Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (20 page)

“All right … how about I start the sauce, then?”

“No,” I said right away. “The sauce is part of the duck.”

There was a lengthy silence.

“Right. Yeah. Okay. Ummm … why don’t I start peeling and cutting up the carrots? Those aren’t part of the duck, correct?”

“That’s true,” I conceded.

“And the potatoes? Is it okay if I touch those?”

“Yes. Yes, that would be acceptable.” He walked away. I addressed myself to the ducks. I arranged them on racks in two giant roasting pans. I patted the skin and the cavity dry. I ran my fingers over the chilled skin. I laid my palm on one of them. I started massaging the bird.

A voice to my left asked, “What are you doing, Grandpa?” It was Dan. I felt a sudden sort of disgrace, like I’d been caught leaving the bathroom without washing my hands or something. “Uhhh …,” I started to say. “Well, I guess I’m massaging the bird.” I took my hand away.

“Of course you are. Hey, why don’t you come back to Earth? Come rejoin us.” He walked off. I felt too embarrassed to continue massaging. I seasoned the birds instead. When the oven reached the right temperature, I opened the doors and put the birds in. I watched for a few seconds through the door glass. Then I went ahead with preparations for the sauce.

The sauce started out as two gallons of stock. It would need to be reduced to a couple of quarts. I got it boiling away. I kept veering between the oven and the pot, back and forth, constantly monitoring. I’d watched Sean fabricate the carrots and get the potatoes put together
and under the heat. I saw him at the stove with a small pan and some raspberries, which were part of the sauce.

“What are you doing?” I asked as casually as I could.

“Chef Sartory told me to make a gastrique and add it to the sauce.” He was boiling the raspberries in vinegar and sugar and reducing it all down to a syrupy consistency. This was messing with my goal of being the sole caretaker of the birds. But he was operating under orders. And I recognized I was getting a little out of hand with all this. I nodded and walked back to the ovens.

An hour after the birds were in, they had browned pretty nicely; the convection ovens cook things quickly. I called Sartory over and asked what he thought. He prodded and pressed the skin. I followed suit. He squeezed the meat on the leg. So did I. “Take ’em out of there,” he said. And I did. The ducks began to rest.

I focused completely on the sauce, which wasn’t reducing the way I wanted. I got the biggest rondeau in the kitchen and dumped the stock into it, with all its aromatics and now the gastrique, and turned the heat to high.

And after a little bit, that was done, too. I remembered reading in
The French Laundry Cookbook
how Thomas Keller instructed the staff to strain everything through a chinois fifteen or so times. If that was what was done at the French Laundry, then I’d do it here. The duck deserved no less. Each time I strained the sauce, the amount of sediment in the bottom of the chinois was lessening. On the sixth none was there. I swirled in butter. I picked up a spoon and tasted it. It was exquisite. I could have done shots of the stuff. Rich, with a hint of sour from the gastrique, and the flavor of raspberries throughout.

We carved the ducks, which had now rested for thirty minutes. The skin was crisp. My hand feeling weighty with trepidation, I pulled a large scrap of meat off the bones. I put it in my mouth. It was moist and tender. The potatoes and carrots came out. We plated the meals and served them. We sold out of the duck within about twelve minutes.

C
HEF
D
AVID
S
MYTHE WAS
running a couple minutes late, but it was an early Christmas in the hallway outside his Cusines of Asia kitchen. A hand truck sat weighted with ingredients for that day’s cooking. Adam and Brookshire, Dan and Sean were buzzing around it like hummingbirds, darting their hands in, pulling out packages of lily buds and dried mushrooms, four or five bottles of different soy sauces, a bag of Chinese long beans, a trio of various rice wines that looked like the real thing, covered with bright calligraphy and import stamps, not packaged under the familiar Kikkoman aegis.

It felt like a particularly good time of year to be a culinary student. Christmas was three weeks off, followed by a two-and-a-half-week break. In the interim, we’d be studying the fundamentals of Asian cuisine, with a few days each spent in China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and India. The schedule had an edge of impossibility to it; every one of those countries had a long, complex, and well-developed cuisine—way more long and intricate than France or Italy or America—and the idea that two days here and two days there would be anything more than a dilettante’s layover was absurd. But—and I’d used the analogy just recently with Nelly when we were talking about my three days with Sartory and the cooking of Mexico—this was learning a few chords from our scales, and it was up to us to figure out how to make rudimentary, then more advanced, music from it later on.

We each had different reasons why we were more excited for this class than we’d been for any other, except maybe Skills, when we first felt a stove’s heat on our faces. Adam, for one, was obsessed with the happy meeting of French or American food with Asian food, though he refused to call it fusion because the word had connotations of badly imagined food pairings, like taco pizza or something. He idolized Jean-Georges Vongerichten (who was living out Adam’s dream), had spent time in Thailand, Japan, and Vietnam, and saw these three weeks as an opportunity to let some seeds that had already been planted start germinating.

I myself suffered from a lot of misapprehensions about Asian cooking that I wanted to diffuse. I couldn’t figure out why every one of my stir-fries tasted fundamentally the same, or why the wok I used at home didn’t transform ingredients so they tasted like dishes in Chinese restaurants. I understood that adding lime leaves and coconut milk to a dish made it taste vaguely of Thailand, but very little beyond that. Once in a great while, I’d open one of the two Asian cookbooks I owned and make an attempt. But not often; I didn’t have many of those ingredients on my shelf. To make the dish, I’d have to trek to Chinatown or Jackson Heights in Queens, drop a small pile of money, and then bring them back home, where the volume of new and unfamiliar ingredients felt intimidating. I’d learned enough so far at school to look back and know why: You didn’t just toss ingredients together. You had to finesse them, build with them. You didn’t mix flour and stock together, crank the heat under it until it got thick, and call it gravy. There were a lot of intricacies involved. I wanted to see those intricacies performed by expert hands. Plus, I loved korma. Any type of korma. No matter how bad, how greasy. When I paged through my recipe packet, I saw the dish on the menu during the Indian portion of the class and got really excited.

A few of the people in the group were still so young and unexposed to much beyond the small towns in Georgia and Texas and Florida where they’d grown up that this was truly an exotic new world, one that had nothing to do with the moo goo gai pans and lo meins on
the standard green-and-red-printed take-out menus from strip mall restaurants.

And as for the three Asian students in the class—Sitti, Joe, and Yoon—I suspect they were cracking their knuckles and waiting to kick everyone’s asses. Since Sitti was from Thailand, I resolved in advance to stick close by him, if possible, when Thai day arrived. He’d recently won a cooking competition in Manhattan for some of the Thai dishes he’d cooked at home. He never mentioned his win to any of us, but we’d heard about it through the rumor mill.

Outside the classroom kitchen, at a little past 1:45, Adam finally stood up from examining the contents of the bins on the cart and announced, “This is going to be a good way to end the year.”

We were milling around, clapping one another on the shoulders in mute, male affection. We weren’t clapping Tara on the shoulders. But the tensions that had been building in prior classes among all of us—the tensions of long days under pressure, the irritations with people’s bad kitchen habits, their sloppinesses or shortcuts, reiterated day after day—none of them were there this afternoon.

I was in an especially good mood. Over the weekend I’d watched
It’s a Wonderful Life
, and every time I watched it, I spent a few days afterward in love with life and humankind. I loved Christmas. It made me sentimental and sappy. I had also watched
Gimme Shelter
in honor of the anniversary of Altamont and had been singing Rolling Stones songs to myself ever since.

Smythe arrived, well over six feet tall and slender, and we followed him into the kitchen.

“Okay,” he said, moving down a long bank of six worktables stretched end to end, walking back and forth and around, “your assignments are taped to the fridge. Find your assignment, find your partner, find some cutting boards, find some bains-marie. Get yourselves set up. Lecture in five minutes.”

The worktables took up most of the room. Behind the tables, opposite from the door, was a squadron of huge, industrial-sized woks sitting over gas jets. A tandoor oven stood just beyond the woks. At the
opposite end of the worktables sat a deep fryer and a steamer. We took it all in for a moment, then fell out to discover what we were doing and who we were doing it with. Brookshire and I were partners, and our assignment that day was to make a dish called “Aromatic Lamb Shoulder with Mushrooms.”

Brookshire and I got ourselves set up side by side and were about to go digging for ingredients when Smythe started his lecture. He did a tour first—a quick demo on how to turn the woks on, where dry ingredients went, which refrigerator we’d use, all the minutiae. We were all shoulder-to-shoulder in a half circle around him. Then he said, “I know this is insane. I know that there is no way—not a chance in hell—to become literate in Chinese cooking in just a few days. Or Korean cooking. You guys”—he indicated Joe and Yoon, who were both Korean—“you guys have spent your whole lives becoming literate in Korean cooking and I bet there’s still more you could learn.” Joe and Yoon nodded. “But I propose this to you. Braising is braising the whole world over. Sautéing is sautéing by any other name. You cook green beans to the same point of perfection in China as you do in Provence. The flavors might be new, they might be unfamiliar, but not for long. I’m your guide here. I’ll show you what you need to know.”

Smythe continued. “You are not to use recipe sheets in this class. You can write down a few basic things on index cards—ingredients, some notations about method and technique, but you need to have this stuff internalized. If you follow a recipe blindly, you’re never going to really get that recipe into your blood. You need to memorize it, envision it, see it in your head. Then you’re going to be cooking. But not if you’re doing cook-by-numbers. If you get flubbed up, if you lose where you are with your recipe, you can come up and look at the book up front. But keep in mind, I start removing points from your daily grade for each second you’re standing there trying to figure out what you should already know.

“If you find yourself short of an ingredient, you have until two fifteen each day to put it on the supplemental order. After that, you’re shit out of luck. And your grade will suffer for it. You need to be prepared and organized.

“I’ve heard from Chefs Coyac and Sartory that this is a particularly strong group. That there’s a lot of talent here. I want to see it come out. I
need
to see it come out because we have so much to do and so, so little time.”

He looked at his watch. I looked at mine. It was 2:15. Dinner was at six.

Smythe said, “Let’s discuss China.” He began with geography, breaking China apart into provinces, discussing which foods were indigenous to which province, foreign influences, the economics of each region. As he spoke, every word was echoed by the small cacophony of our pens scratching in our notebooks. He went on to talk about different dynasties, then about soy sauce, delineating each of the several types, the differences in character not only between those types, but between brands of the same type. He took the same tack with rice wines. Bean pastes. Different tofus, and how they’re made, from the harvesting of the soybean through to the finished curd. It was 3:00 now. The intensity of the pen scratching was letting up. But Smythe wasn’t. He was on to topography now, and how differing climates affected cuisine. From there to climate change, to the evolution of industry in China, to communism and Chairman Mao and some of his favorite dishes. Smythe took us to the influx of Chinese immigrants to California in the nineteenth century, of how what we know in America as Chinese food came to be and proliferate. It was 3:45. Pens and notebooks had been laid down some time ago.

“Well …” He trailed off. “I guess that’s probably enough for now. Wow, I’ve talked for a while.” I thought I saw a very faint trace of a grin flit across his mouth. “We have a little less time than we’d probably like, but hey … get cooking.”

Almost everyone—Adam, Tara, Brookshire, Sean, and I—looked pissed off. On the first day, with this cooking so few of us had ever been immersed in, having to serve a steady stream of students in a few hours, we could have really used any extra minutes lost to his lecture; most of the chefs I’d had barely went on for forty-five minutes. We careened around the room, bumping into each other, not so gently
nudging each other out of the way, groping through the dry storage and spice racks for ingredients, grabbing up vessels to hold them. Over at the pile of things from the cart, little violences were playing out. Yoon and Adam were after the same bag of scallions, the same cache of carrots and ginger. The bags were being pulled apart, the contents falling, the volume of voices edging up.

I was checking out one of the woks, and Smythe appeared next to me, reaching for a tool that hung on a hook on the wall. I thought about the twists, turns, loops, and free associating he’d just done for more than one hundred minutes. I don’t know why I said it, but I remarked to him, “So I guess you’re kind of the John Coltrane of lecturing chefs.”