Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (2 page)

She called a list of names, mine included, and told us to speak with the school nurse, who was at a table by the door. We needed to schedule a hepatitis-A vaccination and a tetanus booster. Then we were sent upstairs to set everything right with the bursar.

The wait in line for the bursar was long, but I spent it watching the others. We’d been sent sternly worded notices about the school’s dress code—dressy pants, collared shirt, no sneakers, no jeans, no facial hair. The hair on your head must be of “natural color.” No lengthy sideburns, and no earrings for the men. No nose rings for anyone. Most of the males in line—including me—looked as if we had hit the same sale at Old Navy. We looked like stereo salesmen, or golfers. Everyone had the same polo shirts in the same small spectrum of solid colors. Everyone’s khakis had the same cut. Some people had apparently missed the memo, though. As we stood in line, an administrator of some sort approached each of the scofflaws and explained that they’d have to change or shave. One young kid, with a huge bush of a beard hanging off his thin face, made arrangements with a complete stranger to go back to the stranger’s dorm room and shave.

Very few of the people in line were talking. That vibe of angst and fatigue just seemed to mute the moment. One by one, we made our way to the bursar. Afterward, we were ushered through a door and down a long hallway to a tailoring station where we were measured for our uniforms. Then we were set loose for a few hours until lunch. I filled the time touring the campus.

When you’re on these grounds, it’s hard to not be impressed. This was certainly intentional. They went at the planning and landscaping with grandeur in mind. The place is situated a couple miles north of Poughkeepsie, in Hyde Park, on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River, high enough so that every building catches the sunlight. Right across from the Admissions Building was a structure modeled to look like an Italian villa. It was done up in yellow stucco, with a red tiled roof, and hemmed in on two sides by evergreen trees. Inside was the school’s Italian restaurant, open to the public and staffed by students. The road
in front of it was made to look like a cobblestone street. Behind and below the villa, at the bottom of a slope, lay meticulous rows of dozens of herbs. I walked the rows and periodically reached down to rub the leaves between my fingers and smell the oils on my skin. Maybe because of the neatness of the garden, or because of the surroundings, they had an authority in their scent, as if these were not herbs like those you bought or even grew on your own.

Across from the gardens was the library. We’d been told that morning that the Conrad Hilton Library housed the second-biggest collection of cookbooks in the country, and I wanted to see what the second-biggest collection of cookbooks looked like. I went inside, made some inquiries, and was told that the cookbooks were on the second and third floors. When I went upstairs, I saw dozens and dozens of rows of shelves, dense with books from floor to top. I went at random through the stacks, walking more and more quickly—every book Elizabeth David ever wrote, everything by Jane Grigson. Michel Guérard’s books were here, Alain Ducasse, Paul Bocuse, arcane books on Serbian gastronomy and Native American cooking, endless numbers of books on Chinese cooking from every region; the collection went on and on and on. For the first time that day, anxiety gave way to anticipation. I wanted to learn everything that was in here, everything available. I wanted to turn my mind into a repository and I wanted to fill it. I had never once in my life pondered Serbian cooking, but right then I wanted to make myself an expert. After an hour, I forced myself back outside.

Next to the library stood a plaza with a view of the river. The plaza was small but looked imperial, broken up into a geometry of trimmed grass, a fountain, trellises, and gazebos. The water was off, but it had apparently been on earlier. Puddles lay on the surface and some of the students, out of uniform, dressed for the summer weather, ran and splashed. These grounds were beautiful, everything devoted to food. It was like Disneyland for cooks.

We’d been told to report for lunch at eleven thirty, in the same
complex as the Admissions Office, where the Banquet and Catering (B&C) class is taught. To get to the banquet room, you walk down a long hallway that passed the B&C kitchen. For the benefit of visitors, there are large windows looking in, and I stopped to watch the students at work. These students were on the tail end of their second year. Their faces did not carry baby fat. They didn’t have the lazy radiance of the kids I’d mingled with a few hours ago. The acne was a little more stubborn, apparently, but, still, I noticed they all moved with purpose and focus. They were cutting up tenderloins of beef, attending to big steaming pots, working some decorative tricks over plates of desserts. No one was bumping into each other; no one seemed panicked. They simply flowed through the two or three minutes I stood watching.

A young woman appeared right in front of me on the other side of the glass, wearing the standard white chef’s coat, checked pants, and a paper toque on her head. She had a box of tools open on a tabletop and was searching through it. She looked up and straight at me. I could see her take in the clothes I was wearing. I saw her notice the name tag. She smiled and raised her eyebrows at the same time, then pursed her lips like she was suppressing a laugh and quickly looked down and away. If a thought bubble had formed over her head, I was imagining that it would have read,
You poor little fucker. All awkward in your khakis, with that stupid name tag. You just have no idea
—no idea—
what’s coming
.

As the other new students arrived at the Banquet dining room, a long line formed at the door. One of the Banquet students, dressed in dark pants, a dark vest with a faintly ridiculous almost-psychedelic-patterned fabric on the front, and a tie, acted as the maître d’, and escorted people to random tables. There were eight places at each table. We were in for some forced socializing. I didn’t actually mind; we were all going to have to talk to each other at some point.

Lunch was allotted an hour’s time on the schedule and consisted of three courses: appetizer, entrée, and dessert. Bread with the meal came from baking kitchen classrooms. Everything else had been produced in the B&C kitchen.

When I sat down at the table—I was the eighth person—I looked at
everyone else and gave a cursory greeting. Everyone—about an equal mix of male and female—smiled and nodded and recommenced a long stare at the tablecloth or out the windows that ran along one side of the room.

The silence was awkward. It stretched itself out until I, too, was staring with great concentration at the tines of my fork. Then it became absurd. I chortled a little to myself and looked up.

“Wow, this is stupid,” I said. Everyone looked surprised. I turned to the woman on my left. “Where are you from?”

She flinched, smiled, and then said, “Hershey.”

“As in, Pennsylvania?”

“Mmm-hmmm.” She sipped her water.

“What’s your name?”

She pointed to her name tag.
Britney
.

“So Britney,” I said, “are you culinary arts or pastry?”

She mumbled something.

“I’m sorry?”

She mumbled again.

“What?”

“She said, ‘pastry,’ ” another woman chimed in. Her name tag read
Tara
. She turned to Britney. “Are you coming here from college or high school?”

Britney paused for a long time. “I just graduated from high school two days ago, on Saturday. I got my diploma, went home, got into the car, and drove up here. I didn’t want to spend the summer in Hershey because I was getting into too much trouble and my parents wanted me to come here instead of juvie.”

Silence descended again, but this time, I just let it go unbroken.

Eventually the appetizer arrived, and everyone grew a little more animated. We were right then seeing a portion of our future on the plates. It was a vol-au-vent with mushrooms, a puff-pastry cylinder filled with sautéed mushrooms in a Madeira cream sauce. We all waited until each had been served, put napkins in our laps, and tasted it. Today, the future tasted pretty decent.

We’d been told earlier that all students are allowed two meals a day. For new students, during the first six weeks, one of those meals could be in any of the school’s different kitchens—the Asia kitchen, the Americas kitchen, the Mediterranean kitchen—but one meal had to be in the B&C room. This was where we’d get the first look at what we were supposed to be doing at the Institute. The meals, as we’d discover, were often ornate, complex: foie gras profiteroles; seared duck breasts with green peppercorn and pineapple gastrique. Occasionally the food was sublime; occasionally it was horrible. You couldn’t help but take mental notes, writing critiques in your head. There were things to try and emulate, things to avoid. These meals were cooked by students just on the cusp of their graduation. It was no coincidence that the newcomers were forced to eat here night after night.

After the appetizer and before the entrée, the silence evaporated. I’d been watching Tara a little bit while we were eating because I discovered something strange about her, mainly that I suspected she was a lunatic. Her eyes pinwheeled, and she’d jump and agitate in her chair. She cracked her knuckles over and over. Her lips were perpetually set as if she’d give a raspberry at any second, and every movement of her hands and arms and head had something frantic to it. She simmered with a very peculiar energy. She caught me looking at her.

“Okay, then,” she said. “Tell us where
you’re
from.”

“I grew up in New Hampshire, but I’ve been living in Brooklyn for a long time.”

She slapped the table with her hand and said, “I’m from Brooklyn.”

“Where?”

“Cobble Hill.”

Right near my apartment.

“I live on Atlantic Avenue, right off Court Street,” I said.

“You’re kidding! We’re neighbors!” Tara turned to the guy next to her. “We’re neighbors.” She turned back to me. “Well, we’ll have to get together sometime in the city.”

The entrée arrived. Roasted beef tenderloin, pureed potatoes,
sautéed green beans. The future was tasting simple, but still pretty damn good.

I
F YOU PAID ANY
attention at all to the CIA’s public persona, you knew who Tim Ryan was. A graduate of the school, he became the youngest-ever Certified Master Chef (a title bestowed on experienced cooks who pass a rigorous test of skills, technique, and creativity); a popular instructor; and, in his early forties, the president of the Institute. That’s just the short list. He was also on the US Culinary Olympics team, honored by dozens of culinary societies, on and on and on. In the realm of food he is a serious overachiever. He is known to be a no-nonsense but extremely kind sort of person. He also has a reputation as someone best not crossed.

And he’d been in the news lately.

Two months before I was set to start at school, someone e-mailed me an article from the
New York Times
, detailing the clash between certain student groups, the teachers’ union, and Ryan. Slipping standards. Bad equipment. Overcrowded classes. Cozying up to corporate food entities. And my favorite: the use of premade frozen waffle fries for the Quantity Food Production class. Nelly and I both laughed hysterically when we read that.

The teachers’ union had given him a vote of “no confidence.” The students had created Facebook pages.

The corporate toadying and, yes, the waffle fries gave me pause. I decided to call the CIA and ask about it. I spoke with a woman in the Student Affairs Office who was surprisingly candid.

“I really can’t say that I feel academic standards have fallen,” she said. “The same chefs are still teaching the exact same curriculum we’ve taught for years. They aren’t deviating. Those people—with all their experience and training—are the ones you’ll be studying with. No one from Sysco is going to be teaching you in the classroom. And yes, we have relationships with corporations. We’re a nonprofit institution. We rely on benefactors and donations. So, yeah, we have the
Conrad Hilton Library and the Colavita Olive Oil Center. But does Mr. Hilton’s name mean that the second-largest collection of cookbooks anywhere in the country is any less valuable? And furthermore, let me address the question of frozen waffle fries. Let’s say that you’re working in an industrial cafeteria, or a hospital or a prison or on an army base. Are you going to have the time to cut thousands of servings of waffle fries from scratch? No, you’re not. But when you do get those frozen fries, we want to show you how to prepare them so they’re as good as they can be. However good that is.

“Listen, Jonathan, if you want to drive up here, or take the train, we’ll pay for your gas or your ticket. You can come and spend an entire day, or two days if you want, in one of the kitchens. And if you still have any concerns, we can sit and talk about them.”

I thought she was so up-front that I decided to take her word for it. I also found out later that, for cost-cutting purposes, some members of the board of directors had been pressuring Ryan to eliminate seriously costly items like foie gras or truffles from the curriculum recipes. Ryan wouldn’t budge. If the recipe—deemed to be of such stature and classicism that it should be learned by every student—called for foie gras, then there was going to be foie gras available.

A student I met early on told me that I’d see Ryan twice during my entire time at the CIA: on the first day when he spoke to all the incoming students, and when I graduated.

When I walked into the auditorium, where he’d address us shortly, there was a large video monitor down front with the words “Your attitude determines your altitude” projected on it.

I sat midway down the sloping rows of seats. We waited just a few minutes and a man came out to tell us that we were about to be addressed by Dr. Ryan. Then another man came out to do an actual introduction. And then Ryan emerged.

He is a handsome guy, distinguished, with the sort of thicker build that men in their fifties seem to grow into. He wore a blue blazer, a blue shirt, and a starkly green tie. He was also immediately charismatic.
I found myself watching intently as he conferred with a few people around him and strapped on a microphone.