Under the Table (10 page)

Vegetable oil

1. Preheat the oven to 450°F.
   
2. Pat the skin of the chicken dry. Gently tip a generous handful of salt into the cavity of the chicken (only inside the cavity!), being careful to get no salt whatsoever on the skin. (This is a cardinal sin in the kitchen—salt causes moisture to be released from the meat and coagulate on the surface. Moisture on the surface of anything means that no matter how hot the pan is, the meat will not form that lovely crust of caramelization that tastes so good and keeps the interior so moist. Poultry has a nice built-in pocket for any and all seasonings. Salt the cavity liberally, and as you season, remember to be generous! What are you saving that salt for?) Once the chicken is seasoned, pack the cavity with the mirepoix (the onion, celery, and carrot) and pepper to taste. Get ready to brown.
   
3. Place a large ovenproof sauté pan (not nonstick) over high heat. Turn that flame up as high as it will go and heat the pan until it is very hot. Pour a bit of oil in the pan; it should immediately begin to shimmer but not smoke. Quickly slide the chicken gently into the hot pan. There will be some spitting, so stand back a bit. Brown the chicken on all sides over high heat—back, breast, and sides. This should take about 3 to 4 minutes per side.
   
4. Remove the chicken from the pan—gently, to avoid puncturing or tearing the skin. (This is hard to do faultlessly. I have found that inserting my tongs into the body cavity will sometimes work well. If you get truly stuck, sliding a flexible spatula underneath the chicken and resting another spatula gently on top of the chicken for balance will usually do the trick to get the bird out of the pan. A further piece of advice: Take the pan off the heat if you think you need some more time to remove the chicken successfully from the pan. There is no need to rush or to let the poor thing burn.)
   
5. Drain most of the fat from the pan. Return the chicken to the pan breast side up, and pop it into the oven. After 15 minutes, turn the oven down to 400°F.
   
6. With a spoon, gently scoop up some of the fat from the bottom of the pan and baste the chicken with it. All that time spent browning the skin of the chicken means that it is already gloriously crisp and (hopefully) perfectly browned. Baste using only the clear fat in the pan—using some of the opaque “juice” from the chicken will only make this crackly skin soggy. Fat will just crisp it a bit more. Depending on the size of the chicken, at 400°F, most chickens will be done after another 30 to 40 minutes. Continue to baste with the hot fat accumulated in the pan every 15 minutes or so.
   
7. Use an instant-read thermometer to test for doneness. Insert the point into the thigh of the chicken, being careful to avoid the thighbone, and when the internal temperature registers 155° to 160°F, the bird is done. (I know, I know, if you read the care labels on poultry, they advise that you cook until the temperature reaches
   180°F, or until the bird spontaneously combusts, whichever comes first. That bird, too, will be done, but so dry I don't really advise eating it. Do keep in mind that after the bird comes out of the oven, the internal temperature will continue to rise by as much as 10° to 15°F, and this can mean a perfectly cooked chicken becomes overdone. It can always go back in the oven for a moment or two, but nothing can save it when it has been in too long.)
   
8. Remove the pan from the oven, and as before, gently remove the chicken from the pan. Put it neck-first into a stainless steel bowl, breast up. (Putting the roasted bird in a bowl neck down and breast up is supposed to enable the juices to flow gently back into the breast meat. It sounds weird, but Chef Jean swore it worked, and he was right.) Tent the chicken
   very
   loosely with foil. (If the foil is too close, it will trap steam—this means that the skin will quickly go from crunchy to soggy.) Let the bird rest for 10 to 15 minutes. Check the temperature in the thigh again if there is still some question about the degree of doneness.
   

That is a perfectly roasted chicken.

I
t had been an awful day at school. Everything had gone wrong, from spilling my coffee on my uniform in the morning to struggling over a cheese soufflé that failed to rise in the afternoon. I blamed Tucker for overcooking the béchamel sauce that is the base of every soufflé, and Tucker blamed me for underwhipping the egg whites—a ridiculous charge. I whipped the eggs until they were so stiff they could have arm-wrestled with Angelo, but the whites were left to sit, waiting for Tucker to cook and cool his béchamel, and so they deflated. We ended up bickering throughout the afternoon, and even Chef Jean couldn't get us to quit our sniping at each other. When class finally let out for the day, I was in such a bad mood that I stomped out of the classroom without even telling Tucker good-bye.

At least the schools were finally out for the summer, and I would not have to hurry uptown to tutor my flock of spoiled, lazy students. Most of them were good kids, and they certainly had a lot on their plates, from advanced placement classes to piano lessons to ballet and baseball and soccer and charity work. But there were a few students who were simply too lazy to do their own work. I was paid fifty bucks an hour to read
Pride and Prejudice
aloud to one freshman from Dalton, a spoiled scion of a sporting goods empire, because it was “too boring” for her to read herself. Her mother offered me five hundred dollars to write her final English paper for her, and while I needed the money badly, I couldn't say yes. It was too much like selling my soul. Not to mention that her English teacher would not have believed for a moment that “little Andrea” had managed to write anything other than a text message.

With no plans for my afternoon, I decided to go for a run in Hudson River Park, along the West Side Highway. Even on a hot afternoon in July, there would be a cool breeze coming off the river, and it would be a good way for me to relax and forget about my quarrel with Tucker, my less-than-stellar performance so far in chef school, and even keep my rear end in pre–chef school shape in the event that I was ambushed by Ben again.

I hurried through the crowded streets of SoHo to my little apartment, threw on my running shoes, and hit Spring Street, following it west against traffic to the river. I jogged along, watching the landmarks of the West Village slowly come into view on my right as I ran uptown. There was the small clutch of strip clubs and peep shows, a last holdout against the wealthy gentrification slowly changing the face of the West Side and of the city as a whole.
Well, if I flunk out of chef school,
I thought gloomily to myself,
I could always get a job at the Carousel Club. And then again, maybe not,
I thought, as I glanced down at my less-than-curvaceous frame.

I thought about the progress I was making so far. Or not, as I sometimes felt. I had learned to use my knives properly, and could turn vegetables into perfectly even matchsticks or fine dice. I could roast a chicken pretty well, and had turned out some beautiful omelets at last, but there were still so many things I couldn't do, or couldn't do well enough. While Tucker and I had gotten the hang of making French fries pretty easily, I couldn't exactly go home and polish my skills in my tiny galley kitchen, which was the size of a dishwasher. More recently, we both had failed at making soufflés, and as much as I wanted to blame Tuck, I knew that it was my fault, too. I had tried to make a
tarte aux pommes
as a special treat for Michael, but my homemade
pâte brisée
crust was gummy. I felt like I was going backward instead of forward with my skills; gone were the days when I could mindlessly whip up some new recipe for dinner—cutting out time-consuming steps, chopping any old way, using whatever pan I had handy. Now I repeated lessons learned in
class over and over, trying to get every single part absolutely perfect. Even making something a dozen times was no guarantee I would have every step memorized and perfectly executed. And even if I did finally make a perfect béarnaise sauce, or my
oeufs en gelée
were breathtakingly gorgeous, Chef Jean would never see them. He only saw my fumbling efforts in class. I longed to imitate his polished maneuvers, the offhand confidence instilled in his gestures. His every movement, from rolling out dough to adding a pinch of salt to the whisking egg whites was swift and certain. I knew that it took Chef Jean a lifetime of kitchen work to perfect this, but this knowledge didn't stop me from wanting to be that good, right now!

As I thought about how long it would take me to be a chef like my teacher, the glass-and-steel Richard Meier high-rises on Perry Street loomed up on my right. Once I drew even with them, I knew it was time to turn around and sprint for home—a round-trip of about three miles. I slowed from a run to a trot, checked the traffic around me on the bike path, and crossed on the crosswalk. As I was halfway across, head down, still thinking about Tucker and how school was going, someone shouted “LOOKOUT!”

WHAM! The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the tarmac of the path, ten feet from the crosswalk. Blood was running into my eyes and down my white T-shirt and making a puddle on the ground around me. One of my tennis shoes had come off and was lying on the ground, looking lonely. I was confused. What had happened? Someone was retrieving my shoe, and someone else was holding me down, telling me not to move until the ambulance got there. Ambulance? A few feet away, I saw a bicyclist pulled over, the front wheel of his bike bent and one of his handles twisted in the wrong direction.
Oh. I must have collided with the cyclist. But where did he come from?
I had looked both ways before crossing on the crosswalk. The only person around had been a woman doing yoga on the grassy median. She was still here, holding a T-shirt to my head to stop the bleeding and talking to the EMT workers who had parked
their ambulance right on the path, lights flashing and siren wailing.

“That man flattened this poor girl!” the woman said, and I was grateful that someone was here to stick up for me. The medics loaded me into the back of the ambulance, and a police officer was talking to the cyclist as we pulled away. We shot through the rush-hour traffic to St. Vincent's, the overcrowded, overworked, under-funded hospital that serves most of lower Manhattan. On the way, one of the medics took down my information, checked my blood pressure, disinfected the many cuts and scrapes that covered most of my body—I had several square feet of road rash on both thighs and calves, and most of the skin on my right arm had been scraped away—and entertained me with stories of how they were often called to another culinary school uptown to treat the many deep cuts and burns the students received. I started to feel better about my own career at school—at least I hadn't chopped a finger off yet!

The medic (named Jim) looked at the cut on my scalp, which was still bleeding profusely. “Oh-oh. Looks like stitches for sure. Mmmm, it's a bad one. You might need a dozen of them. That's an ugly cut. We'll definitely have to shave off some of that blond hair of yours.” With that, he began quizzing me to see how my response time was. It was slow, and I was still a little fuzzy. I couldn't remember anything about the accident, or anything leading up to it, just the failed soufflé, which I told Jim about in detail. Jim let me talk, and even use his cell phone to call Michael. It took me a long time to remember what his cell phone number was. When I finally did get through, I told Michael to meet me at the hospital.

When we arrived at St. Vincent's, Jim helped me out of the ambulance (I was still feeling a little wobbly) and into the hallway of the ER. He handed my file to a nurse, covered me in a blanket—the afternoon was still very warm, but I had started to shiver with cold. Shock and leftover nerves, Jim told me, nothing to worry about. Then he was gone and I sat alone in the hallway for what seemed like hours. Finally, a frazzled nurse swept by and, without even
glancing at me, said, “The doctor will see you in room 3. Please have your insurance card out so that we can make a copy for our files.”

Oh. My. God. I had just realized I didn't have health insurance. When I quit my job, I thought about signing up for the supplemental COBRA insurance, but at $150 a month, I just couldn't afford it. And I definitely couldn't afford this. The ambulance ride alone was enough to bankrupt me. In a panic, I fled the ER, tearing past the security guard and right into Michael's arms. He recoiled. I was still wearing my bloody shirt, and dried blood flaked off my face. Michael can't stand the sight of blood, and while I could tell he was concerned, he was also trying very hard not to look at the blood, the scrapes, or the bruises rapidly forming. So he was looking everywhere but at me.

Early evening was falling, and Michael hailed a cab. He was trying so hard to comfort me, without actually coming into contact with any of the nasty-looking scrapes or cuts still oozing blood, or touching any of the bruises that seemed to be sprouting like dark purple fruit everywhere. (I could feel the one on my bum with every pothole the cab hit. It was sure to be the size of a stockpot.) He settled for squeezing my hand—I didn't have the heart to tell him he was only grinding stray bits of grit more deeply into the road rash on my palm. He was even paler than I, and it was easy to see that he was really upset. When we finally arrived at the apartment, Michael let me in (my key chain had been broken and the keys lost in the accident) and then dithered in the doorway. A quick check in the mirror showed just how bad it was. I looked terrible, more like steak tartare with a side of overripe eggplant than a person. I showered off the blood, trying to avoid getting anywhere near the head wound (which was still trickling blood) and put myself to bed. Instead of joining me, Michael hemmed and hawed and finally came out with it.

“I thought I would play poker with the boys this evening, but you don't look so good.” Michael had begun playing poker in an
underground club on West Fourteenth Street a few evenings a week. I usually didn't mind, since I was busy working in the evening anyway, but lately I had begun to come home late at night to an empty apartment, and the dinners I cooked got cold on the stove before Michael came home from playing poker, sometimes as late as one or two o'clock in the morning. I was getting tired of spending my evenings with Spankie—her green eyes were no match for Michael's big brown ones, and, frankly, she always had tuna breath.

I sat in bed, my head pounding, every bone and muscle in my body sore. I felt even worse than I looked. I stared at Michael, who was hovering like an anxious student waiting for a pot of water to boil. I didn't think I was up for Michael's version of tender loving care, which veered toward microwaved Hot Pockets, chicken soup straight from the can, and celebreality TV on VH1. I definitely couldn't face that. “No, go ahead. I think I'm just going to crash. I mean, get some sleep.” Michael looked so relieved, his “Thanks sweetheart! Feel better! I love you!” came floating up the stairwell as he hightailed it to the club.

Hmmmph. He didn't have to agree quite so easily,
I thought to myself as I threw back some Tylenol and carefully eased my bruised butt into bed. I didn't even feel like having dinner—for the first time ever. This was not the way I had imagined my relationship going. I wondered if Michael and I had come to the end of things, after almost two years together. Were we just going through a phase, or was this the end of us?