Under the Table (5 page)

I was trying to forget my earlier humiliation and focused all my attention on perfecting the right amount of dip and sway in my cocktail waitress strut without dumping shots down my shirt. Thirty seconds later, things were looking even better as fifteen shots were simultaneously drained and fifteen shot glasses were banged down on the table. I had never had a kamikaze shot before and thought they were a revelation. I asked Ricki where she had gotten the wonderful idea for these delicious shots. She flung down her shot glass and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand before answering, and I realized that her glass had joined a flock of other shot glasses gathering in formation in front of her.

“They're all I drink,” she slurred, stifling a hiccup.

Fortified with the fiery alcohol, I felt like now would be the ideal time to begin my campaign to win over Chef Jean. I could just make him out in the gloom of the dark bar, still sitting with the other chefs. As I was screwing up my courage to wander over and throw myself into the lion's den, he suddenly got up and made his way to the bar, empty glass in hand. Marvelous! I shot out of my seat, knocking it over in my hurry, and scurried over to intercept him before he could place his order.

“Bonjour,”
I shouted, perhaps a bit too loudly. “Make it two,” I added, turning to the bartender, who was just setting a small Stella Artois in front of my astonished professor, “and put it on my tab.”

That sounded awfully good, I thought. Now it was time to get out my rusty high school French, dust it off, and get to know Chef a little better. For fifteen minutes, I babbled on in broken French,
interspersed liberally with sweeping hand gestures, gulps of Stella, and long pauses when my increasingly fuzzy brain searched in vain for a long-forgotten verb form.

Chef looked at first startled, then confused (my vocabulary was not what it used to be), and finally his face broke into a grin, and he began rapidly firing French at me. I think I got most of it, though I got lost in the middle of his anecdote about jam-filled omelets—at least, I think that is what he was talking about. Another round of Stellas appeared before us, and I plastered on a grin and thanked Chef for his generosity, and looked around for a potted plant or anywhere to dump the suds as quickly and quietly as possible. This is when the wheels began to come off. I was in the middle of a long story about some seared veal kidneys I had eaten in a little bistro in Nice when I felt someone grab my elbow. I turned, a bit wobbly on the stool, to see Tucker mouthing frantically at me.

“What are you doing?” Tucker hissed, but before I could think of a way to say good-bye to Chef
en français,
Tucker physically dragged me to my feet and led me back toward the bleary ring of faces at our classmates' table.

I was filled with triumph: I had done it! Made friends with Chef, and worked on my French. Multitasking was definitely my middle name. Wait a minute, no, it wasn't. What was my middle name? Tucker interrupted this fuzzy train of thought to say, “You looked like a total freak over there. What were you doing?”

I didn't care what Tucker thought. I was happy that I had worked up the courage to try out my French on Chef. I was taking a big chance in quitting my job to go to chef school. What was a little embarrassment at my pitiful French grammar?

As I looked around the table at the faces of my new friends, I realized someone was missing from our merry little band. I peered around, trying to match up the red faces around me with the class roster, when a large pyramid of spent shot glasses that took up almost half our table caught my eye. Ricki.

“What happened to Ricki?” I asked Tucker. He sighed deeply, and pointed. Stretched out on the vinyl bench, hidden from the gimlet eyes of the chefs by a protective screen of red toolboxes and knife bags, was a deeply slumbering Ricki, drunk as a skunk and completely dead to the world.

Well, we couldn't just leave her there, I thought. We would have to resuscitate her and somehow transport her back to the Upper East Side, where she was subletting a tiny studio apartment. But how? Usually, this was not a logistical problem that would have stumped me, but my mind did not seem to be working with its usual speed. It didn't seem to be working at all, in fact. As I stared contemplatively at the supine form of my classmate, Tucker swung into action. Jared, by far the biggest member of our class at almost six and a half feet tall, was enlisted to prop up Ricki's limp form and propel it through the bar with speed and stealth. Tucker scurried outside to Broome Street to hail a cab. It was my job to wake up Sleeping Beauty and get her sufficiently upright and ambulatory so that she would not have to be carried out of the bar. I started by gently calling her name, and then nudging her softly on the shoulder. The snoring noises became markedly louder, but she didn't stir. I shook her shoulder harder and practically shouted her name, but still nothing. I looked around, hoping that inspiration would strike before the cabbie waiting outside lost patience, when someone plunked a large glass of ice water down next to me. It was the bartender, Bear. He took one look at the situation, snorted, and returned to his lair behind the bar. I drank the water, and then dumped the ice down the back of Ricki's shirt. Bingo! She shot up, right into Jared's grasp. I festooned her swaying form with her toolbox and knife kit and sent her out to the waiting cab.

I decided maybe it was a good time for me to depart as well. Tucker and I settled up the surprisingly expensive tab we had run up, and slowly made our way home, pausing every block or so to rest. Even though the sun was still high in the sky, it seemed like
it had been a very long day. When we finally made it to my apartment, all I could think about was collapsing gratefully onto my bed. I mumbled good-bye to Tucker and staggered up the three flights of stairs. Finally I managed to get my door open, drag myself inside, and face-plant at long last on the cool cotton sheets of the bed. I was exhausted from waking up early, my feet hurt from standing all day, my hands were covered in blisters, and my head was already pounding from that kamikaze shot. I would just lie here for a minute…

Michael found me several hours later, facedown, arms and legs splayed out like a starfish at low tide, with my shoes still on. Regaling him with the story of the afternoon, he seemed somewhat doubtful that I had been quite the social success with Chef Jean that I had originally thought, or that Ricki, or anyone else, could have possibly been in worse condition than yours truly. Remembering some of the things I had said, I thought he might be right. Michael was also surprised to find me in bed at six o'clock in the evening. It was not like me at all—I was always going: making dinner, doing yoga poses, working on a knitting project, talking on the phone, all at the same time. His pet name for me was the Energizer Bunny.

Michael did not seem pleased that the Energizer Bunny was now on the loose with a bunch of hard-partying chefs. Despite my assurances that nothing could be less sexy than a long day spent sweating over tiny vegetable dice, and the fact that he had seen how very unappealing my uniform was, it seemed that all the time I was spending with my new pals was making him jealous. I loved Michael for all the ways he wasn't like my friends: he worked in an office as a successful real estate investor, he had normal hobbies (playing basketball and poker), read long biographies, and he could spank me soundly in our marathon games of backgammon. I didn't care that his fridge contained only bottled water, a bottle of Rao's vodka sauce, and a magnum of Dom Perignon when I met him, or that he used his oven to store the rugs he brought back from Turkey. The fact that he couldn't boil water was endearing to me, but
Michael seemed to feel that suddenly we had nothing in common, and I might run off with someone whose
sauce gribiche
swept me off my feet. While Michael sulked and played an online poker tournament, I lay in bed, too tired to even look for the take-out menus, and I wondered: Had I bitten off more than I could chew? Was school too much for me and for us?

Kamikaze

While my first experience with this deadly little drink was not the spectacular evening I was hoping for, I don't blame it on the kamikaze. Use the very best liquor you've got and freshly squeezed lime juice (or, even better, Key lime juice) and drink in moderation. I have tinkered with the classic recipe for the shot to make it a bit more sophisticated. My version is below.

 

1 ounce best-quality vodka (I like to use Grey Goose L'Orange or Ketel One Citroen)

1 ounce Grand Marnier or other top-shelf orange liqueur

1 ounce freshly squeezed lime juice

Grated zest of 1 lime

¼ cup superfine sugar

2 lime wedges

1. Fill a cocktail shaker with ice. Add the vodka, orange liqueur, and lime juice and shake well.
   
2. Prepare an old-fashioned glass: Mix together the lime zest and sugar and place in a shallow bowl or on a plate. Run a wedge of lime around the rim of the glass, and then dip the glass into the sugar mixture, making sure that a liberal amount of sugar and zest adheres to the rim of the glass. Fill the glass with ice.
   
3. Strain the drink mixture into the waiting glass and garnish with another lime wedge. Sip slowly!
   

Makes 1 drink

I
f stocks are the foundation of French cuisine, eggs are the mortar that binds (sometimes quite literally) the bricks together. It is said that a chef earns his toque when he is able to prepare eggs in a hundred different ways—one recipe for each pleat in the tall hat.

Even though I ended up with egg on my face after the fiasco at Toad Hall, I still love eggs, from deviled to poached to fried. I was really looking forward to today's lesson on eggs, but I wasn't sure how I was going to feel after sampling a dozen different egg recipes. But other than a possible egg overdose, I wasn't really worried about doing well—who couldn't make an omelet already? Me, apparently.

After the morning lecture, we dispersed to our workstations, each team burdened with a flat of thirty eggs. With hundreds of the fragile things rolling around the classroom, something messy was bound to happen. Sure enough, as Penny, the middle-aged biddy who had dominated Dean Jacques Pépin's attention at orientation, ambled back to her workstation at the back of the class, clutching her flat of eggs to her chest, her enormous bosom caused several innocent eggs to jostle out and splat against the tiled floor. A half dozen had gone before she noticed the slimy trail of yolk and shells she left in her wake.

While this muddle of Penny's making was funny, it was also a slippery mess, and Penny was unable to wrangle the mop and clean it up without help. Suddenly twenty students were busily weighing out ingredients and rereading recipes, eyes averted. Tucker and I threw ourselves into the breach. We wiped and mopped while Penny
stood by, babbling unhappily. We had barely started classes and already Penny was becoming a problem for us all—the egg incident was only the latest in a growing series of mishaps. Penny was always last to finish her dishes, and she had already set her workstation on fire—before our third week of class. Penny was constantly holding up the class one way or another, by asking hundreds of questions during lecture, or telling interminable stories about her hometown in Indiana that drove us all up the wall.

I made excuses for Penny, thinking how difficult it must have been for her to come to New York from a small town, how hard it was to adjust to the grueling schedule of chef school after being a homemaker for twenty years, how different everything was from her expectations. It must have been hard to be the only fluffy, middle-aged housewife in the midst of rambunctious teens and twenty-somethings. Still, Penny was a catastrophe.

When we finally finished helping Penny mop up her latest messy disaster, Tucker and I were free to begin with the program of recipes slated for the morning. I was glad that I hadn't eaten any breakfast; our first recipe was for coddled eggs, a dish my father had made for me when I was small and home from school with the flu. Coddling an egg is an extremely gentle procedure. The egg is cracked into a buttered ramekin, bathed with a bit of heavy cream, and popped into a warm oven. The egg cooks slowly, almost poaching in the cream, yielding a soft, rich dish that verges on custard. I ate all of my coddled egg, and finished off the rest of Tucker's, too.

With a bite of this simply prepared dish, I was suddenly whisked back to my childhood. I remembered the tiny surge of excitement at being allowed to stay home sick from school, of a fever soothed with ginger ale, crackers, and love in the form of a sunny yellow yolk breaking open in a cloud of warm cream, spiked with freshly ground pepper and grains of crunchy sea salt that melted on my tongue.

Chef Jean applauded our clean dishes and winked at us. “I see you are hungry,” he said. “Well, you will need to be to make it
through class today.” That sounded slightly ominous. Part of our education here at school was not only to learn to prepare the classic French dishes, but also to learn to taste food properly. All chefs must taste absolutely everything that comes out of the kitchen, several times over, from the first addition of herbs to the last-minute adjustment of seasoning before the finished dish heads out the kitchen door to the diner. This is the most basic of safeguards: no one will ever receive a dish that is less than perfect (in the chef 's opinion) if the chef has personally made certain that all the elements meet approval from his or her rigorous and well-developed palate. Of course, in order to develop this palate, one must begin at the very beginning and taste everything. So in class we were responsible for tasting not only our own creations, all the way through the cooking process, but also for tasting the final products of our neighbors. Comparing and contrasting twelve different versions of the same dish, three or four times over, would educate our infantile sense of taste more quickly than a single meal in a five-star restaurant. Even so, I wasn't planning on wolfing down too many more egg dishes. I am no Cool Hand Luke. A taste here, a taste there, and I would fulfill my duties to my palate and my classmates as restaurant reviewer, without popping out of my increasingly snug chef 's pants.

Our next project was the perfectly poached egg. There are few more versatile methods for preparing this most versatile of ingredients. A poached egg could be served warm, doused in the lemony bite of hollandaise sauce, or chilled and trapped within the gelid confines of a salty aspic. It could be served at room temperature, perched atop peppery bitter frisée, ready to bathe the greens in warm, but not yet set, yolk. Poached eggs are also very easy to prepare in large quantities, and may be held for several hours or even a day in the refrigerator, before being rewarmed with a quick dip in simmering water.

The whole class managed to poach their eggs properly and plate them up with a minimum of fuss and bother. We were all obliged to
try everyone else's eggs—after a few bites, though, a plain poached egg can lose some of its appeal. By the time I took a bite of Jared's egg at the back of the classroom, farthest away from my station, it was stone cold on the plate, its once runny yolk congealed into something resembling wallpaper paste. I was already experiencing egg overdose, and we hadn't even made it to lunch yet. Luckily, there was only one more recipe to go before we were free at last to lunch on something other than eggs. All that remained to be prepared was an omelet.

 

As quintessentially French as a baguette, the omelet, that staple of the brunch menu all over the country, was the last—and most difficult—technique we would be attempting before lunchtime. Piece of cake, I thought. I had been making omelets since I was little and had to stand on a kitchen chair to reach the stove. Chef Jean called us over for a demonstration before setting us loose with our own nonstick pans. Feeling confident in my ability to prepare an omelet, I scarcely paid attention to what Chef was saying as he heated the small pan, well greased with a knob of butter, and beat two eggs together in a bowl. I nodded somewhat impatiently as he talked about not overwhipping the eggs, so that they would not become tough, and grimaced only slightly when he tasted the raw eggs for the correct balance of seasoning before pouring them into the sizzling hot skillet. But then everything I thought I knew about making an omelet went out the window. Instead of letting the eggs set in the pan without moving them, Chef began to scramble them rapidly as soon as they hit the hot surface. What was going on? Chef caught my astounded look from a corner of those all-seeing eyes, and began to laugh.

“Not what you expected, eh?” he asked me.

The eggs were now practically finished cooking, an opaque pale yellow instead of runnily transparent. Chef stopped scrambling them just when they were cooked but before they began to bunch up in curds on the bottom of the pan. Suddenly, he pulled the pan
off the heat, held it high in the air for a moment, and then brought it down with a resounding bang on the grates over the flame. We all jumped in shock, and Chef chuckled at the looks of astonishment on our faces. The lumpy surface of the omelet had become smooth as silk. Chef tipped the pan up, slid the finished omelet onto a plate, brushed it with melted butter, and added a small rounded scoop of the tomato, onion, and green pepper filling known as
pipérade
.

“Voilà,” he said. Chef had prepared a flat omelet perfectly in a little over forty-five seconds. He wiped out the nonstick pan and began the whole process again, demonstrating the rolled omelet. Once again he brushed the pan lightly with melted butter and in went the gently beaten eggs, Chef 's hand becoming a blur as he used his wooden fork to scramble quickly, gently. Then, just as the eggs turned opaque, up went the pan in the air, down it came with a crash, and the eggs smoothed out to a calm, pale yellow sea.

Now Chef tipped the skillet up to a 75-degree angle, with the handle grasped firmly in his left hand tilted high in the air, and the eggs slid easily to the edge of the pan, making a small crease in the middle of the omelet, half the egg ready to slip out of the pan and half still clinging to the bottom. Into this he popped a scoop of the filling and then—one-two—with a deft flick of the wrist so quick I almost missed it completely, Chef used the handle to flip the pan all the way over, the velocity folding the rest of the omelet neatly together before depositing it, a perfectly plump, football shape, squarely in the middle of the waiting plate. Chef covered the omelet with a fresh linen napkin and gently pressed it more firmly into shape. A quick brush with melted butter to make it shine, and there was the most gorgeous pale golden omelet, positively glowing under the hot kitchen lights.

If it sounds confusing, that's because it is. There is a lot of whipping, shaking, banging, and flipping, all in the time it takes to pour a glass of water. We stared, mesmerized, at the two omelets looking so lovely and creamy on their plates.

Angelo nudged me. “Did you see him smack those eggs? That was hot! Smack that!” he said, whipping me in the rear with his side towel. I had the feeling he wasn't talking about the eggs.

“And that melted butter just dripping everywhere? Ohhh, yeah. This is my kind of recipe.” Nope, definitely not talking about the omelets. I smacked him right back with my own side towel. This was not the time for the sexual double entendres endemic in kitchens. Suddenly omelets seemed downright scary, and I had a bad feeling I had underestimated this lesson.

Assistant Chef Cyndee handed out twenty-four nonstick pans, and off we went. Nonstick pans were a precious commodity in the school kitchen, and were kept locked up in the storeroom downstairs when not in use. Before we were allowed to actually touch them, Chef made us all promise never ever to use anything but wooden utensils on them. If there was a scratch on one of the pans when we were done with the lesson, Chef assured us with the utmost Gallic sincerity that he would personally beat the guilty student to death with the pan himself. With that warning ringing in our ears, we began. As soon as we had each produced a perfect omelet, we were free to break for lunch. I took a deep breath, put my pan over the flames, and prayed.

“Go!” shouted Chef Jean. “Now: whip, season, taste, pour, scramble, bang, and onto the plate. No, ONTO THE PLATE! THE PLATE!”

I banged my pan down again, more in frustration than anything else, as Tucker slipped his omelet seamlessly onto the waiting plate. My omelet wasn't going anywhere. Worse, it was starting to brown around the edges. Real French omelets have no marbled brown bits of color, only pale perfection and are still even slightly runny—
baveuse,
a word for which there is no real English equivalent. I pulled my pan off the burner and got out my spatula. It was cheating, but I was desperate to get the sucker out of my pan and try it again. Gently I eased the tip of the spatula under the obstinate egg. Ever so carefully I levered the spatula underneath, tipped the pan
forward over the plate, and shoved. The omelet came out, at last. In three pieces. Crap. Quickly, I stuffed the pieces in my mouth and chewed. Definitely too done. It tasted more like an old tire than an egg. Yuck. I swallowed with difficulty and turned around to find Chef Jean staring at me, his eyes twinkling as he took in the traces of egg in the pan, on the plate, and on my chin.

“Try more butter,” he said, before moving away to help the next failed omelet maker, as wails of “Chef! Help!” went up like air-raid sirens throughout the classroom.

I put a great whack of butter in my pan and off we went again, this time to try the rolled omelet.

“Go!” shouted Chef Jean.

And again: Crack the eggs, beat, season, taste, pour, scramble, bang, and now grab the handle, tip the pan, add the filling, fold over, and—this time things were going well for me, it was all coming together, literally. All I had to do now was get it out of the pan and onto the plate—position plate and flip. This is when my omelet fell on the floor, smearing filling all over the burner, the cutting board, and my shoes. How could I have missed the plate entirely? I stared down at the mess in disbelief. I scooped everything back up and buried the failure in the garbage. Perhaps there was a bit more Penny in me than I would ever care to admit.

I returned to my workstation, where Chef Jean was once again hovering, with a smile at the corners of his mouth.

“Try it again, but maybe not so hard this time, eh? Be gentle. It isn't going to leap out of the pan and bite you.
Bon, allez!
” Easy for him to say.

Tucker had once again produced a gorgeous specimen, and was out of the classroom, his apron streaming behind him. Traitor, I thought. Partners are supposed to help each other. Again, I prepped my pan, beat the eggs, and churned out another omelet. Somehow this one got cut in half as I was flipping it onto the plate. I crammed half into my mouth and forced Ben, Junior's partner and the fourth
member of our little kitchen island, to wolf down the other half, before Chef could see the carnage. The third rolled omelet came out of the pan and made it to the plate before oozing filling out of the bottom. I ate this one, too. The fourth omelet was too brown. I made Junior, who was still laboring over his own omelet attempts, eat this one. The fifth omelet stuck to the pan again. By now I was the only one left in the classroom, and had no one to pawn off the wrecked omelet on. I closed my eyes and ate this one, too. The sixth omelet, I forgot to put filling in. The seventh omelet looked more like a flattened basketball than a plump oval. The eighth omelet was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it was definitely an omelet, not an egg-themed train wreck. I stood, the total chaos and destruction of my efforts piled around me like snow drifts: my shoes, pants, and apron were splattered with bright red tomato and pepper filling; eggshells littered my cutting board and the stove, and some were even hidden in my pants pockets. Chef Jean had returned from lunch, looked at my last effort, and smiled.