Then he looked at John and me. He was either annoyed with John for missing class yesterday or thinking we had it too easy. He said, “Grill, for Saturday, why don't you give me some kind of special? Think about it. I'll call the meat room and see what kind of protein item is available.” John nodded as though the chef had asked us to cut a couple more potatoes.
As service that day wound down, and John's chicken fiasco and words with the chef faded into the past, the chef approached our station and asked if we'd thought about the special at all. John, to my relief, said, “I was thinking about quail.” The chef nodded. “Maybe do a grape sauce,” John continued.
“I'm not big on grapes in sauces,” the chef said.
“Maybe berries, dried berries?”
The chef said, “Let me think about it.”
While we prepped for Friday, the chef floated a sheet of yellow legal paper on the service shelf above our station.
Saturday, 12 orders
Grilled quail stuffed with hickory-smoked chix sausage
Wild Rice
Apple
Butternut squash
Wild Mushrooms
Other Veg
The evolution of a special was fascinating to me in its apparent whimsy. What began Thursday as wondering what kind of protein item was available in the meat room would become, by Saturday, the most interesting entrée on Saturday's menu. It was simply a response to a common questionâwhat should we fix for dinner tonight?âtaken to an artful, and marketable, level.
Chef Turgeon grew bored once he'd brought the class to autopilot proficiency; to amuse himself he made an exquisite forcemeat. First he threw
some hickory chips in a small roasting pan, put it over a burner, then smoked boned chicken leg on a rack over the chips covered by another pan. The smoked meat was then ground with about 20 percent pork fat and mixed with shallots, reduced apple cider, salt and pepper, thyme, rosemary, and Pommery mustard. With a piping bag, David, a tournant, would stuff about an ounce of the forcemeat into the boned quail, then secure its legs through slits in the skin, and rub them with oil. John would mark these off on the grill at service and finish them in the oven.
John created a sauce of half veal/half chicken stock, fortified with more roasted chicken bones. He added some sage and apple cider that he'd reduced by three-quarters. The chef tasted it, then added
verjus
, rosemary, and thyme. John then strained and reduced it, and we'd monté au beurre at service.
Meanwhile I would sauté a dice of butternut squash and Granny Smith apples in butter, then add some wild rice and walnuts, a couple of ounces of chicken broth, and season the mix with salt, pepper, and fresh thyme. In another pan, I would heat butter and some bacon fat, sauté haricots verts, fava beans, spears of cooked bacon.
The plate was gorgeous. It began with a large spoonful of wild rice with bright yellow-orange squash and white apple in the center of the plate. On this bed, two stuffed quail were rested facing five and seven o'clock. Fava and haricots were sprinkled around the perimeter along with whole shitakes that had been seared and reheated in a little chicken broth. The plate was sauced, and we sprinkled tiny bright green leaves of thyme over the quail.
Not that we needed more to do, but somehow, by that time, we'd grown competent enough at our stations that the extra cutting and cooking seemed more a pleasant diversion than an unnecessary chore.
At the end of the day, as we huddled, Turgeon said, “I'm going to let you guys slide out of here. It was the best day so far; I saw very few mistakes. Have a good weekend. I'll see you Tuesday.”
Â
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T
uesday was my last day working in kitchens at the Culinary. For my fellow students, it was their last day in the kitchen before graduation, the culmination of two years' work. When I asked how it felt, I was greeted with the obvious. Mimi said, “I woke up this morning and I thought this is the last time I'm gonna have to wear this uniform.” When I asked John if he was glad to be leaving the kitchen, he remained completely silent
with a hard smile, his mind apparently flooded by possible sarcastic remarks. Eventually, he only chuckled and said, “Yeah, I'll be glad to get out of here.”
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“H
ow you guys doin' today?” the chef said, arriving in the dining room with his three-ring binder. The graduating group had had a pig roast over the weekend to celebrate their final block and graduation and that was the first thing on Turgeon's mind. “How was the pig roast?” he said. “How did the pig turn out? Good. All right. Busy day today. A la carte, we have seventy reservations. Make sure you get totally set up for that, plus business tomorrow, about fifty à la carte, plus a little party, but it's all à la carte. For the banquet, it's twenty-eight people. We're getting twenty-eight orders of crab cake; tournants are going to clean it. We have to set up twenty-eight orders plus a dozen other orders for tomorrow, plus the endive, plus the coleslaw. The entrée,” he said, looking at John and me, “we're basically going to be doing your steak dish. We're doing it with a pork tenderloin. Tournants, I ordered twelve pork tenderloins that we need to trim up. We're gonna leave them whole, and marinate those like we did the tenderloin. O.K.? Sauce, we need about two quarts of sauce. Tournants, you're gonna have to help out with this, also veg station. I'll have veg station do the french fries; you need about thirty-five potatoes cut up for it. Make sure you've got the onion spice mixture for it. Veg station, I also need you to clean five bags of spinach and if you guys can set up the onions for it, I ordered extra, thirty onions, and succotash for thirty. So, grill, you guys are going to do the onions, the sauce, and the succotash.”
“Did you order fava beans?” John asked.
“Yeah, I ordered four pounds.” He continued through the rest of the banquet meal and then told us we needed complete mise en place for the incoming group's Day One. “As soon as you're done and have everything wrapped up,” Turgeon said, “call me over so I can go through your station with you. Make sure you leave a prioritized prep list for the next class. Make sure you leave a station diagram, and kinda take your time, make sure it looks neat, how to set the station up, by the time you leave.
“Also, we were not here for two days; make sure you double-check everything, pull it out, taste it, make sure it's good to go. That's not something I want to catch at eleven-thirty, I'm going through tasting stuff and oop, this is no good, it's slimy.
“Next thing I want to do is go through your game plan today for à la carte, starting with soup station.”
Soup station, then fish station went through their game plans and Turgeon said, “O.K., grill?”
John said, “We gotta do about fifty onions, succotash for thirty. We have a lot of barbecue sauce, but not enough for two quarts, so we've got to do about two quarts of barbecue sauce. Probably have to dehydrate some onions for the onion rub for tomorrow. We need to get a little more mise en place for the special today, and cut potatoes for our station.”
“I'll have veg station cut potatoes for you.”
And on Turgeon moved through every station, followed by a critique of Saturday, small quibbles, mainly at sauté station, but concluded by saying, “So it was by far the best day. Today, I expect it to be twice as good as that. O.K.? This should be your best cooking day here at the school. All right? That's what it's all about.
“Usually on Day EightâI was standing in your shoes at one time, too, getting ready to graduate, I didn't have a job when I left here and for me, by far my first job was probably the most important position I ever took. I didn't know what the hell I wanted to do.” Turgeon had worked at a large hotel chain and while that environment taught useful skills, such as how to have strict controls on recipes, it was not where he would grow. A friend told him about the job at the Mayflower Hotel. “I just happened to walk across the street, walked in, guy talked to me, Jeff Buben, said, âYeah, I need somebody, you can start in a couple days.' I ended up taking that job and that's the one where I told you, second day on the job, the chef told me he was going to fire me. But it just set me up for the rest of my career. I ended up working for him for two and a half years. It was exactly what I needed. I needed that discipline. I just remember how he worked; whenever he wasn't doing anything he was polishing stainless steel. He was wiping things down,
all
the time, all the time. He'd be sitting there talking to you, wiping down the table. He was a
fanatic
. But there are important lessons I saw in that. And in how he worked, too. Make sure your station was wiped down. Totally organized at
all
times of the
day
. When I came in there, I was late every day, getting my stuff done, and he was all over me. So it's really important. I had somebody in my face saying, âLet's go, let's clean this up.' A lot of you may not work for somebody like that. You're gonna have to take it upon yourself to push yourself every day.
“Two pieces of information that I could give you, lessons I've learned.
When you go and work, some of you have jobs, some of you may not, some of you have talked to me. Know what you do? Find the top ten, top twenty places in that city, wherever you're gonna go, and go work there. Money really shouldn't be a big issue. Some of you it has to be, you may be older, you may have a family, you may have a wife, may have kids, or you have to worry a little more about money. But for a lot of you guys, money shouldn't be a major consideration for at least three to five years. I mean that. You make the right decisions, you work for the right people, you keep on working for places of that quality, later down the road, you're gonna be making more money than somebody who came right out and took a sous chef position at thirty-two at an average hotel; you're gonna end up passing them by a long way. Your education should be your major consideration at the beginning. Secondly, when you leave that place, this is something I've done, never take a step back in quality. Again, money can sometimes be a driving force. When you leave a job, keep going to a place that is better, and better, and better. The money comes later and the money'll be
good
, if you make the right decisions. That's real important.
“What else? I just think you have to be a hustler in this business. It's really physical, and you have to be really, really fast. A lot of people when they work, they work kind of lethargic; that's not what this business is about. It's very, very physical and it's very demanding. I look at it as kind of a war or a game, every day, me against the clock, and I don't want the clock to win. So I alwaysâI'm in the kitchen? Get my stuff done as quickly as possible, work efficiently, work cleanly. That's probably a couple of the most important things.”
Finally, he asked everyone what they had planned after graduation. Theresa was headed back to Seattle to the restaurant where she'd externed. Mark also would head to Seattle. Chen hoped to bring Escoffier's principles, and much of the food done in the Escoffier Room, to his father's hotel in Taiwan. Manning and Mimi were headed to San Francisco. John planned to go to
Food Arts
magazine and then to Germany. Russ answered, “I'm going to go to the Grand Hyatt in New York City. And hopefully in about two years I'm gonna open something of my own.”
“Good,” Turgeon said. “Bill?”
“I'm gonna go work for Boston Harbor Hotel.”
“Good. Who's the executive chef there?”
“Daniel Bruce.”
“Yeah, I heard a him, good. Gene?”
“I'm gonna relocate to Florida.”
“Don't know what the hell you're gonna do, go fishing or something? Todd?”
“I'm not quite sure where I'm looking. Boston or Chicago area. I'm gonna try to use my connections from my extern.”
“Where'd you extern?”
“Rattlesnake Club in Detroit.”
“How often did you see Jimmy Schmidt there?”
“There was a major turnover when I got there, they just got three new chefs and were understaffed, so he was popping his head in there quite a bit.”
“All right guys, that's about it; let's have a good day, seventy reservations.”
And we were back in the kitchen.
“I think he does this on purpose,” I said to John as we walked to our stations. “That barbecue sauce takes all day. We've got about ninety million onions to do.”
“Succotash for thirty,” John said.
“We'll do what we can.”
“That's all we can do.”
I would be making brown sauce, again, on my last day working in the kitchens in the Culinary Institute of America. I remembered the virulent roux debate of the previous winter, and I had thought at the time, “What an unusual place this is, what strange people who get passionate over brown sauce and what color you cooked your roux to.” And then it occurred to me that
I'd
become one of them.
But not today. Three cups of brown sauce was the last thing I had time for, what with all the fava beans to shuck, cook, and peel, mise en place for the quail special to finish, onions to boil and shock and peel and hollow, and more onions to peel, chop, grind, dehydrate, and pulverize. What color roux did I make? Blond. Blond and that was all right, for I had learned by then that there were many things to consider when making a brown sauce.