White Jacket Required (7 page)

½ bottle of your favorite barbecue sauce

Rub the pork shoulder all over with the salt, ground mustard, and cayenne. In a heavy pan over medium-high heat, brown the shoulder on all sides. This should take about 10 minutes.

Remove shoulder from pan and place in a slow cooker. Add chopped onion and sauces. Turn slow cooker on high and cook the pork for 6–8 hours, until it falls apart easily when pierced with a fork.

Remove pork from slow cooker and shred with two forks. Spoon sauce over top and serve.

6
OUI,
CHEF!

M
Y NERVES WERE ON FIRE. THE NIGHT BEFORE, I HAD
assembled everything perfectly. I had ironed and starched my uniform, organized my knife kit, and trimmed my fingernails shorter than they had ever been before, getting every tiny bit of old polish off. After work, I had tried to fall right asleep but ended up lying in bed for two hours. When the alarm finally rang, bright and early at 6 a.m., I leaped out of bed, anxious nerves turning into excitement about the day to come.

I arrived at school thirty minutes early and took a deep breath as I entered the kitchen classroom for the first time. My primary thought was how cold the room was, and I nervously fiddled with my cravat (a necktie that's part of the traditional chef's uniform) to disguise my shaking hands. There were only a few other students in the kitchen, and I recognized the face of a girl who had been in orientation with me a couple of weeks before. She returned my nervous smile, and I grabbed a metal bar stool from the corner of the kitchen and took a seat next to her alongside the metal counter. Out of my bag, I pulled a brand-new notebook with neat, smooth pages. I couldn't believe that only a few months ago I had been sitting in a Victorian Literature class, preparing to take my final exam. The minutes ticked down, and even though the room was chilly, I felt a prickle of sweat start at the base of my neck, where my long hair was gathered and pulled into a hairnet-covered tight knot.

More students filled the room, most of them boys who looked to be about eighteen. Only three other girls entered the kitchen, and for a moment I wondered what in the world I was doing here, thinking about how I probably should have followed everyone else's advice and gotten a safe and comfortable job after college instead of putting myself in thousands of dollars of student debt. It was too late for that now, though, and at exactly 7:30 a.m., Chef Stein walked into the kitchen. “LINE UP!!” he barked and then turned and walked right back out of the room. I took a deep breath and followed the rest of my classmates out of the room, where we formed a line with our backs straight against the wall while Chef shook our hands and inspected us individually. Since my last name begins with W, I was at the end of the line and waited nervously for my turn. Finally, I moved forward.

“Good morning, Chef!” I said in an overexcited tone, shaking his hand. Whenever I get nervous I act way too enthusiastic. He scanned his roster and glanced up at me.

“Why are you here, Weber?”

I paused, then smiled, showing my teeth. “Well, you see, I just graduated from the College of Charleston with a degree in English. After college I went to Paris to study travel writing, and now I'm here to learn everything about food so I can make a career as a food writer!” The overeager tone got the best of me again. I wanted to run far, far away.

Chef just stared at me with a deadpan expression and then smirked. “I didn't ask for your entire life story. I just wanted to know why you're here. Weber, there's nothing I hate more than a good restaurant critic. Personally, I'd like to fry 'em all up for breakfast and then cut into them like strips of crispy bacon. That's how I feel about food critics and now that's how I feel about you, too. From now on I'm going to just refer to you as ‘the enemy.' How do you feel about that, Weber?” How did I feel? I felt like I was about to lose my breakfast right there on the shiny linoleum floor, that's how I felt. Instead, I just mumbled something unrecognizable and then scurried back into the kitchen to begin my first day of school.

Later, as I stood with my future peers in a huddle around a long rectangular table in the chilly classroom kitchen listening to Chef Stein dictate, my anxious nerves returned.

“I'm not here to be your friend, buddy, or pal. The rules are written in your book, and if you don't respect them then I will fail you and you will go home, no questions asked. This is my house and you will listen to what I have to say.”

Chef was an ex-marine with a passion for classical cooking and a very long list of things he thought were “disgusting,” such as the microwave, the Food Network, all celebrities, chain restaurants, shortcuts to anything . . . the list could go on for days. He was a large man with hair buzzed short in typical military style. When he looked at you, it was as if his blue eyes pierced right through you, just challenging you to look away.

Every response we gave to him had to be a “YES, CHEF” or “NO, CHEF” in unison. The louder we were, the happier he was. “Sounding off,” it was called. To someone with my mild-mannered Southern upbringing, shouting in class seemed intense and unnatural. I always hated to be yelled at.

The classroom kitchen was large, with a long row of commercial-grade stoves in the middle and two long wooden countertops on each side. There was nothing on the walls, not even a clock, which Chef said would be too much of a distraction. In the back of the kitchen there were two large stockpots—large enough for a small person to stand in—in which chicken and veal stock bubbled continuously all day long. I learned that every morning we were to get to class thirty minutes early to set up our individual work space with a cutting board, a sanitizing bucket, a waste bucket, two dishcloths, and our tool kit. Homework was mandatory and reviewed aloud every morning—and Chef loved to call on unsuspecting students whom he thought might not have finished their work.

Also every morning, students were to procure food from the Purchasing Department, set up Chef's demo (complete with peeled vegetables and tools), fill the industrial-size three-compartment sinks with water and sanitizer for dishwashing, and arrange our own
mise en place
, ingredients and tools, so that we wouldn't waste any time after the demo. Timing was everything here, and part of our daily homework was to complete “timelines” of the next day's recipe, including all tools, ingredients, and preparations used.

That first morning, we were each assigned a workstation along the two countertop rows. I found myself the only girl on my end of the counter, which wasn't surprising given the ratio of men to women in the class. The three guys surrounding me were all from Florida, too, and had just graduated from high school the previous spring. Their faces bore remnants of adolescent awkwardness, with fading acne scars and faint shadows of beards. Frank, Jim, and Diego were all from the same town and constantly bantered about different girls they'd been with, or made racist jokes. When I introduced myself initially, Diego made a low-pitched whistle and said something in Spanish while elbowing Frank. Color rose in my cheeks, but I was determined to meet their gaze and not back down. The four of us were going to be working together for the next three weeks, after all.

On the second day, I felt a bit more prepared for lineup, but I was worried about my triple-rolled checkered chef's pants, knowing I should have spent the extra twenty bucks to get them hemmed. My scalp had already begun to itch under the hairnet and my white hat.

“Good morning, Chef,” I said loudly as we shook hands. He just looked at me and wrote a note on his paper.

“Hands,” he barked, gesturing for me to stick out my hands so he could inspect them for any sort of cut or dirt speck hidden under my now too-short fingernails. “Socks.” I pulled up my pant leg to show short white socks. He made a clicking noise with his tongue. “Miss Weber, are your pants hemmed?” There was no point in lying to him because I could tell he already knew.

“No, Chef,” I responded.

“They'd better be by tomorrow. Get in class.”

And so it was. That evening, when I got home from school, I sat in my apartment staring at my bank account on my laptop screen, half a turkey and cheese sandwich next to me. Getting my pants hemmed would eat into my food budget for the month.
Screw it,
I muttered under my breath, and decided to just do it myself. In my closet, I found the small plastic sewing kit my mom had given me—the same sewing kit that had remained sealed for the past four years because, despite my childhood prairie-girl phase, I hate sewing with a burning passion. I told myself it must be done, though, and after I poured myself a large glass of wine I sat down on the couch with the Food Network on and prepared to hem my first pair of pants.

I worked and worked at it, but my efforts were in vain: the stitches came out loose and loopy. I wondered briefly if I should pick them all out and start over, but then I glanced at my watch and saw that it was already ten o'clock. I set the pants aside, fell into bed, and dreamed of checkered pants and life-size sewing needles stitching up my legs.

By the third day, my class officially lost our only fifteen-minute break of the day because a girl showed up
thirty seconds
late. Now we went straight through the five hours with no stopping. I didn't mind this as much as my partners, who, along with the other smokers in the class, suffered greatly from nicotine withdrawal during stressful situations.

On my fifth day of Basic Skills, we made our first dish to be graded, pasta with sautéed vegetables and pesto sauce. As soon as Chef said “Go,” I raced to my station and began work on supreming and zesting an orange, along with the various knife skills I had to demonstrate before I could even start on my pasta. To perfectly supreme an orange means to leave it bare and juicy, with no flecks of stringy white pith at all. Sweat trickled beneath my cravat and I fought back exhaustion. I was quickly discovering that culinary school was more than just frosting cupcakes, as I had envisioned it. I was under more stress now than I had been all four years of college combined. We had an hour and a half to complete everything, and the timer was ticking.

I took out my sharp paring knife and made clean, easy cuts down the segments of my orange. I wiggled each glistening segment out gently but still managed to lose half of each one. I scraped off every speck of pith, for if Chef saw any white at all we would lose points. In the end, I had no pith on my segments, but they were ugly and misshapen—not at all like the perfect ones that Chef had produced effortlessly in a matter of minutes during the demo. I took a deep breath, put the segments in a ramekin, with pretty ones on top to hide my mistakes, and began work on the other knife skills. While I was working, I glanced over at Frank's tray. I had to admit, for being crude and obnoxious, he was a pretty good chef. All of his oranges were perfectly supremed, and he chopped so fast it looked like his knife never left the cutting board. I quickly got back to my work.

I cut an onion the way Chef demonstrated—peeling it, slicing it in half, and then making vertical and horizontal cuts, leaving the root ends attached. This was supposed to produce perfect small dice, all uniform and complete. After chopping, though, I noticed that some of my dice were quite a bit larger than the others. With the clock ticking, I had no choice but to put them all in a ramekin and let them go. After my onion was chopped, my orange was supremed, and my shallot and garlic were minced until they were barely recognizable, I took my silver sheet pan and ramekins to the front to be graded.

“I'm finished, Chef,” I said as I stood there, rather awkwardly, with my large tray held out before me.

Chef didn't say anything at first, just made a low grunting noise while he finished jotting something down in his book. Finally, he looked up. “Ah, the enemy,” he said with a grin. “Let's see what you got, Weber.”

Immediately he went straight for my misshapen oranges. “These are not how I demonstrated. See how yours falls apart when picked up? You were overzealous with your knife. Be gentle. I could not serve these.” My cheeks began to burn, and I could only nod. He then picked at my onion dice, separating the good ones from the longer pieces. “These need to be uniform. All the same size, perfect quarter-inch dice. Every one of them. You need to throw away the ones that do not fit that mold.” He marked some numbers in his grade book and looked up at me. “You better get going, Miss Weber.”

I hustled off to start on my pasta. This had been the first real test of my culinary skills, and I felt like I had already failed. I had one hour left, and Chef had told us that on this day, about eighty-five percent of students get a zero for lack of finishing. Thirty minutes later, after my
torchon
(hand towel) almost caught fire on my gas burner, my onions hit the oil without any hiss of a sizzle, which meant the oil had not warmed up enough. I finished with only five minutes to spare, but at least I finished. I anxiously seasoned my pasta with salt and pepper and piled it into a large stainless-steel bowl before taking it up to Chef to taste and grade.

This time: “Not enough salt.” He chewed on a diced vegetable. “Vegetables are cooked nicely, and so is the pasta, but there is not nearly enough salt in this . . . and a little too much oil.” He gave me a four out of five as my final grade for the day and left me to pile my greasy, undersalted pasta into a Styrofoam cup to have for dinner that night at home. A lot of my classmates were still struggling with their sauté pans and water that was refusing to boil. I exhaled. One day down, fourteen more to go.

I ditched the pasta and came home that afternoon completely exhausted, bearing a couple of potatoes and leeks that Chef had given me to “practice” with. Helen was just waking up from a nap and laughed when she saw my arms full of dirty potatoes.

“More pancakes?” she asked.