Eating for Beginners Page 6
This echoed something Mark had said earlier, when I commented that the cheese business seemed to be thriving. "We're about the animals," he said simply. "We're a farm." Now I understood that the cheese was merely the means to a larger end, which was preserving land. The land could be preserved only because Elizabeth used it to pasture the cows, who in turn made it possible to produce the cheese, which provided the money to tend to them and the land—a perfect circle connecting people, food, and farm.
Elizabeth confirmed this when I asked how she had become interested in making cheese instead of just running a dairy farm. She said the cheesemaking was the best way she could think of to keep the farm up and running and even make a little profit. Then she told me about her father, a doctor and also a self-proclaimed "cheesehead." "During World War II, he served in France," she began. "At one point during the fighting, a group of soldiers came running to him and said 'We've found this awful place, you have to come condemn it so we can blow it up.'" Here she paused for effect, then cracked up, her laughter ringing out across the fields. "Well, of course, it was a cheese cave!"
The sky began to spit rain as we wandered back down the road between the pastures. Banks of gray-blue clouds set off the wet, vivid grass. I thought of my own father, who had once failed to return my phone calls for three days because he was in bed after overdosing on the French cheese he had just smuggled home from Europe in his suitcase. "But it was so good!" he had half-moaned (whether out of happiness or nausea I wasn't sure) when he finally managed to dial my number.
On the way back to my car, we stopped at the barn again to visit the new calves in their pens, including a pair of twins and Gin's latest offspring, Vodka. When I reached in to touch their soft brown heads they butted up against my hand and looked at me hopefully, as if I could feed them while they waited for their mothers.
We found Mark outside the cheese shed, loading up the van to be driven to Manhattan before dawn the next morning, to the Saturday greenmarket in Union Square. I thanked him for letting me tag along through the cheesemaking. "Sure," he replied, grinning. "You should get to know what your farmers are doing."
I couldn't resist asking Mark about the cheese preferences of his elder daughter, who wasn't much older than Jules. I imagined him coming home from work with a big hunk of Bloomsday or Hooligan, and his daughter, the child of an honest maker of delicious, hormone-free cow's-milk cheese, relishing every bite, the opposite of my own obstinate eater.
"Oh," he said with a wry smile. "She really likes goat cheese."
I left the farm and drove home with a very full stomach and a light heart.
4. School for Chefs
"IPSWICH CLAMS! SOOOOO GOOD!" David was rhapsodizing one sticky-hot summer afternoon when I arrived in the kitchen. He waved a white plastic container full of the Massachusetts delicacy in the air. "We're going to serve them fried in beer batter with arugula from upstate."
As an eater, I greeted this news with anticipation—surely there would be a clam or two available for kitchen consumption. As the person who was, I suddenly realized, about to spend the evening dunking slimy clams in goopy batter and frying them to order at the garde manger station while also assembling salads, cheese plates, and other appetizers, I was pretty sure I wouldn't make it through the night without a major grease fire. It didn't help that the night before Noah and I had watched an episode of the British spy series MI-5 in which an operative is murdered by having her head pushed into a deep fryer.
I had not quite managed, at this point, to work up the degree of passion for cooking that led all of the chefs in the applewood kitchen to create dishes that required first a lot of prep and then even more work after they were ordered. They were excited about the possibilities of food and wanted to experiment all the time; if some delicious new combination required three or four extra steps in the pickup—the cooking that gets done when the dish is "fired," meaning the table that ordered it has finished the previous course—they didn't mind. Why make food that you could assemble with minimum ease and potential for burning yourself when you could do it the hard way? The clams were a minor example of this kind of thing. On other occasions I watched David poach eggs to go on top of a pork-belly appetizer while simultaneously sauteing mushrooms for one dish, making caper butter for another, and roasting fish for a third. Because almost all the dishes were new every night, there was no opportunity to get really good at making something (or at least, for me to get really good at it, since the chefs were already pretty good at making anything they could think up). As soon as you—that is, I—learned to make pan-seared scallops with spinach, milk-poached garlic, and a splash of Concord grape reduction by cooking it fifteen times in one night, it was off the menu.
So it would be, I knew, with the clams. The spattering of oil wouldn't start until about four-thirty, when we would make a batch to test the batter and let everyone try them. In the meantime, I got busy peeling avocados for a salad with pickled watermelon rind (the product of someone's pawing through the walk-in for a project during a slow dinner service), cleaning a big box of arugula, and wincing each time someone new came in, saw the fryer, and gave me a look of pity.
As always, family meal was served to all of us—waitstaff, chefs, dishwashers—at three-thirty. That day it was pork and duck meatloaf, which gave a whole new meaning to the word "leftovers." Unlike so-called family meals at my house, everyone not only ate what was offered but also graciously thanked Liza, who had somehow found time to make the meatloaf, along with a salad, while also prepping for dinner. When family meal was over, we filled the fryer with canola oil and cranked it up to start heating. David mixed up a batch of batter and got the clams out of his lowboy again. Each viscous glob was gray, with a roughly nickel-sized body attached to a gooey substance that dripped and slid between my fingers like cold gelatin. I put on a plastic glove, picked up five clams, and dropped them into the batter. Then I plunged my hand into the mixture to fish them out, a horribly oozy search-and-rescue mission. I finally managed to capture them and dump them into the simmering oil, where they sizzled and spattered and turned into frilly little golden blobs within about a minute. As I scooped them up with a perforated spoon (miraculously, without burning myself) and dropped them onto paper towels to drain, I worried about how I could possibly cook batch after batch of them to the perfect combination of tender and crisp when the orders started coming in. I had quickly learned that there was a restaurant version of Murphy's Law: if there was something particularly complicated on the menu, everyone would order it. This seemed to be doubly true when there was something complicated on the menu and I was in charge of making it.
Then we all tasted the clams and suddenly it didn't matter how hard they were to fry properly or how much money David had spent on them when he could have gotten lesser clams at a lower price. "It's like licking the boardwalk," said one of the servers, a look of sublime pleasure on his face. Just then Laura came into the kitchen in a pre-dinner funk. "I don't want one!" she said in a stressed tone when David offered a clam. "You should taste it," he replied calmly. "It tastes like the Atlantic Ocean." That was enough to break Laura's pique. In the summer the Sheas spend their precious days off on Cape Cod, and David was willing to say these clams were as good as being at the shore with Tatum and Sophie. Laura popped one in her mouth and bit down into its soft, briny center. "Oh. That's good," she sighed as she walked, newly serene, back to the office.
As I had predicted, the minute customers read the menu, they all ordered clams. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be transported to his or her favorite seaside haunt in a single bite. Over and over the servers came through the swinging door yelling, "Fire two clams! Fire three clams!" as they stuck their tickets on the rail in front of me. The rest of the kitchen staff didn't even try to hide their relief that someone else was the sucker up to her elbow in batter, peering into a vat of boiling oil in the middle of a heat wave.
But then it was no picnic over at the stove, either. Once the dinner rush star
ted, all the burners were left blazing to save the hassle of turning them on and off—a task that was a special kind of hassle at applewood because the stove had no actual burner knobs. Instead, it had burning-hot metal stubs that had once held knobs. To light a burner you had to grab the stub with a towel and twist it to get the gas flowing, then ignite it with a wand lighter.
"Is this a restaurant thing?" I finally asked one night after wrestling with an especially sticky stub.
"No, it's an applewood thing," said Liza, who seemed unfazed by the knoblessness. David and his father had bought the stove second hand for eight hundred dollars, which is apparently a great deal as long as you're willing to accept a few minor flaws. Like no knobs.
It was so hot at the stove that night that a conversation began about the spontaneous combustion of chef's jackets. "Oh, I've been in hotter places," David said. Flipping a duck breast over at the grill, he continued, "In the Navy, the night before firefighting training, they tell you to wear cotton underwear because anything synthetic will melt right to your skin." Suddenly, whining about the waves of oily heat emanating from the clam fryer seemed inadvisable. At least my hand cooled off whenever I dipped it in the batter.
"You were in the Navy?" the latest kitchen extern said incredulously.
David just smiled and drained the duck breast.
***
On a shelf in Sophie and Tatum's old room beneath the office loft sits a small photograph of a baby-faced, blue-eyed teenager in a sailor suit with a white sailor hat perched on his dark hair and the American flag behind him. This was David in 1987, when, after dropping out of high school, he joined the Navy to save himself. "I'm not one of those guys that went into the kitchen at twelve years old and spent their life there," he told me once. "I joined the Navy when I was seventeen. I had been living on my own, doing my own thing, and getting into trouble. Thankfully I was smart enough to realize I was getting into real trouble and I needed to do something else, so I got my parents to sign me away."
He went directly from the West Village to the famous recruiting booth in Times Square to enlist, and from there went on to boot camp. In the Navy he earned his GED and was trained to fuel jets on aircraft carriers. ("Not very practical in the real world. You can get a job at an airport.") Discharged at twenty, he found work fishing for cod in Alaska and then, back in New York, did a stint as a locksmith and worked in several low-end restaurants making pasta and pizza.
"I just found that I had a knack for it in the most uneducated, basic way," he remembered of his first forays into cooking. "I got to the point where I didn't want to continue at that level. I tried to break into the next tier of restaurant but nobody wanted anything to do with me. I didn't have anything serious on my resume, I didn't know the terminology, I had no classical training at all." It was the mid-1990s, before the Food Network or celebrity chefs, and cooking school was nowhere near as trendy as it has since become, but David realized that if he wanted to move up he needed to study. When he was accepted to the Culinary Institute of America, his grandmother agreed to pay his tuition for the first semester, after which, if he stayed, he would be on his own. He paid for the remaining semesters until graduation with student loans.
Taking classes on everything from making consommé to baking bread, he saw that they were hugely challenging for many of the other students. For David, though, the skills came naturally. "I was good at it for whatever reason. Not by any effort of my own, more genetics or just something that works for me. So I was able to cruise through school. I loved it. I learned a lot."
After he and Laura finished school they moved to Chicago, where he had a series of jobs cooking at fine-dining restaurants, then to New York, where he had one memorably awful job making burgers before they decided to strike out on their own. All along David knew he wanted to have his own restaurant, and that when he did, the kind of natural ease he'd felt in cooking school was what he'd look for when hiring kitchen staff.
Indeed, cooking school wasn't required for success at applewood, as Liza had proved. When I asked why she hadn't gone, she said, "They don't teach you how to make food and create food. They don't teach you anything you couldn't learn on your own with a few reference books and working under a few good chefs. It would be much more useful if they taught you how to think about food." She had worked in a number of high-end Manhattan restaurants, and had landed at applewood largely because she could experiment and imagine to her heart's content. "This is the only place where they let you create your own food from day one," she told me. "'Here's the meat station: write your menu.'"
Also not an alumnus of cooking school was Greg, who was working part time when I started at applewood and had become David's number two by the time I left. His first job in New York had been at a restaurant owned by the brother of a school friend. "They said, 'Do you want to be a busboy or learn to cook?' I chose learn to cook. I just stood on the line for the first three weeks. I didn't even know how to peel a potato."
Sarah of candied orange peel fame, over at the grill, had gone to cooking school and done her externship at applewood, but along with her more traditional credentials, she brought something novel to David's kitchen. Originally trained in theater, she had a kind of presence that none of the others did, her long brown hair bound up underneath a bright scarf, her conversation interspersed with hearty exclamations of "Delicious!" While the rest of us limited ourselves to mumbling along off-key with the eighties hits blaring from the kitchen radio during afternoon prep work, Sarah was not afraid to break into food-related song, occasionally belting out a line or two as she went about chopping onions or some other task. More than once I heard her sing about what she was plating—"This meat is very well done," to the tune of the last song we'd heard on the radio before dinner service began, or a high, melodic "Onions!" as she spooned cipollini ragout into a bowl. During a particularly intricate maneuver that involved pouring pickling liquid from a wide-mouthed container into a small-mouthed one, she produced a little aria with the lyric "This is going to end badly!" And she was absolutely right.
This small group of people, all of whom were referred to as "Chef" (subverting the traditional kitchen structure in which only David would have had that title, and leading to hilarious conversations that began, "Chef?" "Yes, Chef?"), brought a range of personal variation to the food they prepared, and David liked it that way even as he held them to a very high standard. Of course they all absorbed a certain ethos and aesthetic just by watching him cook, but there were days when he had no hand at all in writing the menu. Every dish was cleared with him, but with total confidence in his chefs and in the quality of their ingredients, he was happy to let them experiment the same way he experimented. Every person who came through the kitchen in my time at applewood told me that this attitude made working there unlike working anywhere else.
Andrew, August's predecessor at the pastry station, put it best. He was about to leave applewood, only because he had been offered his dream job, tending to an organic rooftop garden at a private school and cooking for the students. While helping to interview candidates to replace him, he remarked that at other restaurants, even—or perhaps especially—famous ones, "you don't get to have any ideas. That's why we're getting résumés from people who are at great places." Just that day he had talked to an applicant who worked at one of Manhattan's most exclusive restaurants and was eager to escape to a job where everything wasn't the same all the time. All these people already had their training; they were longing for a chance to really deploy it. Restaurant life was taxing enough—the long hours, the stress, the heat—without having to execute someone else's idea of short ribs night after night after night. David encouraged his kitchen colleagues to look at the food in front of them and invent, and he inspired them by example as much as by anything he said.
***
I benefited from this as well. One afternoon David gave me a crate of parsnips, then showed me how to chop them so they came out in what he called "funny little pieces," angular
, asymmetrical bits. First he peeled the parsnip, then he started cutting it at an angle, turning it toward him about a quarter-rotation after each chop, going around and around so that it looked like the point of a pencil as it shed piece after piece. "It's called an oblique cut," David said. "That's what the asshole French cooking teacher would tell you." Then he watched me chop for a minute or two, offering advice. "A little bigger." Chop. "A little harsher angle." Chop. "Perfection!" And even though I knew it wasn't perfect at all, and that I was very slow in creating even imperfect pieces, it was passable.
A more dictatorial chef might have made me consign all the rather haphazard parsnip fragments to quarts to be used for parsnip purée or even family meal, but not David. I realized as he left me to my chopping that I had begun to internalize the ethos of his kitchen on my own terms. I didn't have to do everything exactly the way David would have done it; I did have to do my best. My parsnip pieces were many different sizes and lacked the elegance they would have had if he'd been the chopper, but he was willing to accept them. In cooking school I would have been made to perform this task over and over again until I could produce pieces of uniform size and angles. (The externs and recent graduates all had stories of being in tears over, for example, endlessly practicing tournee-cut potatoes, the peeled ones shaped like little footballs, at home late at night, in order to pass a class.) At applewood, David allowed us time and space to improve.
Often when I watched David visiting the various stations and answering younger chefs' and externs' questions, encouraging them to try things and see what happened, I saw the kitchen as a kind of teaching hospital for chefs, myself included. Once when I asked about how he came up with new dishes, David shrugged and said, "You can't do it right, you can't do it wrong." He never lost his temper at me even when I made idiotic mistakes like forgetting to take those theoretically oblique-cut parsnips out of the oven during prep so that they emerged as, rather than tender little bits, semi-charred fragments that David dubbed "parsnip chips." (We salvaged them with shocking amounts of heavy cream, and they were a big hit at dinner that night.)