Under the Table (3 page)

W
hile it was mere chance that I ended up across the table from Tucker on our very first day of chef school, it was no accident that we became such good friends and partners.

We couldn't have been more different. Tucker was a proud product of the absolute middle of the Midwest. Michigan born and bred, he had never left the state but once or twice, when he traveled to Chicago to eat at Charlie Trotter's restaurants. Tucker went straight from high school to a job on the assembly line cranking out car parts, and buying a house in the small suburb he grew up in.

Tucker came from a long line of autoworkers. His entire family—parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and siblings—were employed by General Motors at one time or another, before the industry took a dive and layoffs became more common than paychecks. When Tucker was laid off himself, he went into the repo business, reclaiming the cars, trucks, refrigerators, televisions, even the bedroom furniture of people who believed the economy would be golden forever, or at least until they caught up on their payments. It was nasty work, and Tucker disliked having to tow away the hopes and dreams of his neighbors. But it wasn't until he stumbled upon the Food Network one day after work that he began to dream of doing something different.

Mesmerized by the antics of Emeril Lagasse, and finding a hero in the macho posturings of Bobby Flay (an alum of our alma mater), Tucker began to believe that his hobby of fixing elaborate meals for his friends and family could be a career. He got a job slinging hash in a restaurant at night for the necessary restaurant experience while
he saved up money from his day job until he was accepted at The Institute.

By the time Tucker came east, he had a wife who worked in a GE refrigerator plant, and two kids under the age of three. Tucker was a man with a lot of responsibilities, and he was taking a gamble that school and the six months he would be out of work would eventually pay off. But Tucker loved to cook and he dreamed big, and those things, more than anything else, were what we had in common.

I'd attended a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts before settling down in New York and finding work in publishing. I had a nice apartment and a lovely, not to mention very handsome, boyfriend, but I wasn't ready for the sort of responsibility Tucker handled—forget kids, it was enough for me to share ownership of our cat, Spankie.

It was 8:00 am sharp on our very first day of class, and as I walked into the large room that was dazzlingly bright with the glow of many overhead fluorescent lights bouncing off the stainless steel workstations, ovens, pots, pans, sinks, and even the tools of my classmates, I saw that Tucker had taken up a spot at the front of the room, closest to our chef-instructor's dark green marble–topped lecture station. While I had been hoping for that spot myself, I was content to take the open spot across from him, determined that the foot that separated us, and put him closer to Chef, would not hinder my learning curve. And my parents thought I was too competitive. If I were competitive, I would have created a diversion and just snatched his spot when he was momentarily distracted. Okay, maybe I was a little bit competitive, but as it turned out, so was Tucker.

We eyed each other warily for a moment or two, and then I decided to introduce myself.

“Hi, I'm Katie, nice to meet you,” I said as I juggled my toolbox, knife kit, neckerchief, notebook, and textbook from one hand to the other, trying to get a hand free to shake with.

“Pleasure, ma'am,” said Tucker, as he grabbed a few things from
my failing grasp, setting them gently on the table, before he shook my hand. He had large hands that ended in blunt fingers, I noticed, and they were well scarred from doing manual labor. Despite their size, Tucker was not a tall man, and I looked him right in the eye as we shook hands. They were nice eyes, their corners upturned in a way that made him look almost elfin, and he had the beginnings of smile lines fanning out toward his temples. He was a few years older than I, it seemed, probably in his thirties, and it looked like he had been hard at work for most of his adult life. His small nose was garnished with a spray of freckles, and his face was balanced by a wide mouth, just now flashing a big grin. I realized I was staring, and tried to cover my awkwardness with conversation.

“So, how do you tie this stupid thing?” I asked, waving my neckerchief at him. I noticed his was perfectly aligned and the tails were neatly tucked out of view under the mandarin collar of his spanking new chef 's jacket. He was obviously already well ahead of me in the sartorial aspect of class. Taking the large, itchy bit of cloth from my grip, Tucker smoothed out the wrinkles I had managed to crimp into it and folded it in neat little accordion pleats from a large triangle to a flat rope almost an inch wide. Tucking the triangular end under, he deftly flipped the length of polyester over my head, tails dangling down either side of my neck. Undoing his own pristine knot, he then led me through the steps—something about a rabbit going around a tree twice, then ducking under to pop up again. Somehow, from all that nonsense, Tucker managed to turn my mess into a perfect knot, complete with two even tails. These I tucked into my jacket, and Tucker and I smiled at each other.

Things were going well—it seemed like I was making at least one new friend. Together, we took a moment to check out the rest of the class that was rapidly arriving and milling about the room. It was a confusion of students in various states of dress—everyone had managed the jacket and pants, but most were having the same trouble with their neckerchiefs that I had. There were two dozen
large red toolboxes scattered throughout the room—one for every student—and the bulky three-ring binders that were our new textbooks littered every flat surface. The babble of many nervous voices raised in conversation made further interaction with my new friend almost impossible.

I made my way to the quickly emptying coffeepot in one corner of the vast room and snagged two cups of the very dark brew. I threw some cream and sugar in Tucker's cup and brought it back to him as a thank-you for helping me. As I delivered it, I asked Tucker if he knew any of the other students milling about. We almost had to shout to hear each other over the sound of chatter bouncing off the gleaming white-tiled walls and orangey red–tiled floors. Because Tucker was in the school-sponsored housing on Roosevelt Island, he actually knew several of the dozen male members of the class, and was able to point to several women as fellow boarders. In fact, one of the other guys sharing our kitchen island was Tucker's roommate, a tall, gangly fellow with a name at least twice as big as he was. Before I could commit the many multisyllables to memory, Tucker said not to bother, that everyone was already calling him Junior.

Further discussion of our classmates was forestalled by the arrival of Chef-Instructor Jean and Assistant Chef Cyndee. Chef Jean was an impressive figure in his crisp chef 's whites, complete with a tall chef 's toque set at a jaunty angle on his curly black hair. His round glasses flashed in the overhead lights, and something about his sharp nose and wide mouth reminded me of a benevolent amphibian, like Mr. Toad in the children's classic
Wind in the Willows
. He seemed very nice, smiling good-naturedly at us all, and I immediately began to lose some of my first-day nerves. Assistant Chef Cyndee, on the other hand, scowled at all of us before barking sharply at us to sit down and shut up.

We were quickly brought to order and our first lecture began. Chef explained how this first level would work—every day, five
days a week, we would report to our classroom and set out chairs for our morning lecture, where Chef Jean would explain the culinary concept for the day and guide us through the basic recipes we would be preparing. After lecture we would break into teams and prepare two recipes before lunch. Sometimes we would get to eat our morning's efforts for lunch, if we were making
poulet au sauce chasseur,
for instance, or a
blanquette de veau à l'ancienne.
If we were making only salad dressings, mayonnaise, and veal stock, we would eat family meal—a hot lunch made by the students in Level 2 for all the students and staff of the school. After lunch we would make one or two more recipes, taste and critique each other's efforts, clean the kitchen until everything sparkled, and then we would be dismissed for the day at 3:00 pm sharp. This would be repeated every day, with weekly written exams and the occasional pop quiz, for six weeks. Then we would be passed on to the next chef-instructor for Level 2.

An hour later, after Chef had lectured us about everything from proper attire and footwear (again!) to the correct way to wash our hands and prepare vegetables, we were at last ready to begin working. We stacked away the chairs we used for lecture and resumed our places at the six large kitchen islands spaced around the class. Chef Jean then announced that for the rest of our first term of classes with him we would be learning and cooking with a partner. Not too surprising—pairing us off would be a good way for us to learn teamwork and cooperation in a fast-paced, physically demanding setting. I wondered how we were going to be paired off, as I looked nervously around at my possible mates. It didn't take long to find out. Chef Jean merely surveyed the class and said, “Take a look at the person standing across from you. Say
‘Bonjour'
and play nicely with them. They will be your partner for the next six weeks.” I smiled at Tucker, and he smiled back. While I wasn't quite prepared to say it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, it did have promise.

Tucker and I were well matched, it turned out. Both of us had lots of amateur kitchen experience, a bit of professional drudge work under our belts, and a burning passion to do well in class and beyond. While it wasn't always easy to divide the work evenly—we both wanted to do the challenging part of every recipe to show off our chops, and neither one of us wanted to just sit around, washing pots and waiting for water to boil—we were amicable about things. Tucker almost always beat me into the classroom, and he would set up both of our places with cutting boards, pots, pans, and anything else we might need for the day's recipes. For my part, on my way to class, I would stop and pick up coffee for Tucker: extra cream, extra sugar.

As the days passed and our routine took shape, I found myself relying on Tucker's steadying influence—when I worried that we were falling behind and rushed to turn up the heat under our pot of vegetables, it was Tucker's steady hand that turned the flame down before I could burn things. I looked forward to our study sessions when Tucker would ask for my help translating some of the French in our recipes to “plain talking.” We seemed to fit together, better than most of the other teams in Level 1, and soon we were working as one unit, a coordinated machine that peeled and prepped our recipes with increasing speed and accuracy. Chef Jean didn't compliment our efforts, but we had escaped the harsh criticism other teams suffered—so far.

While I couldn't understand the fact that Tucker wore acid-washed jeans and plaid shirts (occasionally with the sleeves removed) and smoked White Owl cigars he bought for a buck at the deli, he couldn't understand why I went to all the trouble of wearing a skirt or a dress to and from classes and why I would ever want to live in this filthy city in the first place. We loved to tease each other. Everything was fair game, from Tucker's Aqua Velva aftershave (he'd douse himself with it in the locker room after class was over for the day) to my unswerving devotion to coffee drinks that cost as much as a Big Mac. We also got to know each other very well—Tucker
told me about what it was like to fish the Great Lakes around Michigan, and I told him about growing up on a farm in Virginia. He brought me pickled bologna to try—a local specialty where he came from—and I brought him corn bread soaked in melted butter and dark buckwheat honey. We bonded over the comfort foods of our radically different worlds.

M
ichael was keenly interested in my new daily routine. We had gone from working down the hall from each other all day (we met in the elevator of the office building where we both worked), with frequent e-mail exchanges back and forth, to a rushed kiss hello/good-bye before I headed off to school and he headed off to the office. To earn some much-needed money—already monthly bills were coming in the mail for my student loan—I had found a job tutoring private school kids in everything from biology and algebra to Latin and medieval history, and often I would only make it home from the posh Upper East Side apartments of the little monsters after ten o'clock at night. That left enough time to make dinner, usually a rendition of whatever recipe I had prepared in class that day with varying levels of success, study the next day's recipes, and collapse into bed before doing the whole thing again.

I spent a lot of time describing Chef Jean and the other students to Michael, and at first he was jealous of all the time I would be spending at school. Despite my assurances that school was hot, sweaty, and
work,
not fun, I couldn't put his fears to rest until the night during that first week when I showed him my uniform. I was so proud of myself—checked chef 's pants, white chef 's jacket, I looked
exactly
like a chef!—I was eager to show off for Michael. I put on the pants. They came only in men's sizes, so I could either order one with an elastic waistband (Mom always warned me away from clothes with elastic. We both felt that it was a small step from that to lying around the house all day, eating store-bought frosting straight from the tub.) or guess what size pants to order. The woman
in charge of uniforms wasn't helpful. She insisted that all the female students in school had always made do with the elastic pants. Besides, she said, the elastic might come in handy. Chef school could be hard on the waistline. With that comment, I was determined to get the regular pleated men's pants. I ordered the smallest size they had and had them tailored to fit. I also ordered the smallest chef 's jacket they had—I was little, and the jacket was a loose fit on me.

I was anxious to show Michael how professional I looked, how cool, and so on my uniform went, down to the Hanes wifebeater-style tank top I wore under my jacket and the Doc Martens on my feet. We were allowed the choice of combat boots or chef 's clogs, both in black leather. No athletic shoes allowed. I debated buying a pair of clogs, but the Dansko ones all the celebrity chefs wore cost more than a hundred bucks. I had a pair of Docs left over from college (they kept out the piles of snow wonderfully, even if they lacked sex appeal), so I wore them, though after the first day of class, my feet hurt so bad from standing up all day, I had to hobble home in my most comfortable flip-flops. I bought some cushy insoles that made the long hours of standing a little easier, but my feet, used to tripping around town on stilettos, were having a hard time adjusting to their new utilitarian home. I tied my neckerchief around my neck and even tied one of my school aprons around my waist. All that I was lacking was the little absorbent paper hat we wore to keep our hair (and the sweat that poured off our brow) from getting in the food.

With a flourish, I swept into the living room, swishing my apron around me, and even doing a little runway strut—
work it, Chef Katie, you sexy
saucier,
you
. Michael burst out laughing, and kept laughing until tears rolled down his face. This was not the effect I was going for. I was totally dismayed and angry. For the first time, I considered resorting to violence—beaning my beloved on his noggin with a cast-iron sauté pan, for starters.

“Oh, ha ha ha. Oh, I'm sorry.” Michael was actually wheezing with laughter. “Oh, you look…fine. You look just fine, honey.” I
could tell he didn't mean it, because he looked like he would explode any second from keeping the snorts of laughter in. “You just look so…different. Not exactly your sexy self. Are those pleated-front pants?”

Oh, my God. Michael was right. What was I thinking? I was wearing pleated-front pants, combat boots, and a white polyester ascot! Of course I wasn't cute! I could only hope that Michael would forget about this image of his usually (somewhat) cute girlfriend before it had any lasting effects on our sex life. I would never wear my uniform in front of him again. How embarrassing.

 

I was only grateful that Michael couldn't see me in class the next day, as Chef Jean instructed we accessorize our dorky uniforms with a garbage bag worn as a raincoat. After the morning lecture, Assistant Chef Cyndee handed each of us our empty garbage bag. I almost balked, but the first rule of chef school is to obey all instructions, so on my big black garbage bag went. Attired now in shiny black plastic, we could begin.

As I stood there, sweating even more profusely than usual under my rustling plastic prison, I wondered what our garbage bags had to do with making stocks and sauces, the object of the day's lesson. Apparently making stock was a much more messy, unappetizing project than I had anticipated.

Stocks are the very essence of French cuisine, the foundation on which glorious recipes are built. We had mastered basic knife skills and several techniques for cooking vegetables, and a week into our schooling, we were ready to tackle the preparation of stocks. Bit by bit we were learning the building blocks of basic kitchen technique. A well-prepared stock forms the basis for almost all sauces in the classical culinary repertoire. Stocks also play vital supporting roles in many more complex preparations. This was the focus of our lesson: learning to build the basic stocks, and the nomenclature of the sauces derived from them.

All stocks begin with the same basic ingredients—bones, mirepoix, herbs, water, and time. The mirepoix, a roughly chopped mixture of onions, carrots, and celery—the holy trinity of French cooking—should compose a mere 10 percent of the total weight of the ingredients. All stocks also share the same mixture of herbs, known as a bouquet garni, which is always made up of bay leaves, parsley stems, black peppercorns, and thyme. Salt is never added to a stock; because stocks are a component of a more complex finished dish, the amount of saltiness of the final dish would be too hard to balance if the stock itself was presalted. Also, many stocks are reduced, perhaps several times, before they are used in a sauce. If the stock was salted to taste before reducing, it would be two or three times too salty by the time the stock was actually ready to be used.

Stocks are classified into two categories: brown stocks (
fonds bruns
) and white stocks (
fonds blancs
). Brown stocks such as brown veal stock, beef stock, game stock, and brown chicken stock are darker in color, as the bones and the mirepoix must be browned separately in the oven or on the stove before being combined and simmered in water with tomato paste. Brown stocks are also fortified from deglazing the pans used to brown the bones and mirepoix. The
sucs
(browned proteins fixed to the bottom of pans after searing or roasting) are dissolved in a bit of water or white wine and then added to the stock. The components are then covered with cold water and brought to a simmer. The bouquet garni is then added and the stock cooks slowly, never allowed to boil, for as long as possible, usually eight hours or overnight.

White stocks such as white veal stock, white chicken stock, and fish fumet follow the same basic master recipe, with a few small changes. Instead of browning the bones to be used in the stock, the bones are blanched—that is, they are immersed in cold water, brought to a brisk boil, and immediately drained. The mirepoix, green leek tops, and water are then added to the bones with the bouquet garni. Fish fumet varies from other stocks because carrots are not used as
part of the mirepoix (their naturally sweet flavor is considered to be overpowering to the delicate flavor of the fumet). Fumet is also not a long-cooking stock—the flavors should be fully developed in less than an hour, and in the case of small batches, a half hour's simmering time should be sufficient.

All of these directions seemed pretty straightforward to me, but nothing so far explained why the whole class was wearing industrial-size garbage bags. Little did I know.

The class began with the brown veal stock, or
fond brun,
because it is the most important and most utilized of all classic stocks. Two fifty-pound cardboard flats of frozen veal bones were delivered to the classroom. These babies were frozen solid, stuck together with remnants of blood and tissue still clinging to the huge shanks. These veal calves must have been
big
—the bones were easily as big around as my thigh. Chipping them into manageable hunks and then wrestling them into roasting pans sprayed frozen bits of blood all over the room. The bloody ice chips melted in the rising temperature from the blasting convection ovens, and I began to see the wisdom in protecting my freshly laundered chef 's jacket from the mist of defrosted blood drops quickly blanketing every exposed surface. The bones and mirepoix were soon browning nicely in their enormous, troughlike roasting pans, and once everything was deeply caramelized, we dumped it all into a huge, fifty-gallon Swiss kettle to begin the long simmering process that would turn these bones and vegetables into liquid gold. We used what looked like a fireman's hose to fill the monstrous kettle with water—Imogene needed all of Angelo's considerable mass and muscle to help her direct the spray into the vastness of the kettle. This was a piece of industrial equipment that could easily have found a new home on some South Sea island as a cannibal's chafing dish. That was it—less than a half hour's worth of work, plus skimming and simmering, and we had the beginnings of the great sauces. Now for the fish fumet.

Fresh from our success with the veal stock, we attacked the fish
fumet with a swaggering sense of surety. Stocks are a piece of génoise cake—there was nothing to them. Then we opened the bag of fish bones.

Rather, Marita opened the bag and promptly ran screaming from the room. Marita had come to school from her home in Santo Domingo, and while she spoke excellent English in a soft, sweetly accented voice, in her distress she lapsed into a long string of Spanish, and at first we weren't sure what had set her off. No one was particularly anxious to open the bag again, though. Jackie, the darkly lovely but quiet girl who had rocked the seventies look at orientation, helpfully translated part of Marita's remarks. Looking confused, Jackie said she thought she heard Marita say something about…monsters. Ridiculous. It was just fish! I prodded Tucker toward the bag, and while I held it, he reached one hand in and brought out what looked like…a monster. It was a huge fish head, mouth open in a mute roar, distressingly large tongue evident behind its sharp teeth. I didn't even know fish had tongues. Its bulging, gelid eyes were not yet cloudy. Almost everyone who was crowded around the bag took a long step back, but Tucker was totally unconcerned.

“Look here,” he said, his Michigan accent apparent in his vowels. “Everybody just calm down. This is nothing. I've caught bigger fish than this with my dick!” It was not a very politically correct thing to say, but it broke the tension in the class—for the first time, we felt like one team, not twenty-four students. We all laughed at the mental picture: Tucker, White Owl cheroot clamped in his teeth, his checked chef 's pants around his ankles, fishing hip deep in Lake Michigan.

There were a few more mean-looking fish heads in the bag, and a great many flaccid fish skeletons. There was also a mop bucket's worth of smelly fish mucus in the bottom of the bag, coating every morsel of fish we touched. Pretty soon the sticky substance was all over everything not already festooned in the fine spray of blood from the veal bones. We dumped everything into the huge sink and
rinsed it all off. Then Chef Jean dropped the bombshell. We would have to clean the heads before they were ready for the stockpot. The bright orange gills trailing from the fish heads would have to be yanked off and discarded. The eyes would also have to be removed. Each pair of students would be assigned one head to clean before adding it to the pot. Chef held up one hideously grinning skull and then plopped it on my cutting board.

“Darling, you will do this one. Tucker, he already knows his feeeshes. You should be careful next time you go fishing, you wouldn't want to lose that little bit of bait!” With that, he laughed, and then proceeded to demonstrate how to remove the eyes with a melon baller. It looked so easy when he did it—the whole thing just popped right out like a ripe piece of cantaloupe. I got out my melon baller, situated the sharp edge next to the gleaming orb, and scooped. That's when the eye turned to liquid and shot all over my garbage bag poncho. Ewww. The wisdom of donning the shiny black plastic garbage bags was patently obvious.

Once we finally wrestled the fish into their watery grave in the fish fumet, we were able to continue with our lesson at last. When the stocks finished their long simmer, we would begin to learn the classic sauces derived from them, but until then, we would learn the art of the emulsified sauce. Emulsified sauces can be hot, as in the case of hollandaise sauce, or cold, as in the case of mayonnaise, or room temperature, like salad dressing.

The common element in them all is the emulsifying agent—in most cases, this is an egg yolk, though mustard is also a powerful and useful emulsifier. Emulsifiers work by binding the fat in the sauce with the water-based flavoring, such as lemon juice or vinegar. Try whisking together oil and vinegar for a salad dressing. No matter how hard or long you whisk, and how much air you incorporate, the droplets of fat will eventually precipitate out of the vinegar, and the dressing will separate. Now try adding a tablespoon of mustard and repeating the process. With a few brisk swipes of the whisk,
something magical happens: the oil, vinegar, and mustard come together and turn into a thick, almost creamy sauce.