Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (23 page)

There were all sorts of stories about the practical, some of them true, some of them CIA lore. The stories about people breaking down in tears and leaving the kitchen midtest were true. The story about someone once fainting was pretty possibly true; I couldn’t get it definitively confirmed or denied—the instructors at school, all of whom took turns proctoring the test, seemed to enjoy keeping the rumors alive. The stories about people pissing themselves because of nerves were probably not true.

Failure almost always came down to poor organization. To prepare yourself, you needed to write down all the recipes—every one—leaving nothing out; it’s too easy if you’re in a rush to forget some crucial ingredient or vital technique. It was recommended in the strongest
terms that you create a detailed timeline for each one of the menus, listing which tasks needed to be done and by when. You were also given a study guide for the oral component. It had about a hundred questions on it that you might be asked, like: name five of the most popular seasonings in Chinese cooking; describe how to prepare sauce piquante; list five differences between sautéing and panfrying; what are the five basic color pigments and how does the presence of acid or alkaline affect their colors and textures during cooking?

I had been scheduled to take my practical on the second-to-last day of Garde-Manger, so I used extra time during the week to study. And get nervous.

Liz was scheduled to take it two days before me, in the afternoon, after class. The next morning after she’d gone, Liz stood unpacking her knives and tools when I came to our station.

“How’d it go?” I asked.

“Shut up.”

“No, seriously—how’d it go?”

“Seriously—shut the fuck up.”

I changed the subject. Later, I asked around: Liz had failed. She hadn’t told anyone why, and no one knew. She’d have to take it again a couple of weeks later. Liz was a solid cook, and I thought this was a chilly omen.

The night before my practical I stayed up until almost 1:00 getting my menus in order and going over and over the oral questions. I was up four hours later for class. I was incredibly nervous for the entire day.

At 2:00 in the afternoon, I arrived at the practical kitchen, along with the five others who’d be taking the test that day. I knew three of them from class. The kitchen was pretty small: a few equipment racks, a pair of refrigerators, shelves of ingredients and sanitation supplies, and six workspaces with six burners each and a small, reach-in fridge (a.k.a., a lowboy) below them. There were no sinks at any of the stations. Each work area was segmented from the others with a blue-tiled barricade.

I was prepared for every and all contingencies: I had all the possible recipes written out, a timeline for each of the possible menus, “shopping
lists” with all the possible ingredients. My stack of index cards was about an inch thick.

I was very much hoping I would not have to make hollandaise, one of my least favorite things to do. And if I could avoid making salmon—one of my most hated foods—I’d feel okay about it.

The start times were staggered by fifteen, twenty minutes or so. If you’re the last to go, you would have been waiting for nearly two hours before being allowed to start cooking.

We were given a tour for thirty minutes, and then loosed to go exploring, just to see where everything was. The instructor, Joseba Encabo, a gentle-seeming Spaniard with a soft voice and an occasionally impenetrable accent, called the first student over. It wasn’t me. But as I walked by I caught a glimpse of his clipboard and noticed my name was last. I felt unsteady on my feet from exhaustion and suspected this would be a long, long afternoon. I wasn’t able to tell what the menu would be, but as the time passed and the others began cooking—one person got the roast chicken with mashed potatoes, gravy, and consommé, another (mercifully) got the salmon and hollandaise, also with a consommé—the possibilities got narrower.

An hour passed. I spent that time walking through and observing at a distance, from time to time bumping into Encabo, who was doing the same thing. He’d stop, watch from over someone’s shoulder, staring at a pile of scraps or dirty utensils or pans. He’d watch how they stirred, how well they seared a piece of meat, and then make a mark on a paper on his clipboard.

The next-to-last person was called, a young woman I’d never seen before but whom others seemed to know. She did not appear to be a favorite of any of them. They muttered about her being incompetent and unpleasant. Apparently, this was her third time taking the test. She was assigned a shallow-poached fillet of fish. This meant that I knew exactly what my menu would be: beef stew, mashed potatoes, sautéed green beans, blanched root vegetables, and a beef consommé. I had never had much trouble with consommé—it always just seemed to work for me—but I’d witnessed others make a mess with it.

“Hey, Jonathan,” I heard. “Come here a minute, please.” Encabo told me he was making a switch. “Forget the consommé,” he said. “Do a cream of cauliflower soup instead.”

Then he started asking me questions, each one worth a few points: “What are the five mother sauces?”

“Velouté, béchamel, tomato, espagnole, and hollandaise,” I said.

“Good. And can you tell me what an emulsion is?”

I was anxious to get cooking and found my mind suddenly slippery. “Uhhh … when oil and a liquid are forced to coexist.”

“What does that mean, ‘coexist’?”

Words failed me. “When the oil molecules are forced to bond with the other molecules …” I was interlocking my fingers to illustrate this.

“But what holds them together?”

God? Destiny? “Uhhhh … another medium? Something in which the two incompatible molecules are suspended?”

“Maybe you mean a ‘stabilizer’?”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” I said with confidence.

“And how is an emulsion formed?”

“You … you …” I put my hands to work for demonstration purposes. “You beat the hell out of it.” I whipped my hands around. I was seriously tired.

He looked like he was pondering the nuances of the word “hell.” “Okay,” he said after a moment.

Thus it went for a while. He gave me a 100 on this part of the test. And I was given the go-ahead to start cooking.

I immediately preheated the oven to 375.

There were a few ingredients stowed in the lowboy: some cubed beef, green beans, a turnip. That was about it. I looked at my menu cards—stew, vegetables, potatoes, consommé—and then rocketed over to the storage fridge and commenced scavenging: small carrots for the root vegetables, a rutabaga, a whole lot of butter, red wine, and ingredients for the consommé: ground chicken (there was no ground beef), eggs, a few plum tomatoes, and so on. I grabbed potatoes to mash. There would be other things I’d need, but I could get them later on.

About ten minutes had passed.

Beef stew and soup both take a while. The soup could just sit on a back burner, so I figured I’d start it first. I started making the raft for the consommé: a rough chop of the onions, cutting up the tomatoes, separating the eggs. I beat the eggs and folded the other ingredients in. I went back to the fridge to get some stock. And it occurred to me that I had just made my first error.

“Forget the consommé,” Encabo had said. “Do a cream of cauliflower soup instead.”

Fifteen minutes had passed. Fifteen minutes had just been squandered. Nothing I’d prepped for the consommé could be salvaged for anything else. I toyed with the idea of just going ahead and making a consommé, but decided that could backfire. It hurt, but I tossed the ingredients.

Five students had gone prior. The pots and pans at the dish sink had piled into a small Everest. I would need a few of them, because there weren’t that many left on the shelf. One of the first people to go had finished and was beginning work on the pile. I told him which ones I needed and he said he’d take care of me.

I then made my second big mistake, the one that would truly come back to bite me on the ass. I didn’t get that at the time, though.

The base of a cream soup—broccoli, cauliflower, mushroom, whatever—is velouté, a sauce made of a roux and a stock. I had noticed that there was no espagnole sauce in the storage fridge. Espagnole sauce is a crucial component of the CIA’s beef stew recipe. It is something of a pain in the ass to make if you’re in a hurry. I was starting to be in a hurry. You need mirepoix, tomato paste, a brown roux, and stock. I’d deal with it in a minute, after I got the velouté going.

I looked at the clock and, man, a lot of time had passed. I started making a roux, enough for the velouté, working on a higher heat than I really should have. But I got it done, and added the stock bit by bit. I felt I was regaining that time. I let the sauce simmer.

I cranked the heat under a large sauteuse, poured in the oil, and started browning the beef. As it browned, I worked on mirepoix for
the espagnole, and skimmed the velouté. Once the meat was done, I deglazed with the red wine, poured in the stock, added a bay leaf, brought it to a boil, and put it in the oven. I’d gotten the time back. One hour, forty minutes to go—more than enough, way more—to finish everything else.

I cooked the mirepoix until it caramelized. I spooned in the tomato paste and let it turn a nice, rusty red. I added the stock, pushed it to the back burner, and let it simmer. The espagnole was under control. I started boiling water for the cauliflower, cut it up, blanched it, shocked it, and set it aside. I did the same with the green beans in another pot. I fabricated the vegetables. I was in great shape again. For a few minutes I just stood and watched things steam and bubble, entranced by all the alchemy I’d just worked. I went to skim the espagnole and noticed there wasn’t much flour rising to the top. I skimmed the velouté. I got the blender and made the cream soup. It was really good. One hour and ten minutes to go. I thought it was strange that there was still nothing to skim on the espagnole, but not strange enough to keep me from pouring it in with the already-simmering stew. I’d skim it later. An hour to go. I’d mash the potatoes last minute. I had the beans and the root vegetables set for a quick stay over the heat with some butter, salt, and pepper.

The dish sink was still mounded, and there was no place to take my dirty dishes. I tried to neaten the dirty pans at my own station as best I could. I wiped down what I could around the stove. Leaving the mess was mistake number three.

With forty minutes to go, I checked on my stew. I pulled it out and pulled the top from the pot. It looked watery. I tasted it. It tasted thin and almost acidic. Something had gone amiss.

It hit me just then: I had never gotten around to making the roux for the espagnole. I’d just forgotten. This was the root—the bedrock—of the problem. There was a significant paucity of flavor and texture to the stew. The forty minutes suddenly seemed very short.

I could make a roux, I thought, and get at least a twenty-minute simmer, maybe a few minutes more. I turned the heat to high under a
pan, added some oil, and went off to get more flour. The flour went into the pan, and I whisked it into the oil. I should have done it in increments. I also should have paid more attention and not turned my back to deal with the potatoes, because it took just a few moments for the roux to burn beyond salvaging. As I tossed it out, I realized too that Encabo had been watching me for the past ninety minutes. I had no idea what he’d seen.

I looked over at him and he was looking back at me. I might have just imagined it, but I think I saw him—very slightly—shake his head in a sort of rebuke. Something unpleasant bloomed in my stomach.

I needed the quickest possible fix here. When Encabo was busy evaluating one of the students who’d just finished, I dashed to the fridge and the dry storage. I took a bottle of balsamic vinegar, a bottle of soy sauce, a rind of Parmesan, and some cornstarch. I put a good shot of balsamic into the stew, followed by a few dashes of soy sauce, and then the rind. Soy and Parmesan add depth of flavor—what the Japanese have dubbed umami—and I thought I’d get some sweetness from the balsamic. I left it on the stovetop and brought it to almost a boil. The meat was not going to be that tender, but …

I got the potatoes in the boiling water. I was really pushing it, timewise.

I made a slurry of cornstarch and water, and, with fifteen minutes to go, added it to the stew. It thickened immediately. It still tasted off. I dumped in an immense spoonful of butter. It tasted passable.

Ten minutes to go. I speared a fork into one of the potato quarters and it felt done. I dumped them into a colander, put them into a food mill and started turning. That solitary potato piece was the only one of its brethren that had fully cooked. I scraped off the usable parts of the other potatoes and found I had about a serving’s worth. I turned the mill again, with great vigor, and squeezed another quarter portion out.

I mixed in the hot cream and the softened butter. I seasoned the potatoes and realized I simply did not have enough for the two servings I was supposed to present for evaluation. I eyed the cream of cauliflower soup, pondered my situation, and dumped a large ladleful
of the soup into my potatoes. I mixed quickly, tasted—actually, they were fairly tasty—and put them into a pastry bag. I piped them onto the plate in one of the silly curlicue designs the CIA seems to like.

It was just about time to be evaluated.

I plated the stew, one small serving on each of two plates. I cranked the heat under the root vegetables and then under the green beans. When I saw there was some activity, I plated those, too. I carried two cups of soup to a surface near the evaluation table. I had put the plates into the oven to heat up, and I took a side towel, grabbed the side of it, and carried the food over to Encabo’s desk. I was thirty seconds early and I took slow, shuffling steps. When I reached the instructor, he was still evaluating the young woman who’d cooked right before me. The thirty seconds passed. Then thirty more passed. Then a minute, and then another.

I wasn’t quite close enough to hear what was being said, but the woman did most of the talking. As she spoke, she gestured a lot with her hands and kept worrying her fingers.