Eating for Beginners Read online

  The following week when I arrived for work, David strode out into the dining room to meet me, wiping his hands on his apron, before I made it back to the kitchen.

  "One of Richard's farmhands was killed," he said, emotion rising in his voice. "It was the husband of this woman," he said, pointing to one of the black-and-white photographs of the farm displayed on the restaurant walls. The photo showed Alese, hair up, in cut-offs, boots, and a bikini top, holding heads of lettuce in the middle of a field.

  Micah.

  "Did you work with him?" David asked.

  "Yes." I thought of the potato fields and his little daughter wandering around the barn while I packed produce with her mother.

  Micah had died in a car accident that weekend, I learned from the obituary Laura taped up on the kitchen wall. By dinner service that night, Laura and David had decided to put an insert in the check folders telling diners what had happened and how Micah was connected to the restaurant and asking for support for his family, soon to expand by one. Unsurprisingly, the most donations came from customers seated at the table under Alese's picture.

  Her second baby, born in early April of the following year, six months after its father's death, was a boy. She named him Micah.

  Lucky Dog Creamed Spinach

  1½ pounds fresh spinach

  2 onions

  ½ pound butter

  1 cup flour

  2 cups heavy cream

  2 tablespoons canola oil

  salt

  1. Destem the spinach and fine-dice the onions.

  2. Sweat the onions in butter in a deep sauté pan over low heat.

  3. When the mixture has reduced enough so there is still some liquid but no color on the onions, add the flour and stir until the butter and onion juices are absorbed.

  4. Cook about 15 minutes until flour loses raw taste, then add the cream.

  5. While the béchamel sauce cooks, heat the canola oil in a sauté pan and toss the spinach in the oil with salt, very quickly, to wilt it.

  6. Chop the spinach and mix with the sauce to serve.

  Serves 4 as a side.

  7. Into the Frying Pan

  YOU MAY BE WONDERING at this point how things were going in my own dining room. The answer is badly. Jules had consumed no cheese (apparently my new understanding of what it was had not improved my powers of persuasion). Also no meat, and definitely no pasta (though he had deigned to touch a piece once, picking it up and examining it thoughtfully, as if studying an ancient relic, before calmly putting it back on his plate without a word). We had, however, scored a major victory on the toast front. By starting him off with raisin bread, we had finally managed to persuade him first to eat it toasted, absolutely dry, and then to eat it as French toast (which counted as a double victory since he refused to eat eggs in any other configuration—slathering them in syrup, for some reason, seemed to win him over).

  I stand before you now as a person who never in her wildest dreams thought she'd be offering secret thanks to a higher power just because her child was willing to eat bread, and yet that is exactly what I did. My thanks were secret because Noah and I had stopped saying anything congratulatory to Jules when he was eating for fear that the very idea that we liked what he was doing would cause him to stop. I was so delighted that we could finally take Jules out to dinner and be assured that he would at least eat something out of the breadbasket that I chose to ignore his perverse habit of eating, unlike any other child I've ever known, only the crusts of his bread. On a weekend trip to Philadelphia around this time, he actually refused to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (a meal we had come to rely on) brought to him by room service—under a fancy silver dome, no less—because it had the crusts cut off. He also turned down French fries. Yet somehow he was growing.

  And so was I, in a different way. I had spent my first night "on fish" in the kitchen, and I had survived.

  A night at the fish station—made up of one person, an oven, four to six burners depending on how many the grill chef needs, a lowboy fridge, and about two by three feet of stainless steel countertop—begins when the first handwritten yellow ticket comes in and gets stuck in front of you. The first few orders are easy. There's time to consider how to plate, to froth the soup a little bit longer (soup is the fish station's responsibility), to sauté a stray piece of fish for the rest of the chefs. But once the servers start dashing in and firing tables at a steady pace, usually around seven-thirty to eight o'clock, just as the first rush at garde manger is slowing, the rest of the night flies by in a haze of spattering oil, burning-hot pots and pans, dirty side towels, sweat, sauces, reductions, quarts of water, jokes with the other chefs, panic when the board is full of tickets with nothing but fish orders on them, forgotten orders of soup that you have to heat instantly while you're juggling three frying pans and six other pots, adrenaline, shouted orders to the chef on grill, who can't see the tickets—"You're ordered in on a duck and two veal! You have three ducks all day!" (meaning three orders of duck in total)—and a thousand other tiny details you're too busy to notice until dinner service is over and you realize you've consumed at least six desserts' worth of cookies and about twenty pieces of bread over the course of the night. (I could never figure out if I ate more when I was busy or when I was bored, but either way, I gained ten pounds during my year at the restaurant.)

  But as I put on my chef's jacket for my first night on fish, I didn't yet know about any of this.

  From the safety of my spot at garde manger, everything seemed to move like clockwork over at the fish station, even on a busy night. There was the occasional blip, but even if orders did get backed up, David, who often worked the fish station because from its central location he could manage both the cooking and the expediting of food out to the dining room, just kept moving forward. It looked like fun, actually, and later—much later—I would get to the point where it was. But not until my literal baptism by fire was long behind me.

  ***

  The fish menu that first night had three appetizers, two soups, and four entrées. I started my shift confidently, with David watching over me and somehow managing to look genuinely curious about what I might be able to pull off rather than regretful of his offer to let me try it out. I had proven myself at garde manger as far as keeping things moving during the dinner rush went, but this was something else entirely. The kitchen even looked different from in front of the stove, which was farther from the door and thus further down the rabbit hole than garde manger. I stood behind my counter, a stack of neatly folded green-and-white-striped side towels in front of me and one tucked into the tie of my apron, waiting.

  At six-thirty the first ticket arrived, along with the server's look of surprise that I was the person there to receive it. A patron had come into the bar alone and ordered a bowl of lobster broth—a misnomer since the soup was made with a base of lobster stock, heavy cream, apples, fennel, onions, tomatoes, and brandy. This mixture, stored in quart containers, was waiting in the lowboy at the fish station.

  I swung into action, scooping about three big spoonfuls of broth base into a pot and dousing it with heavy cream before setting it on the fire. "How long?" I asked David. "Until it's hot," he answered. (This was typical of his unintentional Zen riddle responses to questions involving precision. "How much?" was usually met with "Enough" or "More than you would ever think," which usually pertained to adding salt.) When the mixture was heated through, I pulled it off the burner and "zapped" it in the pot with a stick blender to combine the cream and base and make it frothy. Then I pulled a small, low bowl from the shelf above the stove where the serving dishes sat to stay warm and poured the soup into it over a spoon so that it wouldn't splash all over the bowl. I placed a small pile of chives in the center, and the order was ready to go. As David handed it to the server, I recalled that I had ordered the lobster broth the first time I ate at applewood. Even making it myself hadn't really removed the mystery of what made it so insanely delicious—it was as smooth as sil
k and tasted like the very essence of lobster—but I was at least one step closer.

  When the next ticket came in, around six-forty-five, the top half read "lobster app," "red leaf (split)," and the bottom half said "scallops," "duck," and "gnocchi." While David yelled to Sarah, "You're ordered in on a duck and a gnocchi!" (he had wisely decided to do that part of the fish station's duties himself), I opened a quart of dayboat scallops from Cape Cod and placed three of them on the counter on a paper towel. Then I opened a quart of lobster pieces for the appetizer and put a tail, two claws, and a few knuckles into a small metal bowl and passed them to Sarah to toss on the grill. While they were getting color, I grabbed two radishes and a mandoline (eek!) and sliced the red globes into another small metal bowl, to which I added olive oil, chives, salt, and lemon juice. Next I set up a small sauce pot with the scallop sides I had prepped in the afternoon—roasted cipollini onions, blanched baby carrots, a handful of pea shoots, salt, and a dollop of butter—and placed it on a low burner so it would be ready for a final blast of heat when it was time to fire the dish.

  When the lobster came back to me, nicely marked by the grill—"Your lobster, Madame!"—I put on a plastic glove, tossed the radish salad with my fingers, then heaped it in the middle of a bright yellow plate.

  "Let's see if we can kind of pile the lobster on," David said. He had never made this appetizer before, so he was working out how the plate should look as he went along (which of course brought to mind, and then crushed, the old adage about never cooking something for the first time when you have dinner guests coming).

  We stacked the lobster pieces on top of the radish slices, trying to curve the claws around so they wouldn't fall off, adjusting them until finally they all seemed stable. With a fast pinch, David grabbed one knuckle out of the pile and placed it on the other side for visual balance, then took the quart of pesto I was holding out to him and said, "Let's make a quenelle."

  Plunging a large spoon into the pesto, he brought it sideways against the container and dragged a spoonful of pesto up to the lip so that it took on the shape of an egg that had been flattened on one side. He repeated this motion a few more times, shaping the pesto into a fat cylinder with a ridge on the top, about an inch and a half long, then very carefully deposited it on the lobster plate, with one edge on the radish salad. It was a beautiful fresh, mossy green against the pale salad dotted with chives, and the red edges of the radish disks were mirrored in the color of the lobster.

  "Perfect!" he said. "Great job." Then he handed the plate to the extern working garde manger that night, who put it down on the counter closest to the door, next to the red leaf salad with pickled nectarines, sorrel, and red wine vinaigrette that he had made and neatly divided onto two plates. Then he stuck his head several inches out into the dining room and called "Pick up!" One of the servers came and took the plates, and my hard-won inaugural appetizer was gone. My first thought was that I'd never have another chance to make that lobster appetizer for that person.

  On the other hand, I had done almost nothing—Sarah had grilled, David had mostly stacked—and though I had made the pesto during prep, forming it into a quenelle seemed hopelessly out of my reach (apparently there was another method for doing it that used two spoons and required transferring the pesto back and forth between them instead of using the side of a quart, but that sounded even harder). And yet David was as encouraging as if I'd just worked a shift alone. "How was that?" he asked enthusiastically.

  I was about to reply when the door swung into the kitchen and Laura strode in, stopping in her tracks when she saw me standing behind the fish counter. She hadn't heard about my "promotion" (early on she had told me she often felt as if she and David worked at different restaurants since neither of them really knew what was going on in the other's part).

  "Wow," she said, throwing David a look.

  "Melanie's working fish!" he said in the voice I imagined he'd used to announce that Sophie had ridden her bike alone for the first time or that Tatum had eaten her first bite of duck confit.

  "Wowww!" Laura said again, grinning at me this time. I guessed at what she was thinking: this might turn out to be misguided, but David was standing by to mop up any mess I made, and anyway, the fish station was his problem, not hers.

  "You can fire those scallops," Sarah called from the grill. Meat had to be started before fish since it took longer and had to rest after grilling, so the fish station took its cues from the grill in order to send out whole orders at the same time.

  "Okay!" I said, masking my fear with feigned exuberance.

  I already had a black iron frying pan sitting on a lit burner, so I added some canola oil. ("How much?" I asked David. "You know," he said, "some.") While the oil was heating, I pulled the three waiting scallops off their paper towel and put them in my palm, held a box of fine sea salt up high with my other hand and rained salt down onto the scallops, then turned them over and salted the other side.

  Before lifting the pan I grabbed a side towel—there was no such thing as a potholder in the kitchen, only side towels which you folded and used between your hand and the hot metal handles. I tipped the pan so that the oil rushed to the far edge, placed the scallops in it one by one, then tipped it level again and let the oil swirl around them with a satisfying sizzle. I turned up the fire under the pot I'd already filled with the pea shoots, onions, and carrots and turned to the counter, pleased with my performance so far. Over at the grill, Sarah was draining the fat off a duck breast and stirring her gnocchi, which she was serving with beet greens, caramelized onions, and toasted almonds as the vegetarian entrée.

  "You can go ahead and plate," she said calmly.

  I turned back to my scallops, looking to David for guidance.

  "Get your plate ready and they'll be done," he said.

  Grabbing a white plate off the hot shelf above the stove, I worried about getting the scallops out of the pan. David used a spoon for some reason, a technique I didn't ask about and definitely didn't dare try, but I wasn't sure what to do instead.

  I set the plate on the counter and plated the cipollinis, baby carrots, and pea shoots. Then I stared at the scallops for a few seconds, dreading the next step.

  "Okay. Grab your fish spatula," David told me, meaning his fish spatula. "Now slide it under one scallop."

  I had never concentrated so hard in my life. The spatula stuck halfway under the scallop, which seemed unwilling to budge. I wiggled it as the other two scallops kept cooking, simultaneously humiliated that I couldn't get the first one out of the pan and convinced that the other two were going to be black.

  "Try to do it in one swift motion," David said, taking the fish spatula from me and sliding it (needless to say, in one swift motion) under the scallop. Then he flipped the scallop, removed it immediately to the waiting plate, and laid it carefully on top of the vegetables.

  Round two. This time the spatula didn't get stuck, but once the scallop was on the spatula, I couldn't figure out how to flip it. Finally I gave it a little toss and it landed in the pan on its side before falling into position. I could feel the clock ticking along with the pounding of my heart, and Sarah had already plated her duck and her gnocchi. There was a table of diners waiting for their food and I was holding it up.

  When the second scallop was on the plate, I tried a third time. Because the pan now held just one lone scallop, I had no trouble getting the spatula under it and flipping it. I needed lots of space to move food around, the antithesis of efficient restaurant cooking.

  I settled the final scallop onto the vegetables, and David grabbed a quart of red wine vinaigrette from the counter. With a spoon, he drizzled the vinaigrette over the scallops and around the vegetables, where it added a pleasing wine-dark contrast to the bright carrots and pea shoots and the golden scallop tops (I hadn't burned them after all).

  "Pickup!" David yelled to no one in particular as the door swung open. And the order went out.

  My brain was aching as I reviewed
the details of making the lobster appetizer and the scallops so I'd remember for next time: when the order came in, you took the protein out of the lowboy, then you got the appetizers going, then you set up the sides for the entrées, then you fired your appetizers, making sure you were in tune with the grill if there were grill items on the ticket, then you fired your entrées, then you plated, and in the meantime, probably, four more tickets had come in so you were reaching for more fish and balancing more pots on the burners because there wasn't room for each one to have a burner to itself, and the metal stubs of stove knobs were hotter than ever.

  "I think it's going to be slow tonight," David said cheerfully, "so it will be perfect for you."

  ***

  Of course it was not slow.

  It was not slow the next time I had to flip scallops, and it was not slow the first or any time I had to assemble and then flip delicate crab cakes—grab a handful of crabmeat from a quart, mix it in a bowl with chives, egg, shallots, and other herbs, form two patties, throw them into a hot pan with a little bit of hot oil in it, plate with cucumber jalapeño salad and milk-poached garlic puree—which tended to fall apart at the touch of my spatula (one bowl, one pot). It was not slow when I had to grill pieces of cobia (a firm white fish)—stepping close to Sarah and laying them on an empty spot on the grill, then remembering to step back and flip them and then to step back again to remove them—and serve each one in a big bowl in a shallow pool of aromatic lobster stock called nage with baby bok choy and roasted shallots (two more pots). It was still not slow the first time I had to cook and plate grouper, which was started in a pan and finished in the oven, out of sight so I risked forgetting all about it, then served with collard greens and applewood smoked bacon sauce (one pan, one pot, one quart to dip into for sauce). Nor was it slow when three people ordered halibut, pan seared and served with celery root-cabbage slaw, mint pesto, and roasted garlic lemon aioli (one pan, three quarts). The kitchen was humming along by then, plates clattering into the busing tub when the servers brought them back from the dining room, the door swinging in and out, in and out, the pans sizzling, cries of "oven open" and "pickup" above the rushing-water sound of the dishwasher. Sarah was spinning around expertly, plating braised pork belly appetizers and duck with fingerling potatoes and rabbit with risotto and golden tomatoes. By this time I had three frying pans and seven pots going simultaneously—one soup, five pieces of fish, six sides including the lobster nage—and a huge line-up of fish on the counter waiting to be cooked. And I was starting to lose my grip.