Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (22 page)

On day seven, Smythe was at my shoulder watching me make miso soup. I was doing the ichiban dashi—the primary broth for the soup. I had a sheet of kombu, or kelp, in front of me.

“No, don’t rip it,” he said, putting his hands on mine to keep them from ripping the seaweed. “It makes it gooey if you don’t cut it with scissors or a knife, and that’s no good. Call me when you’re about to mix everything.”

I put kombu and dried bonito flakes into a pan with cold water. I heated it up, and, just before it boiled, pulled it from the heat. I strained it, and started mixing miso paste in. I was just about to add scallions and cubes of tofu. I called out, “Chef Smythe, I’m set.”

He didn’t look up. “You’re doing fine.”

It occurred to me that I hadn’t really witnessed him tasting anything—of mine or anybody’s.

I
’D NEVER BEEN A
big fan of really spicy food, because after a dose of heat, it seemed you stopped tasting anything but the tingle and burn
on the tongue. Almost everything we did in the Asia kitchen bore a heavy measure of hot pepper. My midsection was in an uproar, but I wasn’t able to figure out what was on account of peppers and what was on account of money.

Brookshire and I made roasted spareribs on day nine, and I had the extra assignment of doing vegetable crepes. It was Vietnam night. I toasted a cup of mung beans in a skillet and soaked them for an hour. I got coconut milk, rice flour, some water, and turmeric and mixed them together, and then added the beans. I pureed it into a batter, and got some of the black steel pans used for making this dish that Smythe kept under lock by his desk. I heated the pan until it was almost smoking. Yoon was next to me frying spring rolls, and a sheen of grease kept forming on my face. I added oil to the pan and ladled some of the batter in. It did what it was supposed to: It bubbled up in the center and the edges turned brown. I used a spatula to flip it, but the crepe stuck to the bottom and tore. After a few more seconds, the batter had toasted, then burned, and I upended it into the trash. Streaks of the burned batter still covered the bottom of the pan, so I scraped them out and tried again. The same thing happened. I tried another pan. The same thing. Another attempt, another mess. I tried once more.
The definition of insanity
, I remembered reading,
is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result
. I called out for Smythe. He came over to me.

“What’s the problem?”

“They’re sticking. I’ve tried five times.” A trickle of sweat ran down my back. Service was about twenty minutes off.

“Well, the problem is, these pans aren’t seasoned.” He was picking at the crust on the bottom with his fingernail. “Okay, well, here’s how you season a pan. Heat it up. Keep it heating. See how it’s smoking? Okay, now we want to rub some oil into it. Now, wait for it. Wait for it. Okay—it’s smoking again. Rub in more oil. We want to keep doing this for a while.”

So we kept doing it for a while. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Twenty. He stood there with me at his elbow seasoning the pans.

Service started and had been going for ten minutes. He was still with me, seasoning. Finally, he asked for the batter. He poured it in, waited until it bubbled, then went to flip it. It stuck and tore and began to burn.

“Shit,” he said mildly. He tried with the other pan. Same thing. “Dammit.” He pushed the pans off the burners. “Did you rest your batter?”

“For a few minutes, I guess. But not for all that long.”

“It might be the batter,” he said. “But these pans really need more seasoning. But it’s past 6:00 now. Well, no crepes tonight.” He walked away. Maybe it
was
the batter. It didn’t matter, though; I had nothing to do now during service. I went over to the sink and washed some dishes.

Later, I walked by his desk and saw his clipboard out. It had our daily grading sheet on it. I saw something marked next to my name and—though it was hard to decipher his handwriting—saw the words “bad” and “burnt crepes.” I was getting marked down for that whole thing. I felt a dull hysteria rise up shrieking from my gut. I breathed in and out for a few seconds.

After we were done cleaning, we had a lecture. It started off at 8:30 p.m. about Vietnam and colonialism, covering the war through the fall of Saigon, then the rise of the Khmer Rouge in neighboring Cambodia, but through some miraculous stream-of-conscious improvisation, had, at 9:50, veered into the world of hotel management. Smythe was waxing about the price of towels, then about linens. He had been on about napkins for a few minutes and he lost my attention. I wasn’t sure how many more tanks of gas I had left in the bank account, and Christmas was just a week away. A pain right below my eye, near my sinus, began to pulse. I really needed money. I had no writing prospects on the horizon. I had just taken a hit on something that I had no idea how to fix. I wondered if I could have done something different. I wondered how many points I was losing. I heard the word “napkin” again. My jaw was clenched tight enough to hurt.

F
ATE SOMETIMES PATS YOUR
head: The next morning, when I checked my e-mail, I was offered a big freelance writing job. It would cover some expenses for a couple of months. It did, however, mean taking a little time off from school. Because the CIA schedule was broken into three-week chunks, it wasn’t difficult to take a break here and there, and many people did. But it also meant that, if I took more than one three-week block, I would be assigned to a different group when I came back. I spent the morning walking through the house and thinking. I texted Adam and asked him to meet me about an hour before class and he agreed.

He was at a table in the cafeteria when I arrived, eating black bean soup from the Americas kitchen. After I sat down, he scraped the bottom of the cup, licked his spoon, and pushed them away.

“Hey there, fuzzy britches,” he said. “Feeling better today?”

I told him about the money drought. Then I told him about the writing job.

“Oh, man,” he said. “I think I see where this is going. How much time are you going to take? Are you going to be in Quantity Foods with us in January?”

“I think two blocks. When I come back from externship, wherever the hell that’s going to be, I’ll have to take the Quantity Foods course before I can keep going. So … me … this group …”

“Shit. Really? Shit. I had one ally.”

“With these guys it might be a lost cause. I’ve never read Sun Tzu, but if I had, I bet there’s an appropriate quote.”

Fate gave me one more little pat on the head: My assignment for the last two days was to cook korma.

The first night I cooked the korma was an experiment, noting problems that cropped up and then noting how to fix them. I hadn’t used the woks much during the Asia class and didn’t comprehend how powerful the gas jets were, burning the hell out of my onions within a few
seconds. The cashew nuts, which were supposed to be soaked, then ground into a paste, needed to soak longer. The recipe called for fifteen chopped Thai Bird chiles, but upon tasting, my tongue and throat felt seared. I wrote on my recipe card that three would probably do the job.

We took our final that night, tasting all the same bean pastes, fish sauces, and soy sauces we’d been training ourselves to recognize for the last two weeks. It was easy.

Smythe gave his final lecture that night, a review of trade routes, wars, colonialism, and commerce that tied all the countries we’d looked at together. He gave an extensive history of Indian vegetarianism that led to a discourse on how the real money in restaurants came not through big savings but by saving a few pennies here and there so they added up. He talked about the capsaicin contents of different peppers. Then he sent us home.

The final night was an anticlimax. It was the last class before Christmas break, and very few students came in to eat. We served maybe ten of them all night. Which was a shame, I thought, because my korma had come out really well. I’d heated the water for the cashews and simmered them for a few minutes, leaving them to soak for a good hour. I monitored the temperature of the wok really carefully so the onions turned translucent and golden, not brown. I cooked the ground cumin, cardamom, coriander, and fennel in oil until they were fragrant. I simmered the lamb at a low temperature for an hour and a half, twice the time the recipe indicated. I seasoned, tasted, and reseasoned at a dozen different points. The result was terrific. At least, I thought so. At dinner, Gio and I were the only ones who had some. After dinner, Smythe told us that since it was Christmas break, all the food needed to be tossed and we could take home what we wanted. I packed up a good bit of the korma into a take-out container and decided to give it to Nelly’s parents, whose house I passed on the drive home.

Smythe called us one by one up to his desk. He was giving us our grades for the course. When it was my turn, I steeled myself. Given the e-mail he sent out on our second night, and the episode with the crepe
batter, and given that, as far as I could ascertain, he’d never tasted anything I made (and I wondered: “Did what I do
look
so bad that he couldn’t bring himself to try it?”), I was expecting a poor showing—C, maybe, or a C–. I stood next to him at his stool, looking at the computer screen.

“You did a good job this block. You did really well on the final, you kept yourself organized, I noticed that you and your partner each cooked the same dishes over and over and you seemed to be very interested in refining them. Here’s your grade.”

I craned in to see the last number on the spreadsheet: 91. An A–.

“Good luck, and I’ll see you around,” he said. He shook my hand and called up the next student.

At the end of class, we all clustered in the hallway outside the kitchen door. I wished everyone a happy holiday, then got in the car and drove off. With a couple of exceptions, it would be the last time I saw any of them again.

I
FINISHED THE WRITING
assignment, and I got paid. I wrote checks for rent, checks for utilities. I paid back money I borrowed to buy some Christmas gifts. I’d taken six weeks off already—two blocks—and to do the job, I’d need one more block. I called the CIA registrar’s office and explained what was going on. They were sympathetic. But I knew I needed to get an externship soon, or it would affect my GPA. And I’d have to return to school to take my cooking practical—a sort of midterm for the entire degree—before I could start the externship, and to take the practical you needed to be enrolled in a class. They suggested that I come back and take my Garde-Manger class and the cooking practical after those three weeks were up.

Garde-Manger wasn’t an easy class, but it didn’t have the pressure of a daily production schedule. You learned how to make sausages and terrines. You played with foie gras. You learned to smoke salmon and cure whole legs of pork to make prosciutto. You learned to compose classical hors d’oeuvre plates and make more contemporary hot
appetizers. Most of this stuff took time; a terrine was a two-day process, and the sausage recipes took three or four days. The prosciutto took more than a year; the ham we prepared now would be eaten by some other students in fifty-two weeks’ time.

John Kowalski, an alumnus of the class of 1977, ran the morning Garde-Manger kitchen. He was a stout guy with a mustache, and he smiled constantly, always affable and warm. Unless you asked the wrong question. If you couldn’t figure out how to put the meat grinder together, or if you needed some help lining a terrine mold, or you weren’t sure how to affix casings to the spout of a sausage machine so they didn’t tear, he was right by your side with a detailed explanation and demonstration. But if the answer to your question could be found in your recipe or the Garde-Manger textbook, or if it was something he’d covered during lecture, his voice rose with irritation.

He played music during most of the class over speakers on his computer, always the Dead, the Stones, or Dylan.

I liked my cooking partner, a woman named Liz. She was around nineteen years old, with long, straight, sandy brown hair and blue eyes. She played at being tough and callous; she loved extreme heavy metal and quizzed me constantly on bands I’d seen: Napalm Death, Godflesh, Pain Killer, Slayer. She had what she called “a pilot” of a television show on YouTube, in which she made Black Metal Cookies. Mainly this meant a camera was on Liz as she mixed a standard cookie recipe in her home kitchen to a soundtrack of Norwegian Black Metal, banging her head and throwing the devil’s horn sign. I thought it was so cool, I e-mailed the link to almost everyone I knew and watched it a dozen times.

Even though the class began at 7:00 a.m., which meant another round of getting up way too early to make the hour commute from Saugerties in the chill of early March, it was an almost idyllic place to be with the music playing and the relaxed pace. Garde-Manger put a premium on refinement rather than speed, and it was a nice change to be able to concentrate on finessing a dish without a deadline.

But the phantom of the cooking practical was hovering like a threat.

It’s ritual, a rite of passage. And difficult. You walk into a special kitchen constructed for just the purpose of the test and draw one of six menus out of a metaphorical hat. You know exactly which dishes make up each menu, but you don’t know anything else. You’ll need to make a soup, a protein, two vegetables, and a starch. Since you don’t know what you’ll get, you need to know six soups, six proteins, six starches, and twelve vegetables down pat. You’ve got two and a half hours to make the meal happen. You’re watched and graded at every step of the way. You need to score above a 65. Failure happens, though, even to perfectly good cooks. If you blow it once, you pay $150 and take it again. If you blow it a second time, you pony up $150 more and take it again. If you fail it three times, you’re screwed; you get an automatic fifteen-week suspension—but that’s probably the least of your problems. This is basic stuff. Can you roast a chicken? Can you deep poach a piece of salmon? Can you make a good beef stew? Each menu component is something you’ve done a few times before in the Skills II and III classes, and you’ve presumably had some success with them. As an added bonus, you have to pass an oral exam given a few minutes before the test too. All this is why I never thought ill of people who fail it the first time around, or who scrape by with an insanely low score. Sometimes you simply have a bad day, and sometimes that bad day is when you’re taking your practical.