Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (14 page)

Lombardi broke in. “Okay, anyway—Perillo: thumbs-up or thumbs-down?”

We agreed it was too early to say. We finished eating after a few more silent minutes. On our way back to class, Adam pulled me aside.

“I know that being group leader isn’t like being Obama or anything. I just have a lot of experience. I want to share the wealth. I want to teach by example. If someone’s making really terrible vegetable cuts, I want to show them how it’s done.”

“Okay. I’ll be really honest here. I’m thirty-eight years old. I’m at this school with no real experience. I’ve got a lot of years behind me that I’m not getting back. And I’m pretty insecure here. I’m imagining that everyone else without the benefit of your experience is in the same boat. You need to tread lightly. If you want to teach by example, that means not making a show of teaching. Get what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, that makes total sense.”

I’m not sure he understood what I was getting at.

Each day, Perillo showed us something new. On the second day, he demonstrated how to make meat broth.

You cut up some mirepoix (two parts onion, one part celery, one part carrot); you make a
sachet d’épices
from a few crushed peppercorns, a clove of garlic, some parsley stems, thyme, and a bay leaf, all tied up in cheesecloth; add a pound and a half of beef, cover with a quart of water; and simmer the whole thing until the meat is fork tender.

He showed us the basics for making stock: pounds of mirepoix; many pounds of chicken parts or veal bones (which could be roasted or not to make dark or light stocks, respectively); a few large sachets; hours of simmering, constant skimming.

We made stock every day, right at the beginning of class. After dinner, right before lecture, we’d strain it, put it in gallon bags, seal them, and soak them in an ice bath. Sometimes we’d use the stock for the next day. Other times it got sent to the restaurant kitchens.

He showed us how to make onion soup, using veal stock we’d made the night before, topped with slices of baguette that had been smeared with a Gruyère and butter mixture, and toasted. Because I had made it,
and because it was the first fully composed dish I’d done at school, it tasted like the greatest soup I’d ever had. I think it was, in fact, the greatest soup I’d ever had.

We learned to make consommé, clarifying broth or stock with a raft—a mix of eggs, ground meat, tomatoes, and onions. As the liquid heats up, the raft coagulates and floats to the top, looking like gray meatloaf. As the liquid simmers, the raft pulls all sorts of debris from the stock, and results in a soup of crystalline clarity.

It was like sorcery, and Perillo was the magus.

We learned to make roux. Homemade mayonnaise. Potato and leek soup, lentil soup with panfried croutons, fish chowder. I found myself becoming obsessed with sauces. I loved those things: They made everything—a panfried pork chop, a piece of roasted meat, a steamed vegetable—taste infinitely better. We went through each of the “mother sauces,” those traditional French sauces that serve as the basis for an infinite number of variations in classic French cooking: velouté, espagnole, tomato, béchamel, hollandaise.

I was inordinately knocked out when I compared Escoffier’s recipe for hollandaise to that of the CIA’s: They were almost identical. A reduction of vinegar, wine, and peppercorns. Add egg yolks. Put the bowl with the yolks over a pot of just simmering water and whisk them into thick ribbons. Bit by bit, add clarified, or melted, butter, whisking after each addition. Finish with lemon juice.

We were taught what to do if the sauce broke—if the butter and yolks separated—and then deliberately let a hollandaise go so we could resuscitate it.

My attempts at all these things were largely successful. That was thrilling. When Perillo evaluated my work, I was mostly told to add a little more salt, or to make the consistency of a sauce a little lighter, or thicker. Minute things, things that didn’t indicate failure or incompetence.

I’d watch myself, making these motions over a bowl of hollandaise, or a pot of sauce espagnole, and see a chain of phantoms making
identical motions, stretching back from this moment, now, under the shitty fluorescent light, through kitchens all over the country, all through Europe, back through a couple hundred years and feel the strange thrill of being a citizen of tradition.

But before we’d do any of this stuff, we’d spend time at the onset of every class cutting vegetables. They might include a few variations—batonnets, oblique cuts, lozenge cuts, tournéed potatoes—but always included the slicing and dicing of tomatoes, onions, shallots, garlic, potatoes, and, as of the second day, a bunch of parsley that needed to be chiffonaded into ultrafine green slivers.

Perillo would cut most of us down. He had a model he kept at his desk of vegetable cuts cast in plastic—dice in a variety of sizes, obliques, juliennes, and so on—and he’d hold our cuts up against it. He didn’t even need to say much that way. We could see quite plainly how we were screwing it up.

“You need to be exact. That’s all there is to it. There’s no faking this. You either do it or you don’t. You either can or you can’t.”

I
was
getting better. My cuts were getting straighter, generally, but at some point my knife would always strike out in directions of its own, and I’d be left with something halt and uneven. It would be that much more upsetting in light of any success I’d enjoyed at the end of the previous day’s class.

On my way home one night, I stopped at Walmart, a store I’d always vowed that I’d do everything in my power to avoid. But I needed something. I bought two twenty-five-pound bags of potatoes. I spent hour on hour the next two weeks cutting them at home. I analyzed the exact angle at which I stood, judged the angle I held my knife. The counter became chalky with dried starch, our garbage pail heavy with diced potato.

We loved Perillo in the kitchen, when he wasn’t judging our cuts. His demos were impressive, and he was patient when we were cooking.

He didn’t seem as enthused when he lectured.

Each lecture was based on slides shown on an overhead projector. One might read: “Béchamel: A Grand sauce of milk thickened with
white roux
. The amount of roux required to thicken a
béchamel
varies according to what it will be used for. A light consistency may be used for soups, a medium consistency for sauces and a heavy consistency for a binder.”

Perillo would stand up front, doing that strange bob-and-weave, and address us:

“So, let’s talk about béchamel sauce … it’s a grand sauce … it’s thickened with roux. But you’ll want to use different amounts of roux depending on what you’re going to use the béchamel for … you’ll want maybe a light consistency for soups, medium for a sauce, and maybe heavy if you’re doing a binder.”

He’d go on doing very slight variations on the slides. But once he was done reading to us, we were free to leave. The end of the nights were always fun; we’d leave the lecture room and head back to the kitchen to gather our stuff. Perillo would always be in there talking and joking around, and he and I occasionally bonded over missing New York City, our favorite bars there, bands we’d seen at CBGB’s, city things like that. One night, late into Skills I, he mentioned that he’d enrolled in the CIA right out of high school. He graduated from the CIA in 1986, which meant he’d probably graduated from high school in 1984, making him just about four years my senior.

Perillo lived a few miles farther up the road from me and we took the same route home. One day he walked up to me as I was chopping onions and said, “Jonathan—do you drive a little Nissan pickup with a Dead sticker on the back?”

I did. I also drove like an old man, always at or under the speed limit, hands at ten and two on the steering wheel.

“Yeah, I do,” I said. “Why? Have you been stuck behind me on Route 9?”

“No, no, no.” He paused. “Well, yeah, maybe a bunch of times.”

One night I drove home and passed the scene of a really terrible accident right outside of Rhinebeck. It was one of those tableaus that stick in your mind for years afterward, and I felt sick seeing it.

The next afternoon I walked into the kitchen and Perillo said,
“Thank God. I saw you leave school last night and I left about a minute after you. Then I got to Rhinebeck.”

“Did you see that accident?” I said.

“Yeah, and I thought it might have been you. I looked for your phone number on the roster and couldn’t find it. I almost called the police. I kept thinking, ‘Do I hold class if Jonathan got killed?’ ”

O
NE NIGHT
, A
DAM BEGAN
finding out what responsibility tasted like. Just after Perillo finished his close reading of the overhead slides, Adam asked everyone to stay for a group meeting. Perillo left the room.

Once we were alone, Justin, a young guy fresh from the navy, where he had cooked on a battleship, asked, “Why are we having this meeting?”

Adam responded, “I just wanted to talk for a few minutes about how we’re doing as a group and maybe get some ideas of how we can get better. We’re finishing our cleanup later than we should every night. I think we can figure out how to be more efficient.”

I thought we were doing fine. The same people did the dishes every night, not because no one else would but because the same three people kept kicking out anyone who tried to join in. “You’re too slow,” they’d say. So everyone else stopped trying. But what the hell—if Adam was group leader and we elected him, then we could sit for five minutes while he exercised his office.

Justin thought differently. “Is this mandatory?”

Adam said, “I can’t make it mandatory. But I’d really appreciate it if people would stay for five minutes so we could talk.”

“Oh, okay,” Justin said. “If it isn’t mandatory, then fuck this.” He got up, gathered his stuff, and walked out the door. About five people looked at one another, got their things together, and followed him out.

Eleven of us remained. Adam shook his head, started to speak, then shook it again.

“Hey, we’re here,” I said. “Fuck ’em. Let’s talk.”

It would only get worse.

O
N THE LAST DAY
of Skills I we took our knife skills practical. Each day, Perillo had decreased the amount of time we were allowed until, on the final day, we had twenty minutes. I finished in sixteen. I brought the tray up and he took a look.

“Okay … not bad … the potatoes are nice and even … except for this one … and this one … the tomatoes are perfect. And look at this parsley chiffonade—very nice. Definitely nicer than this garlic, though … shallots are good … onions are nice … slicing looks a little off, maybe. But you did a good job. Who would have thought?”

“I would have.” That was uncharacteristic of me.

He paused for a while. “Yeah, me too.”

Skills II began a few days later. I was sharing a station with Lombardi just to the left of Perillo’s demo area.

Skills II is a continuum of Skills I. You learn to take the veal stock and espagnole you made in Skills I and turn it into demi-glace. You learn to turn the demi-glace into more complex sauces—sauces Robert, Diane, poivrade, bordelaise, charcutière, all of which involve mixing the demi-glace with wine reductions and shallots. The Diane is finished with cream, the Robert with mustard, the charcutiere with julienned cornichons.

We learned about cooking all sorts of vegetables, about blanching, steaming, sautéing, or roasting beets, zucchini, green beans, and so on.

Rice and potato cooking came next. We were quizzed relentlessly on the different ratios of water to rice depending on the type of rice you used: 1.5:1 for long-grain white; 3:1 for long-grain brown. We learned to make polenta, not by stirring constantly as the polenta sat on a burner, but by putting it in the oven and having to stir only occasionally. I was dubious, but it turned out to have a deeper, richer flavor than any other polenta I’d had. I started making it at home all the time.

We made fresh pasta, something I’d been taught to do by an older Italian friend of my parents when I was twelve. But Perillo showed us a couple extra steps—two different periods of air drying after rolling the
dough out and then after cutting it—that made a distinct difference in texture. I always made my fettucine pretty thick; Perillo showed us how thinner is better.

That day, Brookshire was working right across from me and Lombardi.

He always looked supremely confident, yet he’d get some pointed critiques on pretty much everything. He’d still look supremely confident after getting flayed. When he’d get in the weeds, he’d get defensive. On our first time out making pasta, his was dry and flaky and looked like pastry crust. I pointed out that maybe he should start over and use more eggs.

“No, the ratio is fine. I think I got some bad flour.”

“You mean the flour from the big bin where we all got it?”

“Yeah, I must have gotten a bad cup.”

“Maybe you should get some better flour and then start over?”

“Nahh, this’ll be coming together any second.”

Perillo tried the ravioli and fettucine I brought him for evaluation.