C
hef Pardus had been right; by Day Three the routine locked in and the kitchen hummed. We typically arrived between one-thirty and ten of two; the food steward, with help, would haul the huge gray tub of food from the storeroom up a flight of stairs and down the hall to K-8; a member of each table would collect cutting boards for the others, another would grab bowls for the table, enough cheesecloth for everyone's sachet d'épices. On this day and for the next two weeks, someone putting together a sachet would call out, “Who's got the thyme?” and Travis would say, “Oooh, about ten after two.” He almost never tired of it and when he did, someone would say, “Travis, do you have the thyme?” and Travis would oblige. People found their personal routines. Greg was the unspoken leader of our table. When Chef Pardus needed clarified butter he would have each table clarify five or ten pounds of it, and Greg would be the one from our table to do it. I wanted my onions out of the way firstâonions for mirepoix, half an onion sliced, half an onion minced, and move on from there. Bianca, next to me, almost never made a sound moving through her standard mise en place. She had worked five years in a bakery but had no kitchen experience. And David, who set his board between Travis and Greg across from us, worked earnestly and affablyâafter graduating from the University of Southern California he had begun a career in banking before coming to the Culinary.
Erica had a hard time getting going, her blue eyes notwithstanding. She kept forgetting to put her hair net on and thus lost most of her sanitation
points every day. Her uniform was badly soiled, even from Day One, before anyone had cooked a thing.
Erica worked across from Eun-Jung Lee. Eun-Jung, a young nutritionist from Seoul, had worked with one of Korea's best-known chefs who had taken courses at the Culinary and had recommended that Eun-Jung apply. Eun-Jung, who couldn't have been much over five feet tall but whose wavy black hair was always properly constrained by a hair net, first appeared to me as shy, but I soon realized that this trait was more likely an Asian delicacy of spirit combined with a limited understanding of English. To compensate, she took notes like a bandit, always moved her chair smack up front for lecture, and studied continually. She endeared me to her by inviting me on Day Three, before anyone was really talking to me, to a kimchi party in her dorm room, where we would eat various pickled vegetables and she would show off her Korean cookbooks. She missed home.
Ben Grossman, a tall twenty-five-year-old from Rockland County, New York, with short dark hair, was the group leader and thus in charge of making sure everyone had course guides for each class and addressing problems that anyone in the group might have; he made announcements of special meetings, and generally kept school life in order for the group. Ben received his bachelor's from SUNY Albany, then got his C.P.A. from the state of New York and worked for about a year as an accountant, before jumping ship. He can trace his career switch to a 1993
New York Times
article and recipe for turkey meatloaf. That's when it clicked, he said, and he knew he would go to the Culinary Institute. He worked first for a caterer at the South Street Seaport and then, through a family connection, got a job in the kitchen of the Stanhope Hotel, where for seven months he worked on everything from garde manger to pantry to banquet.
He did not make a good first impression on Chef Pardus. What kind of group is this going to be, Chef Pardus wondered, when the group leader forgets to put his name on his paper? Others failed to hand in initial assignments. Perhaps these were just two of many detailsâsuch as Erica's netless hair, Eun-Jung's incomprehension, or the ten thumbs attached to Lou's handsâthat gathered in the chef's mind. This was not going to be a good group, he was thinking. But there was Greg, already very proficient, and Adam, tall, skinny, with hair so short and black it looked almost sharp. He rarely smiled and usually seemed angry. When I asked Adam how old he was, he scowled and said, “Twenty-six? Twenty-seven? I don't know, man.” But Adam asked a lot of good questions.
Susanne, too, had an intellectual bent. She was a slight twenty-seven-year-old with curly black hair and dark eyes set deep into her narrow face. She had spent three years as an English major at Barnard before dropping out, dissatisfied with her classes, she said, and tired of living in Harlem. She worked in advertising for several years (her husband was still in advertising) before deciding to give culinary school a shot. She had waitressed here and there during school, but she needed more than that to comply with entrance requirements, and she wangled an apprenticeship, or
stage
, at New York's Chanterelle.
On Day Three, my three-by-five prep card read:
Ovens/pans
SMEP (batonnet, sm dc carrot)
Brown Stock
Onion Soup
I had written the first item to remind myself to turn the ovens on first thing and get the pans hot and ready for the veal bones as soon as the students in Meat Fabrication made their daily delivery. You could lose a good half hour if no one turned on the ovens. Each table was assigned one of the three stocks, and the fourth table would set up the chef's demoâtoday, setting out onion, retrieving sauce and sauté pans, measuring out forty ounces of white stock, filling a white paper cup with a couple of ounces of Blair's Apple Jack so that everything was ready to go when the chef shouted, “Demo in five minutes!” During demo, the entire class would stand around Chef Pardus at the burners by Table Two next to the reach-in coolers. He would talk and perform and we would listen and watch. There would seem little complexity in the subject of onion soup, but it was fun to be cooking anything at all.
Chef Pardus had told us yesterday during lecture that he did not want us to use cheese or crouton. “I'm interested in seeing if you can make a good onion soup.” He had gone over the criteria for evaluating the quality of the soup: color, body, temperature (“I want it
hot
; I want it served in a
hot
bowl; I don't want it
boiling
in the bowl”), aroma, and, of course, flavor.
And Day Three he demoed everything, beginning with the sliced onions: uniform; short enough to fit on a spoon. You didn't want a long strand of onion hanging off some lady's spoon, ready to drop onto her four-hundred-dollar dress, the chef said. “Notice how I'm holding my hands,” Chef
Pardus said, slicing the onion on the big maple cutting board. He stopped to speak. “My fingertips are
curled
. My thumb's in
back
. I'm not gonna
lose
anything. I'm not going down to the
nurse
. I'm not going to the
hospital
. I got
other
things to
do
.”
He turned to the stove, put a sauté pan on the flame, and said, “This is where you play with your flame. The French guys call this your piano. And they say you tune your piano, you want to tune it to make beautiful music. It's up to you. You're the maestro.” He lowered the flame to cook the onions slowly.
Pardus regarded the jiggly white beef stock, set out for him in a half-gallon measuring pitcher. “You want to heat a little bit of your stock up and taste it before you spend all the time and effort to waste good soup,” he said. “I'm pretty sure this is good. We made it ourselves last night.”
“That was the one we used the liquid from the previous day,” said Ben Grossman, erstwhile accountant. “Could that be why it's so gelatinous?”
“It could be,” Pardus answered. “But also it went for an awful long time. We started it at about three o'clock and it probably went until aboutâaaw dammit.”
We were in darkness. Everyone in the class followed Pardus: “Aaw.”
After about thirty seconds the lights came back on. “Go ahead,” Chef Pardus said, “turn off all the ovens. Do you have fire over there?” Greg checked, said no. “Turn off all the ovens,” Pardus continued. “The pilots went out. It's ⦠winter in New York!” When the power at the Culinary goes out, all the gas lines close off and must be manually turned on again. When this happens, the maintenance crew spreads out through the old Jesuit monastery with blowtorches in hand to relight one thousand pilot lights.
“O.K., so the demo's on hold, guys,” Pardus said.
“Oh, no!” cried Lola in mock horror. Lola was from Staten Island. When I asked her why she was here, she said, “I wanna learn how to make gumbo.” I sensed here a kindred spirit. I'd noticed Lola, her deep brown eyes and long brown hair, mainly because she and Travis, whom I faced daily as I cut and chopped, were often engaged in surreptitious whispering and chuckling. I did not know this then, but they had met for the first time a few weeks earlier in Meat Identification, and all I can guess is that Meat Identification has curious effects on some people.
“Hey,” Pardus said, about a half hour later, once the men in Culinary work shirts and brown pants had relit the pilots, and his onions had begun
to sizzle. “You guys hear they started a new media branch of the CIA called the Food and Beverage Institute. Really. We're gonna make our own videos, publish our own books, we're gonna maybe do CD-ROMs, stuff like that. So we've got the CIA and the FBI. It's the truth. Isn't that cute.
“O.K., we're starting to get some caramelization here but not quite as much as I want. I want these to be fairly deeply caramelized. I want to build up that complex caramel flavor and aroma we were talking about yesterday. Caramel is a real complex action of sugar. When it starts to caramelize, all kinds of molecular things happen; I can't give you a dissertation on that, but it's complicated.”
“What do you mean by complex?” I asked.
There was some talking in the ranks so Pardus piped up a bit and said, “The question is what is complex?” He waited a moment longer, then said, “You guys done? Let me know when you guys are done with your conversation and I'll resume.”
Lola apologized.
“Have you taken raw table sugar and put it in your mouth?” he continued. “What's it taste like? It tastes sweet, that's about all you can say for it. You take a piece of
caramel
, a caramel chew? Put that in your mouth. What's that taste like? It's sweet, but there's something else going on in there. It's different, more complicated. Maybe there's vanilla flavors, maybe there's spicy cinnamon flavors; you can get all these different flavors that occur when they start to caramelize and the corresponding aromas that come along with that.”
On the back of my prep list for this day, beneath my equipment list, I'd written the name “McGee” and circled it. This was to remind myself to stop at the bookstore and buy
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
. It's part of the standard issue at the CIA. Pardus had told the class the night before that everyone should read this book straight throughâtwiceâbefore graduating. The author, Harold McGee, had become shorthand for the title. Throughout the year, whenever there was speculation about what was actually happening to food as it cooked, the response would be, “Read McGee” or “Check McGee.”
On page 609 McGee confirms Pardus's comments: “The chemical reactions involved in caramelization are very numerous and not very well understood,” he writes. “If glucose, an even simpler sugar than the disaccharide sucrose, is browned, this single species of molecule breaks down and recombines to form at least 100 different reaction products, among
them sour organic acids, sweet and bitter derivatives, many fragrant volatile molecules, and brown-colored polymers. It is a remarkable transformation and a fortunate one for the palate.”
This browning of food can create such astonishing changes in food that companies have been able to imitate expensive tastes, such as maple, chocolate, coffee, mushroom, bread, and meat, simply by cooking cheap sugar and amino acids. Heating sugar and cereal flours does the same thing. Postum, McGee notesâroasted wheat, bran, and molassesâis an old concoction meant to substitute for coffee, marketed in 1895 by C. W. Post.
“So I've got the fond building up on the bottom of my pan,” Chef Pardus continued. He would deglaze the fond, the browned sugar stuck to the pan, with the Apple Jack, then add the white beef stock, and simmer. He would cook it just enough for the flavor he wanted and after it was seasoned exactly to his liking, he would announce that the onion soup was ready and that we should grab a tasting spoon and taste it. This was the mark we were aiming for. As he cooked, we prepared our standard daily mise en place. Mise en place (“put in place”) was a term that extended beyond our daily preparationsâchefs were often talking about “mental mise en place.” Before the onion soup demo, I was in the midst of bringing my parsley to a fine chop, but in the middle I somewhat absentmindedly swiped the parsley off my knife between my thumb and index fingers. My finger caught the blade and I winced. Chef Pardus saw this and said, “I'll get you a Band-Aid.”
I said, “That's all right, I brought one.”
He did a double take and said, “You brought a Band-Aid because you thought you'd be dumb enough to
cut
yourself?” He chuckled. “Now
that's
mise en place.”
When we felt we had brought our soup to caramelized perfection, we would carry our bowlâusing our side towels because the bowl had better be hotâto the chef for him to taste and grade. He sat behind the desk like an old-fashioned Latin-school teacher, only with a tall white paper hat on, telling many of us that our onions had been overcaramelized, had gone too dark, past sweet.