Beaten, Seared, and Sauced

T
HANK YOU TO
D
AVE
Larabell, my agent. Thank you to Rica Allannic, my editor. I owe both of you a huge debt of gratitude.

And thank you to everyone who directly impacted this entire experience: Adam Kuban, Gail Rundle, John J. Singer Jr., Barbara Ryan, Anna Dixon Lassoff, Dave Lassoff, Sam and Niloufer Reifler, Jenefer Shute, Susan Daitch, Lauren Cerand, Lesley Porcelli, Deborah Finkel, Adam Walker, Gerard Viverito, Robert Perillo, Irena Chalmers, Ben Smith, Lee Greenfeld, Chesley Hicks, Lacy Shutz, Ian Bickford, Dwayne Motley, Laura Wallis, Jay Cooper, Jill Olson, Elizabeth Albert, Erik Satre, Andrew Lindsay Cohen, Sarah Prouty, Ryan Carey, all the Pownal WW crew, and Bob Miller.

And of course, Dan C., Margo G., Stephen P., Bruce P., Micah M., Rocco P., Gabi C., Jessica S., Max S., Brian T., Carol J., Jackie Y., Mike O., Diego F., Greg L., Jeremy D., Kevin S., Zach L., Natasha M., Sam G., Sammy S., Gio A., Mike B., Sasha G., Jeff S., Sitti S., Evan B., Dimitri K., Joe C., and Leo R.: gracias to all of you.

I want to acknowledge Michael Ruhlman’s excellent book,
The Making of a Chef
, which looked at the day to day workings of the Culinary Institute of America’s curriculum with a more microscopic, objective eye than I achieved in mine. My goal was to supplement Michael Ruhlman and not to supplant him.

M
Y THROAT FELT TIGHT
. My hands were slick. My heart kept up a high rhythm, so fast the beats almost collided. Because of nerves, I’d had three hours of sleep.

I was just a few weeks away from my thirty-eighth birthday.

We’d been staying with my girlfriend Nelly’s parents in Rhinebeck, New York, about twenty minutes up the road from the Culinary Institute of America. Last night, I’d turned the lights out at eleven and lay in the dark, twitching and tossing through a long pileup of minutes and hours. At four a.m., I got out of bed, made coffee, and sat outside watching dawn stir and listening to a riot of birdsongs. At five, I started Nelly’s car and drove off.

For an hour, I’d been sitting in the student parking lot, listening to the Grateful Dead, weighing the situation: the fact of this day, the fact of the next two years. I was certain other people too had made decisions before that seemed ordered and right, seemed logical and good, and then felt suddenly disastrous and badly considered. They had screwed up, and screwed up supremely, had been blind all along to a plan’s inherent, obvious flaws.

We’d packed up the better part of all our books, our furniture, all the little totems of our life, and trekked from Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley. I’d turned down a job offer. A stranger was in our apartment for the next six months. My savings account was paltry, and I’d just
bought a decrepit pickup truck, which was being made less decrepit by a mechanic for a good chunk of what little remained in the bank.

At one point, I’d realized that walking away would cost me only the $100 registration fee I’d paid the school to enroll in their Associate of Occupational Studies (AOS) in Culinary Arts program. The tuition was, at this juncture, fully refundable.

I knew that Nelly thought this was a little crazy. She’d spent some of her early years in Poughkeepsie and knew exactly what it meant to attend the CIA. She was excited I’d be doing it. But a good part of the day-to-day finances—money for electricity, gasoline, groceries—was going to be her purview. She is a writer, and shouldering that burden would be rough. I knew that a few of our friends also thought this was a little crazy and—more—irresponsible. I was borrowing tuition money, and I’d be paying it back. You didn’t do that at thirty-eight.

I saw people moving off in the distance. They wore white chef’s jackets and checked pants and carried notebooks, textbooks, and knife kits. Others wore suits. Everyone, I noticed, walked quickly and intently. Without knowing them, without seeing their faces, I felt inferior. My fingers felt incapable; my mind felt shaky. I did an inventory. My discipline seemed slack and my concentration delicate. I wasn’t, perhaps, all that smart. My memory for figures and facts would certainly fail me. It didn’t feel as if I belonged here.

The school, a few hundred yards from where I was in the parking lot, loomed like a set piece out of
Citizen Kane
. The main building, its biggest building, Roth Hall, the one taking up most of the campus real estate, was a former Jesuit monastery. It rose up for five stories, all dark aged stone, stained glass, and ivy. It felt permanent and pitiless, significant.

A new group of students begins at the CIA every three weeks. Every three weeks there must be someone racking themselves just like I was. I had almost an hour to kill before I was supposed to present myself, along with all the other students starting that day, in the school’s Admissions Office.

The sky was overcast and it was cold out. Bob Weir was singing
about Mexican prostitutes and venereal disease at the precise moment I decided to start the car, drive away, and go explain to Nelly, her parents, my parents, my sister, my grandfather, my friends—to everyone—why I decided this was just a bad idea.

I’d be almost forty when school was finished. This was escapism. This was indulgence.

I had given a lot of thought to what I was going to do after I graduated. The results—the specifics—were inconclusive, but I knew I wanted to cook for the rest of my life and I wanted to do it for other people. By definition, I wanted to be a chef. I did not know how I’d bend the definition of that word to suit me. But I wanted to be a chef and I was here in the parking lot of the school that taught you how to become one.

I liked the idea of cooking on the line in a restaurant. I liked the notion of being anchored to a burning stove in a rush and whirl of activity, of making food strangers would eat. If it was good, you earned their admiration, and that was attractive too. But being a cook under those circumstances will not fill your wallet, and it’s physical. I was fit, I was still strong. But cooking involves serious time on your feet, a real commitment of the body. Eventually, I might need to be realistic. I didn’t know.

I knew I would never own a restaurant. To do so would most likely sap any assets I might someday acquire, and cause my heart to rupture and stop. I’d drive myself to an embolism obsessing over how to save two pennies on a bushel of spinach, worried sick that my staff was robbing me blind behind my back.

I would never be Daniel Boulud. I would never be Ferran Adrià.

I would never be on TV. I knew the camera would never love me enough.

But I loved food, and I loved cooking.

It would be two years gone, two years of strain, two years getting older—all without any guarantees. I had an aptitude for cooking, but as far as I knew, I’d never shot off sparks of brilliance. My parents, my friends, dinner guests—everyone liked my food when they ate it. Or said they did.

A few weeks before, I’d reread Denis Johnson’s
Already Dead
. There was a line I’d always liked, right at the beginning when one of the characters is cruising the back roads off California’s Highway 1, that said, “You might throw a tire and hike to a gas station and stumble unexpectedly onto the rest of your life, the people who would finally mean something to you, a woman, an immortal friend, a saving fellowship in the religion of some obscure church.” Or cooking school.

We are what we nurture. I’d nurtured writing. I hadn’t nurtured cooking. But I felt it there in me, and I was here to coax it out and see how it flourished.

People amble through their lives with the serious weight of lost years on them, looking for moments like this. I watched the students in their uniforms for a while longer. Then I got out of the car and walked toward the Admissions Office to stumble onto the rest of my life.

T
HE
A
DMISSIONS
O
FFICE WAS
a nicely turned-out room of gentle carpeting, only-just-tasteful couches, and brooding light. About seventy people were already there.

In my mind’s cineplex, I think I had envisioned the other students—soon to be my peers—as people of unequaled intensity. Their knowledge would be encyclopedic. Already excessively competent, they were here to hone and refine, to make food sing. I had worked my way through most of the titles on the CIA’s recommended reading list that had been sent out several months prior. I was dipping into Escoffier’s
Le Guide Culinaire
—the foundation of classic French cuisine—every day. I wanted to try and catch up. The competition, I’d assumed, would be fierce in the school kitchens.

The scene in the Admissions lobby was very different from the film in my head.

These faces were still puffy with baby fat. They were gritted with acne. A dozen or so stood in small clusters. I overheard a few conversations. Most of the kids lived on campus and had arrived to settle in
several days earlier. A few had been up late the night before, drinking. Someone had been sick in the shower. One young man wondered aloud several times when we’d get our knives.

But the majority of them stood alone. There was a general sway of exhaustion and disquiet in the air; I wondered how many had slept as poorly as I had. A few people in the crowd began to stick out. Their faces were older. Not quite in my age range, but definitely closer to me than to eighteen. They seemed to be scanning the room and looking a little bit wary. Way apart from the crowd I saw two people standing together who were definitely in my age group. They probably had an involved story of how they got here and why they came. But I couldn’t bring myself to cross over to where they stood. I leaned against the wall and stared at my feet. I didn’t really know how to begin telling my story.

Except for the knot of people in the room’s center, few others were talking at all. Maybe they didn’t know how to tell their stories either.

At 7:00 a.m. on the nose, we were led into an adjoining room, a small auditorium with a video monitor and a few hundred seats.

A squat, thick woman of potent seriousness gave a speech on the Institute and the rigors of its program, about how hard we were going to work, about how much it would change us, how skilled we’d be at the end. It was exactly what I wanted to hear, but terrifying to be told. She went over the schedule of classes for the next semester and the one following. The calendar was broken up into blocks, the first one a quartet of academic classes that lasted six weeks (five classes if you had to take the basic writing course, which I had tested out of). Afterward, there were twenty-four weeks of practical classes, broken into eight three-week blocks. At that point, every student left the school to do an eighteen-week externship, working for minimum wage, or nothing, in a restaurant somewhere around the country or world. Upon completion of the externship, you returned for the second part of the program, which meant six more weeks of academics, and another twenty-four weeks of practical classes. A lot of the kids were fidgeting as she talked.