Under the Table (18 page)

For a delicious variation of this recipe, replace the cheddar with ¾ cup of crumbled blue cheese. Omit the thyme and add a healthy pinch or two of coarsely ground black pepper. Top with some Onion Marmalade.

 

Makes about 1 dozen large or 20 small biscuits

Onion Marmalade

This is a wonderful condiment to have on hand. After the onions are cut, the marmalade requires very little work other than an occasional stir with a wooden spoon. It keeps for weeks in the fridge in a tightly sealed jar.

 

2 tablespoons (¼ stick) unsalted butter

1 medium yellow onion, chopped or sliced (see Note)

1 medium red onion, chopped or sliced

1 small Vidalia or other sweet onion, chopped or sliced

2 medium shallots, chopped or sliced

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1 tablespoon dark brown sugar

2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

Leaves from 2 sprigs fresh thyme

 

In a large saucepan, heat the butter over gentle heat until just melted. Add all the onions and the shallots and stir to coat evenly. Brown gently over low heat, stirring occasionally. Be patient and let the onions caramelize fully—the slower the better. Add salt and pepper to taste, and toss in the brown sugar. Once the onions are fully caramelized and soft, remove from the heat, stir in the vinegar and thyme, and let cool. Store in a tightly closed jar in the fridge. Let come to room temperature before using.

 

NOTE: I like to chop each type of onion a little bit differently, to give the marmalade an interesting texture. If you want something a little more homogeneous, feel free to chop everything fairly small or cut into thin slices.

 

Makes about 1½ cups

A
s we soldiered on through the long days of our second level of chef school, everyone began to get a little closer. We were all passionately interested in food, and while we came from many wildly divergent backgrounds, cooking played a big role in them all. The difficulties we faced every day, from the oppressive heat of the kitchens to the complexity of the recipes we prepared to the emotional hardships we endured as the butt of the chefs' never-ending sarcasm, all made for a strong bond between everyone in class.

And then there was Mimi.

Mimi was older than the rest of us students, but was loath to admit it. She kept her black hair long, in a swingy ponytail like a teenager, and her café au lait complexion was clear and totally un-lined. She wore only the latest trends from Diesel, Marc Jacobs, Miss Sixty, and Chanel, and carried a real Hermès Kelly bag. The rest of us shopped at Old Navy or thrift stores and carried shapeless totes, the better to squeeze in all the paraphernalia we needed for our jobs after school. Mimi didn't need an after-school job—or a job at all, for that matter. Word leaked out that she was actually a member of the ruling family of a small Middle Eastern country, one whose oil assets and ruthless oppression of its subjects were equally infamous. She was in chef school only in order to stay in the country, to fulfill the requirements of her student visa. At thirty-eight, Mimi wasn't really the typical picture of a student, but she was part of our class, for better or worse.

Midway through Level 2, it definitely began to seem like worse.
With our new, larger groups, there was a new social dynamic—people were suddenly tossed together and expected to work seamlessly, without disagreements, distractions, or discord. New social groups were forming, while old partnerships were lost. It was very much like being a high school freshman all over again—suddenly it was cliques, hazing, and gossip about who was sleeping with whom.

I was lucky to be working with a bunch of guys. There were none of the tense social niceties to be performed with them, which would have been totally lost on them, anyway. We were all out for the same thing—graduating first in the class—but with the guys there was no pretense, no need to cloak ambition behind politely bitchy conversation. Tucker, Ben, and Junior were just as single-minded as I in their devotion to the work. When we weren't going full tilt at the stoves, we spent a lot of our time trading stories back and forth, divided equally between great places we had eaten, dishes we had dreamed up, and sex. Well, mostly we talked about sex, partly because it seemed to be fading into a distant memory for all of us. Tucker had left his wife back in Michigan, working in a refrigerator factory; Junior
still
hadn't gotten laid; and Ben's girlfriend was spending the summer in France. Michael and I were still living in sin in our little apartment on Thompson Street, but pressure from school and the stress of renovating our new place a few blocks away were taking their toll, and there wasn't a whole lot of sinning going on. Not to mention that planning a wedding is hard work, and we seemed to have very different ideas about what we wanted. Michael wanted to trot down to City Hall and get it over with, and while I shuddered at the thought of a huge froufrou affair complete with a dozen bridesmaids in hideous dresses, I did want to have a little celebration. And wear a really pretty dress and drink Champagne, of course. We had had several arguments about it, culminating in Michael slamming the door on his way out of the apartment, leaving me fuming. I had seen photos of NATO summit meetings that were more amicable than some of our dinner table discussions.

We were all so tired at the end of the day that sex seemed like yet another fancy French recipe to prepare—lots of prep work, a few exciting minutes over a high flame, and then the inevitable cleanup. Between the jobs we all worked after school—Tucker had scored a paying gig at a restaurant downtown; Ben was interning at the famed Blue Hill restaurant outside the city; Junior helped out at a local bistro; and I spent my afternoons and evenings tutoring private school students and wishing I could escape the mind-numbing boredom—and the homework we did every night (memorizing and re-creating the dishes cooked that day and preparing for the next day's work), there wasn't a lot of free time for sleeping, let alone more active pursuits. So we talked.

There was something about all the heat, sweat, and hard work that made it easy to share confidences, and soon I was privy to Tucker's marital problems—he missed his wife and two little kids, and worried about leaving them home alone for so long. Ben was more circumspect in his feelings for his girl, Renee, but his stories were always very funny, and usually involved a self-deprecating (for-give the pun) climax. Junior's stories were always long, involved, and improbable. They were unintentionally hilarious as he bragged about exploits that we all knew he hadn't done, some of which weren't even physically possible. (I know, I tried.) So when we weren't frantically working or cleaning up, we were talking, getting to know a hell of a lot about one another. While we were friendly with everyone, helping out when it was needed or just generally chatting, we were our own little social island, independent of the rest of the class. This was one of the consequences of working in a brigade—much like a military unit, our loyalties were now more to each other than the class as a whole, like the Marines' motto of loyalty: “Unit, Corps, God, Country.” Ours was quickly becoming “Brigade, Class, Chef, School.” This is one of the reasons why I was unaware of the social machinations of Mimi until it was too late.

 

We were just back from running in our dishes to the chefs' table and were beginning the long cleanup before we could have our lunch when Imogene came rushing toward me. Imo and I had been friends since orientation, when we had found ourselves standing side by side, sipping Sancerre and ogling Dean Jacques Pépin. It turned out that we were both from Virginia, she from the suburbs immediately outside D.C., and I from a bit farther outside the Beltway. Though Imo had a few years on me—her two girls were in high school and college already, and she had already concluded a successful career as a computer programmer—we hit it off right away. Both of us were already firmly anchored to our lives outside chef school, and while we both loved it at The Institute, we were well aware that one day soon we would graduate and have to return to our lives out there in the real world. We would be chefs, with all the authority and ability that entailed, but someone would still have to do the laundry, walk the dog, and make the beds.

Though we were not above a spot of gossip about our fellow classmates, rarely did it escalate to the level of actually running to share a juicy tidbit, but here Imo stood, actually panting from her exertions. She was clutching a Diet Coke from the bodega across the street from the back entrance to the school, a popular spot for the students to hit during lunch—their cold sodas were half the price of those from the vending machines in the school hallway—and while Imo caught her breath, I eyed that icy can with envy. Because our brigade was short one member, we were often scrambling to finish our work on time, and rarely had a moment to wolf down lunch, let alone amble across the street for a cold drink. Before my thoughts could turn from merely envious to outright larcenous, Imo had pulled herself together and begun to speak.

“You'll never guess what's going on,” she whispered loudly, drawing Tucker and me into a huddle with her.

“Hmmm…Keri is pregnant with Junior's love child?” I hazarded,
making a gentle jab at Junior's most recent dating fiasco—asking Keri, the straight-arrow Mormon, out on a date to a bar.

“Please, old news already,” said Imo sarcastically, rolling her eyes.

“Just spit it out,” Tucker said. He was—he claimed—uninterested in gossip, but like most men, he secretly reveled in it.

“Mimi has made reservations to have dinner at Le Cirque 2000!” Le Cirque, the well-known warhorse French restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, was regarded by most of our chef-instructors as the most polished temple of haute cuisine in New York at the time. Le Cirque 2000 was its most recent incarnation.

“Well, lucky Mimi,” I said, trying to keep the tinge of envy out of my voice. Mimi had money to burn, literally. In spite of her Muslim upbringing, Mimi had taken up smoking cigarettes since starting chef school, and would often buy cigarettes by the carton to give to our classmates—at more than ten dollars a pack, this was not an insignificant gesture, and one that had won her more than a few fast friends. Le Cirque was famous for its excellent food, incredible wine list, and truly spectacular bills. Mimi would definitely need her daddy's money for this jaunt. Still, as envious as I was about Mimi's trip to the temple of French food in America, I didn't think it merited Imo's exertions or the air of suppressed emotion still evident on her face. I was right, there was more—much more.

“She isn't going alone,” Imo said, her face now twisting in a grimace.

“She has a date?” Tucker asked, his face not quite able to conceal his disbelief. Mimi looked pretty good for her age, but it was definitely a case of mutton dressed as lamb, as my mother would have said.

“Well, in a way,” Imo said.

I was losing patience—I was hungry, tired, and hot, and we still hadn't finished cleaning up. If Imogene didn't stop being mysterious, I was in danger of losing my already frayed temper.

“Dish it. NOW!” I shout-whispered.

And so Imo told us.

Turned out Mimi was going to Le Cirque with eleven of her friends from school, precisely half our class.

Imo, Tucker, and I were not in the half that had been invited.

That was enough for me, and I lost the tattered remains of my once-sweet disposition.

“BITCH!” I shouted, too worked up to mind the warning look Chef shot me from across the room. Since beginning chef school, my vocabulary had gone from Ivy League to Teamsters convention, but in this situation, no other word would have sufficed. I really couldn't believe it. It wasn't so much that I hadn't been invited, though that slight did sting. It was more that Mimi was deliberately dividing our class into two groups, those who belonged at the table of popularity and hipness, and those who didn't. As far as I was concerned, no one in our class deserved the title of hipper than thou, and most especially not Mimi. She tried too hard, a cardinal sin for coolness. Still, why hadn't she invited me? It wasn't as if I disliked her, or even that the two of us didn't get along. I got along with everyone in the class, even Penny, who seemed to have a burgeoning persecution complex and would often complain to me that other students in the class were out to get her. Apparently I could befriend someone with a mental disorder, but not a social climber. It was too much—too much drama and hurt feelings for a group of people who were supposed to be adults. Looking at Imogene's downcast face, I resolved that I was going to do something about all this foolishness, and the sooner the better.

So when Mimi sauntered back into class after lunch, her chef 's jacket still redolent of the smoke from all those free cigarettes she'd handed out, I politely asked if I could have a word with her. Instead of retiring to the recycling closet where the school kept all its cardboard, cans, and paper and where most private conferences were held by our fellow Level 2 students, Mimi wheeled around with a hostile look in her eye. This was not the best beginning for a confrontation, but I wasn't one to run from a war of words, especially when we were quickly drawing a clutch of onlookers from the class. Looking down
at her (thank God I had the advantage of height, at least!), I cleared my throat and began.

“Ummm, hey, Mimi, I heard you are going to have dinner at Le Cirque with a bunch of people. That sounds like so much fun. Mind if Imo and I come?” I could almost hear my grandmother rolling over in her grave. Her rules of etiquette, which she drilled into me from a very tender age, were written in stone and absolutely immutable. Where I came from, people did not invite themselves to a party. Of course, where I came from, excluding people from parties in the first place wasn't done, either. Hoping that mine was the lesser of two mortal social sins, I sent a mental apology to my ancestors and waited for Mimi's response.

It was much more brutal than I had anticipated. Flipping her long black hair over her shoulder, she hissed, “Yes, I have a table for twelve at Le Cirque. It is the private chef 's table in the kitchen. Unfortunately, I have already invited people, and you two didn't make the cut. Now don't make such a big deal out of it, crybaby.”

With that, she turned on her heel and left me standing there, trying to hold my guts in place with both hands after that violent social evisceration. She'd actually called me a name! That hadn't happened to me since the eighth grade, when, cursed with the dork trifecta of glasses, braces, and brains, I'd had a sign saying “Nerd Alert” taped to the back of my shirt.

Angelo tried to comfort me, his beefy paw patting my shoulder with all the gentleness of a black bear savaging an apple tree. “Darling, it's okay. You wouldn't have wanted to come anyway.”

Wait. A. Minute. I looked at Angelo in disbelief. “You're going?” I spat out, unable to hide my chagrin. Angelo was
my
friend. Mimi could invite some people in our class to her little party, but not
my
people. This was shaping into a social war of attrition, and I was standing on the deck of my sinking battleship. The only thing worse than inviting Angelo would be inviting one of my own little brigade.

Realizing that I had been outgunned and outmaneuvered, I wheeled away from Angelo's embarrassed explanations without another word and retreated to my brigade, hoping to cut off a sneak attack from the rear. I was too late; there was already a spy in my midst. I knew Tucker wasn't going, and I was certain that Junior wouldn't have made the cut, either—his puppyish antics were a source of amusement and gentle derision from everyone, but Mimi's scathing comments about Junior were well known. That only left Ben—quiet, unassuming Ben, whose sly humor often kept a smile on my face through the grimmest morning prep work. Ben, whose running social commentary on our classmates had often found an easy mark in Mimi's blatant pandering. He wouldn't defect to the other side, leaving his comrades in arms out in the cold, would he?