Under the Table (6 page)

“Good,” he said. “Now go home this evening and do it again.”

That evening, Michael and the cat had omelets for dinner. I had had my fill of eggs for quite a while.

Oeufs Brouillés (Gently Scrambled Eggs)

These succulent eggs bear as much resemblance to the leathery American breakfast staple as the NFL does to the sport of
le football.
These eggs take time and patience and are better served as part of a special dinner that encourages lingering and savoring every mouthful, rather than as part of a quick and dirty eat-and-run sort of meal.

 

8 fresh large eggs

4 tablespoons heavy cream

Generous pinch of salt

Several grinds of fresh pepper

4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter, softened

1. In a large bowl, whisk the eggs gently with 2 tablespoons of the cream and the salt and pepper.
   
2. Place a large, heavy sauté pan over very, very low heat. Gently pour in the egg mixture and add the butter. Whisk slowly but thoroughly, never stopping for a moment. Eventually, the eggs will begin to coagulate into small, fluffy curds. This should take 10 to 15 minutes.
   
3. When the eggs are set but still quite soft and a bit runny, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the remaining 2 tablespoons cream. The eggs will continue to cook a bit even off the heat, so remove them a little before you think they are quite ready. Adjust the seasoning as needed and serve on warmed plates.
   

Serves 2 for dinner or 4 for brunch. Can be doubled easily.

 

NOTES: I like to use a well-seasoned cast-iron pan of my grandmother's. Add a generous scattering of Parmesan or even shavings of fresh truffle for that very special person.

E
very few weeks, the school sponsored after-school programs for the students to expand our culinary horizons. There was a lecture on making sausage, hosted by Chef Septimus; a demonstration on smoked salmon, complete with samples and fresh bialys, from the owners of Acme Smoked Fish in Brooklyn; and a jam-packed tour of the open food markets of Chinatown, a stone's throw from the back entrance of the school. This last was an incredible discouragement because as we walked by stalls filled to bursting with exotic dried meats, fish, mushrooms, and spices; huge bins of produce, giant melons, and coconuts; and fishmongers whose wares were still flipping their fins, waggling their antennae, or scuttling around their plastic prisons, nothing seemed to be fresher. But our guide explained that most of the fish came from New York Harbor or the East River and were so contaminated they were not safe to eat. She pointed out the baby turtles for sale by the scoopful, telling us they weren't pets but meant for the dinner table, and that we shouldn't even think about buying them, let alone eating them, because they were filled with salmonella. Ewww. Under her practiced eye, we started to see the bounties of Chinatown differently. Instead of the briny fresh smell of a fresh catch, I could smell the fetid, oily smell of an old dock at low tide. The fish scales stuck to the steaming hot pavement and to the soles of our shoes lost their rainbow luster and instead became a symbol of the severe cultural differences between Eastern and Western ideals of sanitation. The dark, mysterious little stores selling dried mushrooms, glass jars of powders and potions, bins of rice, foil-wrapped candies, boxes of fantastically gnarled roots, and huge tins of smoky black tea became not outposts of an impossibly ancient culture
in a thoroughly modern city, but black-market racketeers selling dried monkey's paws, teeth from endangered snow leopards, powdered horn from the last unicorn in existence. Chinatown still holds lots of glamour and the spicy scent of mystery, but I don't think I will be buying turtles there anytime soon.

The best after-school programs were the ones featuring the world-famous chefs who were also deans at The Institute. The school was lucky enough to have an incredibly illustrious roster of deans on the letterhead, and while Jacques Pépin, Alain Sailhac, and Bobby Flay weren't exactly lurking in the classrooms teaching us how to peel veggies, or swinging by the coffeepot to shoot the breeze, they were regular visitors to the kitchens, and even more often to the restaurant. Jean-Georges Vongerichten, fresh from opening his Chinese venture 66 in TriBeCa and coauthoring a wonderful cookbook with Mark Bittman, gave an afternoon demonstration of his Chinese-French fusion technique, complete with samples for the audience. Needless to say, the school's auditorium was packed to the walls with students, chef-instructors, and even members of the support staff.

As we slowly made our way from cooking vegetables and making simple stocks and sauces to learning to poach eggs, the chef demonstrations became more and more interesting. Having some inkling of the effort involved in making those perfect cubes of vegetables and tomato-skin flowers made these demonstrations more personal, and we were able to see so much more that went on before the chef used his sleight of hand to transform
mise en place
trays of prepared ingredients into the stuff of the
New York Times
dining section. It was also a wonderful excuse to snag a cushy seat in the auditorium and rest after a long, hot day in the kitchen classrooms, and soak in the air-conditioning.

The pastry arts students tended to have their own chef demonstrations, complete with celebrity wedding cake makers like Ron Ben-Israel, whose atelier was a few blocks away from school. There were truffle-making demonstrations and long lectures about the logistics
of turning edible ingredients into architecture (it helps to keep the room cold!). There generally wasn't a lot of crossover between the two disciplines, though there were plenty of pastry students at Vongerichten's demo, and Imogene and I had crashed the truffle-making demonstration to eat as much of the super-high-quality chocolate as we could. Dean Jacques Torres was coming to demonstrate how to spin and pull sugar, and a bunch of us Level 1 students were going to go, not only for the massive amount of air-conditioning we could expect to bask in, but also to bask in a bit of the reflected glory of celebrity.

At last we ended our own long, hot day spent churning out stuffed vegetables, everything from mushrooms, zucchini, and eggplant, which were at the very height of season, to butternut and acorn squash that were so unripe, they fought us every step of the way. Ben, Tucker, Junior, and I trooped to the blissfully chilly auditorium and grabbed seats near other members of our class. Sitting next to Ricki was Mimi, the vaguely unpleasant woman who had used her vintage Kelly bag to assault me at orientation. (Well, at least it was couture, I told myself, when I saw the bruise in the mirror.) Mimi had not warmed up to me in the slightest, for some reason. She continued to snub both Tucker and me, and Ben and Junior by association. While I was envious of her fabulous wardrobe, it turned out Mimi was no great shakes in the kitchen.
Ha,
I thought to myself,
I may not have an “It” bag, but at least I can wield eight inches of honed steel!
Even to me, it was only cold comfort.

Angelo and Jackie were also here, which made sense. Jackie's ambition to be a food stylist was naturally piqued by the prospect of the exotic and no doubt gorgeous creations that Dean Torres would be conjuring up, and I kept forgetting that despite his tough-guy image, Angelo was a trained artist whose keen eye and sensitive touch had distinguished him from the rest of us ham-handed fry cooks several times already. Sitting with them was Keri, which
was
a surprise. Keri was a very nice girl, just out of junior college and on her first trip east from Utah. With her blond hair and blue eyes, Keri
was the ultimate image of the All-American Girl, something that seemed to drive certain male members of our class to distraction. Unfortunately for them, Keri was a devout Mormon, here at chef school just to learn to cook. She was at the demonstration this afternoon for the simplest of reasons: “I love candy!”

As my fellow students and I took our seats, the president of the school stepped up to the podium and introduced Jacques Torres, and I immediately forgot about everybody else. Though Dean Torres was a soft-spoken man with a Gallic accent, his actions spoke more loudly than words, certainly much more loudly than the raised voices of many of the chef-instructors. With a large copper pot of boiling sugar-water, a candy thermometer, and some gel food dye, Dean Torres began to pull the sugar into shapes. After spreading the molten sugar onto a cool marble slab and folding it over and over until it became glossy and opaque, Dean Torres pulled on a pair of gloves and began to stretch and pull the sugar into panes of translucent sugar glass, as delicate and beautiful as crystal. Using an inverted bowl, he quickly made a series of caramel cages, arches of crispy caramel used to decorate crème brûlée, poached pears, and apple tarts. With a long steel rod, Dean Torres wrapped long strands of hot sugar around and around, making them twirl through the air as effortlessly as if he were playing with a yo-yo. The sugar twined around the cool bar and then slipped off to create spiral towers. With the food coloring, Dean Torres tinted some of the sugar paste and then began pulling it into fantastic shapes, heating it under a lamp when it cooled and became brittle, until he had made delicate sugar sculptures of flowers, fruits, even a tiny cat. Smiling at us as we sat transfixed by the gorgeous creations that he seemed to pull out of thin air, Dean Torres casually snapped off the stem of a rose he had fashioned with a skill that I imagined God himself was envious of. He casually crunched the candy between his teeth.
“Merci beaucoup,”
he said before leaving the stage, trailing talent and a bit of stardust behind him like a glittering path of sanding sugar.

I
have found that many people, when the subject of a favorite food comes up, revert back to a certain memory. Almost all of these memories take place in childhood, when a heaping plate of Thanksgiving bounty or a homemade caramel apple from Halloween made an indelible impression in the mind and on youthful taste buds.

I have an incurable sweet tooth and, as I am from the South, my favorite food of all time is pie. The forbidden pleasure of cold apple pie for breakfast, the heavenly lightness of a slice of lemon meringue, an illicit nibble of crispy crust from a chocolate pie right out of the oven—these all make my mouth water in a way that filet mignon never could. My family traditionally has five pies for Thanksgiving: apple, pumpkin, pecan, chocolate, and buttermilk. Everyone has a different favorite, and fights break out when it is suggested that this year we do without one of the selections. Making pecan pie with my grandmother is one of my very first memories—rolling out chilled dough with a child-size rolling pin; helping to tip the pecans and their sticky-sweet trapping of warm Karo syrup and spice into the waiting crust; slipping the pie into the hot oven to bake; and waiting (an interminable hour!) for the payoff: golden brown and bubbly perfection.

My mother taught me to make piecrust in that modern marvel of kitchen wizardry, the food processor. The stainless steel blades cut in chilled butter lumps in seconds, and a crust can be made in this machine in far less time than it takes to measure out the ingredients. So important is pie to my life, and the food processor to making
piecrust, that I shipped mine to England when I spent a year abroad in college, studying at Oxford. The thought of life in that rainy, chilly climate without the benefit of flaky layers of pastry trapping warm apple slices was too much to bear and I gladly paid the outrageous shipping charges.

Child of the late twentieth century that I am, I had never made pastry crust by hand, or even with a pastry cutter. As much as I loved pie, and doing things in the authentic way, I never mustered up the courage to attempt the daring feat of producing a perfect short crust using nothing but a bench scraper and my own hands.

Chef Jean was very excited to begin our instruction on the proper way to make pastry dough and an apple tart—the French way, not the vulgar American version so beloved by all of us. I was soon learning that the proper way to do things was inevitably and always
The French Way
. Any other method or variation of ingredients or procedure was nothing but a bastardized imitation, a pale impersonation of the original, and personally offensive to Chef 's delicate sensibilities. For instance, the
tarte aux pommes
is a much more elegant, refined version of dessert than the typically American overblown double-crusted mile-high apple pie (Chef Jean shuddered at the mere mention of it). In the true, understated French version, there is only a single bottom crust, spread with a chunky puree of apples sweetened with just a hint of sugar, a perfectly symmetrical layer of wafer-thin apple slices fanned across the top. No cinnamon, no nutmeg, no excess sweetness, merely fruit and buttery, flaky crust. A pure incarnation. The crust must be without fault—golden brown, even thickness, and texture just balanced between crisp and tender. Chef informed us we would be making such a crust with our bare hands. It came out sounding more like a threat than a promise that he would teach us the proper way of achieving this. I never thought the prospect of golden, flaky pastry would fill me with terror, but chef school was turning out to be full of frightening food encounters.

As always, Chef Jean demonstrated the procedure first for all
of us. He measured out flour and dumped it into a pile right on the marble-topped table. Using a measuring cup, he shaped the mountain of flour into an even ring, with a small circle of countertop visible in its center. It looked like a snowcapped ridge circling the mouth of a sleeping volcano. Into this he dumped very cold butter that had been broken into small pieces. Using his bench scraper, Chef began to flick the flour over the mound of butter until it was completely buried. Now the bench scraper became a blur of motion as he began to cut the butter and flour together, chopping up and down and up and down over the mound of flour until the butter had been completely incorporated and the mixture looked like pale yellow cornmeal. He quickly ran his hands through the mixture, rubbing them together to ensure that the butter was fully incorporated. It really looked like the sand on the shores of the Côte d'Azur, and I wasn't surprised when Chef mentioned that this process was actually called
sablé,
which means sandy.

Once again, using the scraper, Chef mounded the mixture up into a small hill on the marble, and then made a well in the middle. This time, into the well went a few splashes of ice water. It seemed as if the water had no sooner hit the marble than Chef was once again flicking the flour mixture back into the center and chopping and scraping the ingredients together. It seemed like a miracle that he could combine everything together so quickly that the water didn't even have time to leak out of the churning flour surrounding it. So far, he had barely touched the pastry at all, merely attacked it with his razor-sharp scraper. But now that the water was totally incorporated, Chef quickly gathered the dough together with his hands into a loose pile. Taking a healthy pinch of dough between thumb and forefinger, he smeared it against the marble. His other hand deftly used the bench scraper to sweep up the dough and deposit it onto a second pile. Both hands were working simultaneously, doing totally different things to the dough, while Chef kept up a running commentary on the procedure. The smearing of the dough
against the work surface is called
frottage
and ensures that the butter, flour, and water are all evenly incorporated into the dough and there are no lurking pockets of butter. In less than thirty seconds Chef had completely frottaged the dough and gathered it back together into a compact heap. He swiftly shaped this into a flat circle, wrapped it in plastic wrap, and popped it into the freezer. He checked his watch—precisely one minute and seventeen seconds had elapsed since he began the recipe. Wow. Chef had made
pâte brisée
by hand as quickly as I could make it in the food processor. This was definitely going to take some practice.

Before we students could begin our assault on pastry, however, the temperature in the room would have to be brought down a bit. Even though we hadn't turned on the ovens yet, the sticky July heat outside melted into the heat of the classroom and the mercury was quickly climbing to above 100 degrees. There were no air conditioners in chef school—real restaurant kitchens were rarely air-conditioned, and we were not being coddled. Only the pastry kitchens for the pastry students were kept cool to prevent their fragile confections from melting—and we regular culinary arts kids were jealous. The thermometers we kept tucked in the pockets of our chef 's jackets showed just how quickly the temperature climbed from the relative cool of the locker rooms to the sweltering triple digits of the classroom.

In such hot weather, it would be very difficult to keep all the ingredients as cold as they must be in order to make a crust that would not collapse into a greasy mess once it was heated in the oven. Also, while the teacher's demonstration station was equipped with a marble top, which is an ideal surface on which to make pastry of all sorts, the class would have to make our pâtes on the stainless steel counters of our workstations.

Stainless steel conducts heat extremely well, and our workstations were already blood warm to the touch in the stuffy air of the classroom. We began by washing down all the countertops
thoroughly. Every evening, after the night classes went home, the cleaning crew would polish every surface of all the kitchen classrooms with stainless steel polish, which left everything sparkling but also left a faint chemical film behind. After cleaning the countertops, we measured out all of our ingredients, from flour to butter to salt to ice water, and put everything—even the flour—in the lowboy refrigerators. While the ingredients chilled, we filled sheet trays with ice and placed them on all the countertops, to try to bring down the temperature of the steel work surfaces and the classroom in general.

While we waited for the temperature to drop, Chef Jean told us stories about working in restaurant kitchens. In this city, most restaurant kitchens were (and still are) located in the basements, and sometimes the sub-basements, of buildings. I think he was trying to make us feel better about our current conditions in our cushy classroom, but the thought of being trapped on the line in a restaurant kitchen ten feet below street level filled me with a sense of panic and cold dread. What if there was a fire? Is this really how I saw myself, sweating and churning out below-average piecrusts in some lesser circle of hell for the next five years?

I didn't have long to wonder about my possible future, though. While I was still envisioning building-collapse scenarios, ending up trapped next to the deep-fat fryer, Chef called us back to the present, to our hot little classroom, which somehow didn't seem quite as hot as it had before, and ordered us to begin to produce pastry.

“Make it quick,
vite,
” he said. “You don't have all day. Imagine you are Junior here, and you are going to get lucky for the first time.” We tried to stifle our giggles.

Chef smiled slyly. “Well, maybe not quite that quick, eh? Do it right, at least!” With that, we all erupted in loud guffaws, while poor Junior turned red as a raspberry. We all knew that despite Junior's boasts, he was fresh out of high school in his tiny hometown in rural Maine, and still a virgin, to his everlasting embarrassment. Sweet
little Keri was the only one to miss the joke, but Angelo hotfooted it over to whisper an explanation in her ear. She, too, turned brick red. I had the distinct impression that Keri was getting a completely different sort of education than her strict Mormon parents were paying for. To say that Keri was as pure as the driven snow wouldn't be true—she was much more pure than the snow that blanketed Manhattan every winter. Keri came to New York City from a small town in Utah, near Salt Lake. At nineteen, Keri was the youngest of eight siblings—and one of the youngest members of our class—and she seemed to be astoundingly naïve about some things. Her wide-eyed innocence was charming, and complemented her blond hair, blue eyes, and baby face. Chef school seemed like an odd choice for Keri—it was so visceral, full of the booze, sex, and general depravity her Mormon background had shielded her from.

But the fun and games were over, and we removed the pans of ice from our workstations and attempted to mimic Chef 's swift and self-assured style. While it took us all quite a bit longer to complete the task that Chef Jean had made look so simple, everyone eventually turned in a lump of roughly doughlike texture and approximately circular proportions at the end of ten minutes. While we labeled the pale lumps with our names and returned them to the lowboy refrigerators to chill once again, Chef explained the concept of the
tarte aux pommes
to us.

This regal dessert resembles an apple pie only in that both desserts have apples as a main ingredient. Much as a croissant found in a patisserie in Paris bears only a faint resemblance to the monstrous croissants found everywhere in America, the
tarte aux pommes
only scantily recalls its distant cousin on this side of the Atlantic. The two desserts highlight the basic differences between French and American cuisine, and perhaps even French and American people themselves.

I am the first to admit that before chef school, I thought that bigger was always better, especially in terms of dessert. I have always
been a fan of an extra scoop of ice cream, extra sprinkles, heck, an extra cookie after that brownie. I didn't really care how delicious something was: if it was sweet, I wanted two. It wasn't so much that I was willfully ignoring my taste buds; it was more that I was unaware of the panoply of tastes possible. My taste buds were sleeping. I realized that perhaps I was missing something as I watched Chef Jean wax rhapsodic over the simplicity of the French apple tart. His eyes shone with a fervor approaching fanaticism. His hands, never still when discussing food, became positively spastic as he attempted to kiss the tips of his fingers, pat an imaginary crust into a tart pan, and demonstrate the delicate thinness necessary for the apple slices garnishing the top, all at the same time. His voice even seemed to rise higher and higher as his praise for the simple majesty of the
tarte
grew. This, apparently, is what all apples aspire to. I began to feel sorry for those poor
pommes
that were merely candied, or covered in caramel, or, worse still, became part of the puree served atop pancakes with a mountainous dose of whipped cream at the IHOP.

As I watched Chef Jean, I began to wonder what it was about this dessert, which was really only dough, apples, and a bit of sugar, that would make this jaded, eaten-everything-under-the-sun chef so fulsome in his praise. What else could possibly be in this simple confection to make it so good? While I pondered this question, I had my epiphany. It wasn't what was in the
tarte;
it was what
wasn't
in it that made it so transcendent. It had no bells and whistles, no secret spice, no unexpected jets of cinnamon foam garnish to surprise and titillate the palate. It was the very best of a simple thing, and only a palate that could recognize and appreciate the best tastes could really appreciate this stark perfection. Like a Zen koan, the
tarte aux pommes
presents a challenge to the neophyte, a seemingly unanswerable puzzle that can be solved only with proper preparation and insight, but one that would surely lead to nirvana for those worthy few who could provide the right answer.

I was so electrified, thinking that perhaps a slice of this simple
dessert could unlock all the great mysteries of the kitchen—and that I had, in fact, found the culinary Holy Grail (in Level 1!)—that I missed part of the next instructional demo. Chef was forced to actually wave a side towel in front of my face to break my trance.