread immediately. We were grateful, indeed.
Here, I would eventually realize, was table service at CIA restaurants in microcosm. It ranged from dull and awkward to gracefully attentive. One received far more attention than one was used to, by more waiters than one typically saw in a room twice the size, and their service was unfailingly solicitous. Some of the students had waited tables before and felt at ease, but most had not and this was a new experience. All of them were paying money to wait tables and were being graded on their conduct. Even at its awkward, Cro-Magnon worst, waiters here projected the attitude that they would do anything within their power, limited though it may be, to answer every question and fulfill every request with alacrity. I have never felt more at ease in a restaurant than at any of the CIA restaurantsâeven the very formal Escoffier Room, and even with our prehistoric friend, who, after a clumsy and labored service, gave us the wrong bill at the end of the meal.
It was the delivery of the bread to our daughter, however, that created and fixed the tone of the afternoon. (Of three breads served, I feel obliged to note, our daughter opted for the sauerkraut-red-onion sourdough, a very sour bread indeed; as this was a matter of education, we did not worry overly.) We had been at St. Andrew's less than two minutes and had already had the attention of four servers; this had both overt and unconscious effects, as I would soon learn from the impressive Mr. Papineau.
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arrived at 6:30, having fastened my bow tie and draped a green apron over my neck. I had grown accustomed to arriving in kitchens but here one arrived into a cool carpeted room with innocuous jazz music piped quietly into the background. Mr. Papineau noted that my apron was tied wrong. I'd tied it like a kitchen apron; one must tie a waiter's apron underneath itself so that the tie does not show. Then Craig told me to put my briefcase in a locker downstairs. No book bags or briefcases of any kind were allowed here: too much valuable silverware lying about.
I knew none of my fellow students, but what struck me from the beginning was how much older they seemed than the students I'd known in the earlier kitchens. They were not literally older, but there was a maturity to them, even to nineteen-year-old Manning Shaffer, a confidence that must be another by-product of the education and of a five-month externship in the field.
It's possible, too, that fast aging is caused by the work. I was continually surprised to discover that the age of this or that chef was not fifty-six but rather thirty-nine. None looked haggardâsimply older, weathered, properly seasoned.
The oldest in our group was a guy named John Marshall, age thirty-seven. He had spent most of his career in front-of-the-house work. His wife worked and before he came to the Culinary, they had a combined income of about ninety thousand dollars. They'd given that income up (John had to sell his sailboat to pay for tuition), and John now had to work full-time in addition to going to school. He lived in Pine Plains, forty-five minutes northeast of the Culinary. In the evenings he was the chef of Mashomack Shooting Preserve where, as John put it, the very rich come to shoot live, prebought birds, and drink Bloody Marys. He would not make it for Day One's six-thirty starting time.
Tables had been pushed aside and chairs lined in two rows in front of the fireplace where Mr. Papineau began Day One.
“My name is Mr. Papineau. You know Craig. Chef Hanyzeski will be in the kitchen this week. Chef De Santis will be back next week when you rotate into the kitchen. Martin is the fellow and Dan is the fellow-in-training.” These were the customary formalities of every class. He took attendance. As every instructor had, he asked that anyone with learning disabilities see him. He ran down the daily routine and times.
“Everybody needs to have: pen, dupe pad, crumber, and wine key,” he said. “I'm being incredibly dumb and repetitive about this because I don't want anyone to misinterpret me.
Everyone
â¦
must
have ⦠these
four
items
every day
.” If he reprimanded anyone, he said, “Don't take it personally. I don't know you well enough for you to take anything personally.”
A word about dress would seem to be unnecessary, but Mr. Papineau brought his own table-side sentiments to the matter: “We all need to be in uniform. I think the school is right on the money with that. It says a lot about you. Customers only have to look skin deep. They don't
need
to look for the
real
you.”
Shortly thereafter, Mr. Papineau gave us our assignments and we were off to do our side work, all of us wearing a chef's jacket over our apron but for Todd Sargent, who dressed in coat and tie and had wrapped his hair into a rope of a ponytail.
I set tables with a knife and fork, bread and butter plate, butter knife and napkin. I wiped down every salt and pepper shaker in the sixty-five seat house; twenty-one matching vases filled with stems of estamaria, a vase for each table, waited in the cooler. Others inventoried the bar, set the coffee station, filled small dishes with bean spread and olive oil, set the side stations, while five or six sat at one large round table polishing silverware. Mr. Papineau showed me how to unfold the tablecloth, touching it as little as possible, so that the crease was facing the right direction, always pointing to seat number one; soon, but not today, we would learn the unusual and clever mechanics of changing a tablecloth in the middle of service without showing the vinyl covering of the table itself.
I asked how this group seemed to him.
“Very even,” he said. He had sent me a confident, no-problem expression, and he had swept a broad hand across the air. “I get to see this every seven days. You're off to a very auspicious start.”
Only when the side work had been completed and we took our seats again for a quiz on buzzwords for every item on the menuâ“orzo” for the pasta with morels, Parma ham and Parmesan, for instance; “open-face” for
Mediterranean roast beef sandwich on focaccia with aïoliâdid it occur to me that we were actually going to be serving
people
today.
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“O
rder-taking is the single biggest issue in the class,” Mr. Papineau Osaid. Into order-taking was condensed everything that table service was aboutâtiming, finesse, self-control, graceful movement, clarity of mind and voiceâand required some understanding of human nature, salesmanship, and hospitality. During the next seven days, we would scrutinize the “competencies”âan oft-used word at the Culinaryâthat went into professional table service. But, as this was Day One and guests were due in a couple hours, Mr. Papineau's first concerns were that we understand the menu. He began with the wines, describing each simply. “The kitchen really tries to moderate fat; the food has a different mouth-feel to it, so the wine list can be tricky.” He ran through the various aperitifs offered as well as the beer.
“Beer is getting to be like wine,” he said. “For those of you who will open your own place, make your beer list as complex, or almost as complex, as your wine list. It's only gonna get bigger and there's a lot of money to be made there. A big area of growth.”
He moved into the food. Spice level was moderate. Soups required a bouillon spoon, which would be kept in the drawers of the side stations; the required silver must find its way to the table before the food. The open-face is served medium rare, the salmon medium unless the customer requests otherwise. The chicken and shrimp entrée was served over linguine with a spicy saffron broth and therefore required a broth spoon. Grilled beef tenderloinâa temperature was requested on that. And so on through the entire menu, on into coffee service. He went through the kitchen's procedure, when it fired which course and when it picked up. He rumbled systematically through ordering procedure. The instructions ran from broadâthere would be front waiters who would do all the order-taking and there would be back waiters who would deliver the food and clear platesâto specifics. Crumb and remove salt and pepper,
then
set for dessert. Coffee cup handles should be set at four o'clockâlet's watch the details, folks. Reset only the twenties and thirties (tables were all numbered), and never strip a table bare. A sloppy table will take the food down a notch, he warned. The customer's eye goes to the mistake firstâa crumb on the chair, fleck of tarnish on the tip of a knife in an otherwise sparkling
silver setup. “When it's right,” Mr. Papineau said, eyes narrowing at the challenge,
“they don't notice a thing.”