Uniformity, in shallots as in everything, was an indicator of excellence. My sliced onion, for instance, was too thick but the slices were uniform and that was more important. He lifted one of my turned carrots. This was a tough little cut, and the carrot was especially difficult to curve a knife through; you could easily whittle them to nothing looking for that perfect seven-sided football. “Not bad,” he said. “They need a little work, but not bad.” I took the hotel pan away, and Chef Pardus crimped behind some lifted papers to scratch out my score from a possible fifteen.
The products I brought to him in my two-inch-deep hotel pan were written on the board each day as SMEP, or standard mise en place. After six o'clock, the time by which everyone should have taken his or her hotel pan to Chef Pardus for their daily knife-cuts grade, all would begin dumping their minced onion in the minced onion bag and the sliced onion in the sliced onion bag. The class's combined mise en place would amount to thirty-six pounds of mirepoix, big bags of all the other minces, chops, and dices, and eighteen sachets d'épices.
I was here to learn the basics, and certainly it didn't get more basic than chopping onions and mincing parsley.
Dinner was at six-thirty. We had each been given tickets that told us which kitchen to go to and told the sous chef at the kitchen that we were entitled to eat there. Our kitchen, K-8, ate at K-9, Chef Smith's kitchen next door. Rumor was that Chef Smith had been a marine. He looked like a marineâchin tucked, stone-faced, hands behind his stiff back, moving only to pop a green bean in his mouth to check that it was doneâreviewing the troops in his Introduction to Hot Foods class, which immediately followed Skills. This was the first production kitchen, the first time students cooked for their peers. Our Skills class stood at the end of the line and waited in the hallway. Intro meals were classically based: two vegetables, a starch, a protein item, and a sauce, four different plates, one for each stationâgrill, sauté, roast, braiseâalong with a vegetarian plate. Roast
chicken with a jus lié, for instance, would be served with gaufrette potatoes, sautéed spinach, and glazed carrots; veal blanquette would be served with chive mashed potatoes, batonnet root vegetables, and green beans, and would be called “braise.” If you asked for it, the student sous chef would shout, “Fire one braise!” and the student on braise would shout back, “Firing one braise!”
We would then walk our plates down the hall, turn right, and walk through another hall to the dining room, called Alumni Hall, a long room with a high vaulted ceiling, the chapel of this former Jesuit monastery. Large alcoves were used for more tables, and tables lined the altar platform, now called the stage. Stained-glass windows depicting scenes from the life of Christ surrounded you while you ate.
That night I dined with Erica, a youngster of nineteen, from suburban Philadelphia. Erica was short and had abundant thick brown hair that stayed wrapped in a bun and covered with a hair net as the dress code demands. Her face was almost perfectly round, and she had the bluest eyes I had ever seen. They were so blue, with a sort of shimmering, crystalline depth, I thought for sure she wore colored contacts and I asked her as we stood in line in the hall outside K-9. She said she wore contacts but the blue was natural. “Why,” she inquired, anxiously, “do you like my eyes?”
“I think your eyes are incredible,” I said. “They're the bluest eyes I've ever seen.”
She smiled and said, “Do you really? Oh, thank you. I love it when people say nice things about my eyes. David, do you like my eyes?” She batted her lids at him.
“Yes, Erica,” David said. “I do like your eyes.” He rolled his own, and Erica thanked him and smiled.
We got our platesâI was lucky enough to get one of the last sautés, the vealâand sat down with Erica, Lou, and Greg. Lou told me about IBM, where he worked part-time, from about seven in the morning till eleven. His wife, a nurse, worked nights. Lou would take the kids to his wife's parents' house at around six, where they waited to go to school; Lou would return home at eleven-thirty, have a bite to eat and a quiet moment to study before leaving for the Culinary at around one. Most nights he'd be home before ten. Lou was the oldest in the class and had perhaps the least kitchen experience. He scarcely knew how to chop an onion. Greg Lynchâdivorced with two kids; on weekends he'd drive to Vermont to be with themâhad done factory work after high school, then moved to kitchen work; he was fast, he
could cook, and he made it clear he was putting up with these basics simply for the sake of the degree. Erica had spent half her senior year of high school at a technical school learning kitchen skills, then worked about a year at a bed-and-breakfast on the appetizer station; she'd struggled to convince her parents that kitchen work was a viable career choice. Her eventual goal was to teach.
Dinner was over quickly and we were back in the kitchen before seven-thirty, cleaning bowls and pans, straining the stocks, and shoveling all the steaming bones and cartilage and soggy mirepoix into the big blue bin of compostable waste. The brown veal stock would cook slowly overnight and be strained, cooled, and stored by the students in the A.M. Skills class, which ran from seven to one-thirty.
When the kitchen was clean, when aprons had been untied and rolled up and stuffed in backpacks, paper chefs' hats had been doffed for the evening, and knives were secured in their hard, black CIA-issued briefcases, chairs were once again unstacked from beside the dry-storage cage and set out around the tables. We sat for lecture in the large bright clean kitchen.
Day One lecture concerned stocks. We had already made gallons of stock todayâor Greg had; he seemed to be doing all the stock work today, hustling around the kitchen like a scrappy little point guard in a blacktop hoops gameâand while the brown stock would simmer all night, the white beef stock we'd made had not had sufficient time to cook. So as Chef Pardus explained how to label the stocks (stored in rectangular two-gallon plastic containers), he noted, “A good white stock should simmer about five hours. Tomorrow we're going to use the weak stock instead of water.”
Chef Pardus began his lecture by reading from the paper taped to the wall. Typically, he would carry a wooden spoon while he lectured, spinning it in the air as he talked or using it as a pointer.
“A great stock is judged by,” he paused, “its
flavor
.” The first bulleted item is, of course, crucial. Does it have a good clean taste, a taste appropriate for the bones and aromatics that have cooked in it? The second item is clarity. You did not want a muddy stock, especially if you were going to use that stock for consommé, as we would soon be doing. Color, too, is to be evaluated; a brown stock should be brown, a white stock white (as opposed to gray), and chicken stock should be a pale yellow. Body: “Texture in the mouth,” Pardus explained. “If it feels like water in your mouth, it doesn't have body.” And finally, aroma. A brown stock should have a roasted aroma, chicken stock should smell like chicken, and white stock
should have a neutral aroma, and the aroma should always be clean and fresh.
“You should judge a good stock by these criteria,” Chef Pardus announced. “And if it's not a good stock, you should be able to figure out what went wrong according to each one.” If your brown stock lacks color, for instance, perhaps you didn't caramelize your mirepoix well enough. If there's no body, perhaps you used too much water and the gelatin was spread too thin, or you didn't cook your bones long enough to release all their gelatin. Knuckles, bones with abundant connective tissue, release a lot of gelatin but are less flavorful; bones with a lot of marrow have good flavor but the marrow can cloud the stock. A good mix of bones was therefore optimal. With every stock every day, he wanted those in charge to bring a sample of the stock to him and he would evaluate the stock aloud using all these criteria.
Chef Pardus admitted that there were many ways to make stock, many good ways, but said, “We're going to do it the K-8 way.” And the K-8 way was the official CIA wayâalso known as The Party Lineâwhich was spelled out in the Institute's
The New Professional Chef
, a huge cooking textbook.
Pardus used a large flip pad on an easel to lecture from. He performed each lecture once every six weeks, and the reusable flip pad saved a lot of writing on the board. A chart of stock ratios was the first thing on view; I copied it on the inside cover of one of my notebooks. Pardus flipped a page, pointed with his spoon, and said, “Stock is.” He paused. “The foundation for all classical French cooking.”
Â
Â
F
ond de cuisine,
foundation of cooking. “It is to the production of perfect stocks that the sauce cook should devote himself,” wrote Auguste Escoffier, the great French chef and writer, “the sauce cook who is, as the Marquis de Cussy remarked, âthe enlightened chemist, the creative genius and the cornerstone of the edifice of superlative cookery.'” The spirit and name of Auguste Escoffier presides over the Culinary Institute much as Buddha presides over Eastern philosophy. His 1903 book,
Le Guide Culinaire,
eventually translated into English as
The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery
(known at this school as either
Le Guide
, or the bible), is an extraordinary accomplishment in its thoroughness and philosophy of cooking. Escoffier was born in Nice in 1846 and, after establishing himself as a cook, was invited to work at a hotel in Switzerland in 1884 by a former
headwaiter who had moved into hotel management named César Ritz. The two fellows hit it off and went on to open the Ritz in Paris in 1898, and eventually the Carlton in London.
Escoffier, while providing about two thousand recipes, never abandoned his focus on basic culinary preparations, such as stocks. “These culinary preparations,” he writes in the second paragraph of his book, “define the fundamentals and the requisite ingredients without which nothing of importance can be attempted.” There seemed to be something humble in his hubrisâ
without which nothing of importance can be attempted.
Furthermore he named these basic preparations, ticked them off like items on a grocery list without which nothing of importanceânothing, mind youâcould be attempted. There were thirteen. Of these thirteen he set apart a primary group of eight preparations that were composed of three broad categories: stock, roux, mother sauces. That was it, the basis for the art of modern cookery, and the reason I was here.
I was never one to get all goosey about recipes. Recipes were a dime a dozen. You could follow them for a hundred years and never learn to cook. I was after method; I wanted the physical experience of doing it, knowing what the food should look like, sound like, smell like, feel like while it cooked. I had made my own stocks and had talked to various chefs about their stocks, but at the Culinary Institute of America I would learn the classical preparation of stock, the foundation, the bedrock of classical cookery. If you didn't know how to make a great stock, if you didn't even know what a great stock tasted like, you were doomed to mediocrity in the kitchen, at best, and at worst, ignorant foolishness.
Certain facts concerning one's own behavior and choices in life can only be understood in retrospect. I rented our home in Cleveland, moved virtually everything we owned into my father's house, and transported my wife (a photographer who had paying clients in the city we were leaving), our daughter (not yet ambulatory), and myself five hundred miles to a one-bedroom garret above a garage in Tivoli, New York, a Hudson River Valley town with a one-to-one human-cow ratio. I had done all of this, I eventually realized, in order to learn how to make a superlative brown veal stock.
Â
Â
T
he physical principles that bring about a brown veal stock are no different from those of other stocks. Water heats bones. The bones (and
the meat scraps still connected to them) release protein, vitamins, fat, gelatin, mineral salts, and lactic and amino acids. The vegetables, herbs, and spices release pectin, starches, acids, and sulfur compounds. The younger the bones, the more connective tissue they'll have; connective tissue is made up largely of a protein called collagen, which melts into a substance called gelatin, a gluey protein, and this gives a stock body. When you cook meats, you caramelize the savory juices and meat proteins; their taste becomes liquefied in the stock. The vegetables caramelize, their sugars brown, and this, too, liquefies. Add the mirepoix, throw in some tomato product that is cooked till it becomes a deep rich brown, pour cold water on it, and heat it very, very slowlyâtill it's just hot enough to release a couple of bubbles to the surface every few seconds, without any other movementâand tend this mixture for hours and hours, skimming frequently, and you'll have a flavorful, brown, nutritious liquid. Degrease it, strain it, degrease it some more. Then it is done.
You would never want to eat this stuff plain, and it doesn't smell very good either. Roasted chicken stock tastes moments away from a tasty soup; beef stock tastes like beef. A perfect brown veal stock has what is referred to as a “neutral” flavor. This is a kind way of saying it doesn't taste like anything you're used to eating or would want to eat.
Neutrality, however, is the key to this stock. You can do a million different things with a great veal stock because it has the remarkable quality of taking on other flavors without imposing a flavor of its own. It offers its own richness and body anonymously. When you reduce it, it becomes its own sauce starter. You can add roux to brown veal stock for an eventual demi-glace and with a demi-glace, you can, in about thirty seconds, create any of a hundred distinct sauces in the manner of Escoffier.