Eating for Beginners Page 21

  "I'm so happy to get this thing out of here," Laura said. The office was strictly an office at last (though the sheep tea party mural remained). Before long, Laura and David also hired enough part-time chefs and floor staff to allow each of them to take a night off every week and spend it with their kids. On those days the girls frequently appeared on their bikes after school, around the time of family meal, to say hi to whoever their working parent was.

  "Wow, they're really growing up," I said to David after one of these visits, as he was showing me how to julienne green apples for a slaw with lime juice and parsley.

  "I know," he said, a nostalgic look in his eye. "I have this image of Sophie in her highchair, when she had barely started eating food, with a huge venison chop in her hand." And for the first time, the idea of Jules with a venison chop didn't seem entirely outlandish to me.

  Pan-Roasted Sardines with Caper Butter

  6 whole sardines

  3 tablespoons canola oil

  salt

  ½ stick butter

  ¼ cup capers

  1. Scale and gut the sardines. Place one fish on a cutting board and, starting at the tail and working your way up to the head, use the back of a small knife to scrape off the scales by running the knife against the direction in which they grow. Flip the fish and repeat on the other side, then repeat with each fish.

  2. To gut them, slit open the stomach, pull out the innards (they should come out easily, essentially in one yank), and discard.

  3. Heat the canola oil over medium-high heat in a frying pan big enough to hold all the sardines.

  4. When the oil is hot, salt each sardine on both sides, put them in the pan, and turn the heat down to medium. Let them cook, untouched, for about 5 minutes, then flip them and let them cook for about 3 minutes.

  5. Remove the sardines to 2 plates (3 to a plate), turn down the heat to low, and put the butter in the pan. As it melts, scrape up any bits left in the pan. When it's melted, add the capers and sauté for a minute or so.

  6. Spoon the caper butter over the sardines and serve with greens and a wedge of lemon.

  Serves 2 as an appetizer.

  Seasickness Cure

  1 box saltine crackers

  1 bottle sparkling water

  1. Open box.

  2. Open bottle.

  3. Eat one tiny bite of cracker alternating with one tiny sip of water, making sure to remain near an open window or, if possible, an exit to the outdoors.

  4. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

  Fills one very empty stomach, little by little.

  14. Sweetness and Light

  "AUGUST NEEDS HELP."

  I had been waiting to hear these words since my first day in the kitchen.

  What I said in response was: "Okay, sure."

  What I thought was: "Me? Go to the place with the cookies and chocolate and sugar and candied everything? Yes!"

  I had been making one last halfhearted attempt at the grill (after my day on the Dana Christine, my intoxication with the fish station had faded), but the weather was warm now and it seemed like a good idea to be as close as possible to the homemade ice cream. Back I went to pastry, a part of the room I had only passed through before, and within minutes I was blissfully surrounded by miniature pecan tart crusts and flour. As at the grill, I was completely disoriented and lacked the vocabulary to have a conversation about what I was supposed to be doing. Unlike at the grill, though, the lowboy in front of me contained—instead of tenderloins submerged in oil and one-pound chunks of butter—chocolate sauce and mascarpone cream, things I understood instinctively in a way I could never understand raw meat. It also held the dough for the tart crusts, which August pulled out and placed on the counter. He showed me how to roll it out on the floured countertop and cut circles in it with—of course—a quart container.

  "So then do I use this ... this pastry knife to get them off?" I asked hesitantly.

  "Yeah, yeah. Call it whatever. It doesn't matter," August said, picking up the long flexible blade, rounded and blunt on the end, and sweeping it under one of the circles. Then he pressed the dough into a little fluted tart tin about two and a half inches wide, tamping it down gently with his fingers until it filled the space nicely.

  "Then trim it, like this," he said. With one deft swoop of the nameless tool, he cut the drooping edges off the crust. Turning back to the crepes he was making to fill with caramelized pears and ricotta and serve with cinnamon ice cream and cranberry sauce, he said in the nicest possible tone, "It doesn't have to be fast or anything."

  Which, though probably not true, was a good thing to hear because I spent the next five minutes completely botching the first crust I tried to put into a tiny tart tin. Every time I pressed it, it tore, until I finally gave up on that one and rolled out the dough again to cut more quart circles. For every batch of three tarts, I messed one up irrevocably. The dough was too thick, or I tore it, or I trimmed off too much when I was trying to swoop the knife around the edge of the tin. Somewhere behind me, I could hear Sarah saying "short ribs with kale and black bean-bacon purée," and it sounded like a foreign language. It took me almost thirty minutes to make twelve very small tart crusts.

  But August was nothing but grateful. He had to make five new desserts before dinner service began. (Unlike the savory food, desserts were almost all made ahead of time and then assembled when they were ordered, so dinner service itself wasn't hard, but the hours leading up to it were.) "Thank you so much for your help," he said.

  "You have to make all of these?" I asked, looking at the list he had taped up. It read: "Pecan tarts, fruit compote, chocolate soufflés, crepes, orange cream, quince purée, pineapple compote, crème brûlées, butterscotch, cherry soup."

  "Oh yeah," he replied, scratching the top of his head through the Che Guevara baseball cap he always wore in the kitchen. "But it's easy. At one of my old jobs I had to do five hundred desserts a night, pre-theater, dinner, and post-theater. I had to get to work at five A.M."

  "No wonder you seem so unworried," I said as I popped a caramelized macadamia nut into my mouth. "I would be freaking out."

  "Oh, I have a hidden temper," he said impishly, plating his crepe dessert for the servers to try. Watching him stick a shortbread star to the plate with a gob of marzipan and place a scoop of cinnamon ice cream on the star, I found that hard to believe.

  August was twenty-six and had started out as a line cook in Florida at the age of seventeen. Then he had applied to be a bartender on the Carnival Cruise line because he thought it would be fun and he'd get to travel. When that job was re-claimed by its previous occupant, he applied to be Carnival's "assistant to the assistant to the assistant of the pastry chef" and got the job. Pastry turned out to be his calling.

  "I never thought I was going to be doing it for the rest of my life, but this is where all my creativity comes out," he told me as we mixed the pecan filling for the tart crusts I had just massacred. "I just imagine them. I don't even taste them a lot of the time. I just give them to other people."

  In addition to the pecan tarts, which he planned to serve with butterscotch sauce and mascarpone cream, the menu for that night included Ruby Red grapefruit sorbet with citrus compote and quince purée; warm chocolate soufflé with brandied cherry-pecan soup; the crepes; and a cinnamon-fennel crème brûlée with a pineapple, thyme, and lime compote.

  But first came the tarts, which I needed to finish making. "Just put like a spoonful in the middle of each crust," August instructed. It sounded straightforward enough, but even that task was harder than I expected. I have fairly good hand-eye coordination, but somehow I missed the center of the tart tin with my spoonful of pecan goo more often than I hit it, so I had to go back and even out the level of filling over and over again.

  One of the reasons this was so troubling was that it highlighted a major contradiction in my personality: I have a gigantic sweet tooth, but I'm basically incapable of making a dessert. In recent years I'd taken to just buying ice c
ream and cookies or serving somebody else's pie. When we had friends coming over and they asked what to bring, I always said dessert. A few times I'd tried to fool myself into thinking I could follow a cake recipe as easily as one for pork loin, but it wasn't true. The last time I'd baked a cake it had not, as Sarah would have said, ended well.

  My brother-in-law's birthday is December 25, and after years of watching it get eclipsed by Christmas festivities, I wanted to do something in his honor besides arbitrarily writing "This one's for your birthday" on half of his presents. I would bake him a cake. I consulted with my closest friend, an expert baker, who gave me a recipe ("foolproof") that I followed to the letter. The cake looked perfect when it came out of the oven, but when I went into the kitchen about half an hour later, I noticed it had sunk in the middle. So I flipped it over, frosted it, and went about my business. By the time we had eaten our roast goose and cabbage and potatoes and the floor was strewn with wrapping paper, I had put the incident out of my mind. Then I went to get the cake and discovered that, thanks to its leaden center, it had cratered just as deeply in the opposite direction. It tasted delicious, and no one else seemed to mind its appearance, but the whole incident had scared me off ever trying again.

  With that fiasco in mind, I decided that standing next to August and handing him plates and spoons was the safest thing to do for the remainder of the shift. Dinner service went off without a hitch, and though I didn't do much to help, I watched keenly, trying to learn something about baking for future reference. It was almost Jules's birthday, and a cake, obviously, was in order.

  The one great exception to my failure as a maker of sweets up to that point was a boiled frosting so specific to my family that it didn't even have a name. My mother had made it for my sister and me when we were children (it was actually half a recipe from an old cookbook she had, but I didn't learn that until I was in my twenties), and now we made it for our own children and for each other whenever we were together on a birthday.

  "Are you going to make the frosting?" I would ask my sister when one of her kids had a birthday.

  "Do you think we should make the frosting?" she would ask me when our mother's birthday was coming around.

  Though we knew there were plenty of other frostings in the world, we never even considered being disloyal to the one we knew best, which was made of a deathly sweet combination of sugar, corn syrup (that is, more sugar), and egg whites. So it was that I found myself on the morning of Jules's second birthday with a pot containing these ingredients on the stove and a candy thermometer at hand to test the temperature of the boiling mixture. I had armed myself with a cake mix to avoid the cratering problem, but I was not going to skimp on family tradition, even if applewood was exposing me to all kinds of new frosting secrets. When the liquid reached two hundred and forty-two degrees, I beat it into a bowl of egg whites I had whipped until they stood up in peaks. Earlier I had baked two chocolate layers, and now I stacked them with a layer of white goo in between to hold them together and a coating of shiny white all over the outside. In red frosting on the top, I wrote, disbelievingly, "JULES IS 2."

  Family and friends gathered around the dinner table and sang as Noah brought the cake from the kitchen. Jules blew out the big numeral-two candle.

  "Are you going to have cake?" Noah asked him.

  "Yeah," he replied, wide-eyed.

  When the plates were passed around, Jules picked off his frosting to eat and left the cake, but I counted it as a victory not only for tradition but for progress. The frosting was pure sugar, but it was something new.

  ***

  I spent the next month at the pastry station, trying to figure out why things that seemed simple when August did them were absolutely beyond me. I mixed and whisked and cut out tart crusts, but mostly I stood by and watched. He made individual pineapple upside-down cakes with salted caramel (I sliced the pineapple). He made white wine-poached apples with sweet ricotta cheese and cinnamon streusel (I made the poaching liquid and set the apples in the pot to cook). He made espresso bread pudding with white chocolate ganache (I cut up the bread and dumped it in the pan) and almond poppyseed cake with blood orange frosting (I squeezed the oranges and served as official taster). In between, he made batches and batches of chocolate chip cookies, tiny and light, which appeared to be made of exactly the same ingredients I used to make chocolate chip cookies, but which were not like my cookies at all.

  "Why are these so good when you make them and so not good when I do?" I wondered aloud one day after popping one practically straight from the oven into my mouth.

  "Because I've already made every mistake you can make," he answered, handing me another. "Twice."

  Ordinarily I would have taken some comfort from this, but as soon as he said it I realized that I didn't need any. I was no longer obsessed with what I did or didn't know how to do with food. I knew enough.

  Up front they were making crispy kale (baked in the oven with salt on a sheet tray—a big hit with Jules when I tried it at home), a tomato tapenade, and a beautiful salad made of a fluttery chiffonade of long, thin strips of chard, green with a smattering of magenta. All of these dishes seemed, somewhat to my surprise, like things it might occur to me to make at home, though I thought I might cook the chard instead of serving it raw as a salad. I had a lot of ideas. Pastry was different, of course, since you had to know all the ratios of liquid to dry ingredients to make the recipes work; August constantly consulted a food-splattered notebook and various crumpled-looking pieces of paper on which he had written recipes. But even my inadequacy as a pastry chef didn't seem vitally important. I could always buy dessert.

  I mixed up the next batch of cookie dough and we scurried around until dinner service began, weighing out chocolate and checking the sorbet in the freezer to make sure it was hard enough.

  It was slow at pastry the first part of the night—everyone seemed to be lingering over their entrées and then deciding they were too full for dessert—and August was bored and slightly grumpy. Because we had nothing to do during dinner service but put together dessert plates when people ordered them (which was great fun and involved dribbling and splashing sauces onto plates as decoration and popping little cakes and crumbles and bread puddings into the toaster oven to warm them up), we stood around waiting for the servers to come back and stick dessert tickets on the rail above the pastry station. "I'd go crazy if it was like this all the time," August grumbled. "Let's make truffles."

  So we stood at the back of the kitchen, dipping melon ballers into a deep hotel pan of chilled truffle mixture made of chocolate and heavy cream, over and over and over. Then around eight-thirty, just when I thought my hand was going to fall off from pressing the utensil into the hardened chocolate, the first dessert order came in: espresso-flavored bread pudding. Action!

  I took a round cookie cutter about two inches high over to the speed rack, a tall, open-sided shelving frame with runners for sliding in baking trays and hotel pans, used for easily accessible storage and also as a place to put hot trays for cooling. Pulling the hotel pan of bread pudding partway out so that I could reach into it, I pressed the cutter down into the slightly crispy, uneven top, twisted it a few times, then pulled it out with a perfect short cylinder of bread pudding inside it. I pushed the pudding out with a spoon onto a small metal sizzle platter used for heating and handed it to August, who stuck it in the toaster oven. After about five minutes he grabbed the platter out with a side towel, dusted the top of the pudding with powdered sugar, and transferred it to a plate with a spatula. I dipped a spoon into the quart of white-chocolate ganache sauce sitting on the counter, then drizzled some onto the plate in a circle around the bread pudding and zigzagged a bit of it over the top. Next I stacked some chopped pecans on top of the pudding, and voilà! August marched the plate to the front of the room and set it on the counter closest to the dining room door, with the ticket underneath it. Walking back toward me, he had a look of pleased relief on his face. Something was happening a
t last.

  This was how nights on the pastry station unfolded: All the pressure was in the afternoon, and August came in around ten A.M. a few times a week to get started and to have full use of the ovens before everyone else got in and started filling them with squash or potatoes. By the time dinner service rolled around, if everything had gone well, he had nothing to do but wait impatiently and assemble. There wasn't even any fire involved, which made pastry the coolest station, if the least adrenaline-filled. When things were really dull, August spent the first few hours of dinner service testing new recipes to keep from going nuts.

  One evening at about six o'clock, before anyone had come in to eat, he passed around some almond cookies he had just made for the first time. They were crisp and light on the outside and soft and slightly chewy on the inside, and they melted the moment they hit your tongue.

  "Soooo good," David said happily. "How'd you think of these?"

  August started laughing. "I have no idea! I found this recipe under my bed when I was looking for the remote control." He didn't even know how long it had been there. I pondered this information while eating another half-dozen cookies, trying to remember if I'd ever found anything other than dust bunnies or Jules's miniature skateboards under my own bed. I was obviously never going to be a pastry chef.

  Still, it was amazing to behold one up close. On another slow evening, August started experimenting with various kinds of brownies. "No one is ordering dessert," he sighed, looking enviously at the grill and fish stations, which were being slammed with orders. Then about five minutes later, he went to the oven, pulled out a pan, and brought it over to pastry. It was filled with something crusty and caramel-colored.