Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (16 page)

I figured it would take me ninety seconds to get some butter into the sauce still steaming in the pan, wipe the old sauce off, and replate. That would be ten points off my grade. How many points do you get docked for missing butter?

I carried the plate over to Perillo. I’d take the risk.

I was the second-to-last person to be evaluated. Sixteen people had gone before me. I stepped up and the evaluation began. I was already angry at myself and feeling seriously defensive.

“Nice meat—just the right color,” he said after cutting into one of the medallions. He ate a forkful of gratin. “Okay, the potatoes are cooked just right.” The fork went to the plate. “I might have taken the broccolini out thirty seconds earlier. It doesn’t have the bite it needs. The onion rings—maybe a little longer in the oil next time. It’s not the end of the world, just a tiny bit underdone.” Finally, he ate a tiny morsel of the beef. “Consistency of the sauce is good, beef is tender. Okay, nice job. Really nice job. Just watch that broccolini in the future.” He scrawled something down on his grade sheet.

I stood for a second and almost told him, “Hey, man—come on. Bust me on that sauce. It’s really sour. Come on.” But I went back to
my station instead. I tried the sauce on the plate again. And it did suck. I heated up the sauce in the pan, swirled some butter in, mopped most of the old sauce off my plate and ladled on the new. I started eating my dinner. And then I figured it out. Perillo had eaten sixteen bites of meat, sixteen bites of gratin and broccolini, and sixteen onion rings. His palate had to have been sapped. He’d only mentioned textures during the critique. He probably couldn’t have really tasted everything.

The gargantuan (in myriad ways) Fernand Point, whose book
Ma Gastronomie
was at home on my bookshelf, wrote, “Success is the sum of a lot of little things done correctly.” I had roasted a chicken at home the previous weekend and forgot to take out the wishbone. That means I wasted meat when I carved, the wishbone getting in the way of my knife, forcing me to leave a big chunk of breast meat behind. The next day, I was making chicken stock in my kitchen, was preoccupied with all sorts of things I needed to do, and forgot to rinse the bones. When I served some homemade pasta to some friends that evening, I neglected to top it with the garnish of fresh basil I’d chiffonaded. I just simply forgot. I realized that I forgot things a lot.

If you take a shortcut now, you’ll be taking them for your whole career
.

My timing had been on, my reflexes good, my prep work had gone smoothly, but it was hard to keep it from being overshadowed in my mind by the lack of a tablespoon of butter. At least, I told myself, you figured out what you’d screwed up. Chances were pretty good I wouldn’t do it again.

When Perillo’s written final was over, we went back to the kitchen to pull bags of stock from the ice bath and put them away for the next Skills group on Tuesday. Brookshire and Adam were on their cell phones and I overheard them making plans to meet up with some other students in New Paltz. There was a SUNY satellite in New Paltz, and all the bars were there. It was something akin to the East Village of the Hudson Valley, except with a greater concentration of fake IDs. Liz said she’d go. Aubrey, too. A few others agreed to tag along.

As I secured my knives, I heard Brookshire call my name. “Dixon—we’re going drinking in New Paltz. Why don’t you come? You can be the chaperone.”

“I don’t know, Mike. I think my vomiting days might be behind me.”

“You can be the designated driver.”

I saw Adam standing behind Brookshire and he made a motion with his head, as if to say, “Come on, come with us.”

“Designated driver?” I answered. “Wow, that sounds like the best time I’ll ever have.”

But I pondered for a second. I’d really been starved for conversation. I’d only seen some Brooklyn friends a couple of times since we’d moved up here. I’d often feel loneliness exert itself, like a mild headache.

Nelly was waiting, but I didn’t think she’d mind. She’d occasionally expressed concern that I had no friends in the area to speak of. I had an hour’s drive home already—longer from New Paltz—but I had a three-day weekend in front of me. I could also crash with Adam or Mike if I really needed to. I had just gotten a check from a freelance article I’d written, so there was some cash in the bank. It had been a while since I’d sat drinking Irish whiskey in a bar with loud music playing.

“I’m going to take a pass, but I appreciate the offer.” I think I saw a very slight flicker of relief on a few of their faces. “I’ll see you guys on Tuesday.”

I got in the truck with a low note of something forlorn droning in the back of my skull. I just couldn’t stand to feel a gap deepen and widen, sitting in dim light, watching them flirt and pick up women, getting increasingly careless behind the alcohol, getting drunk the way you only can when you’re that young. I wasn’t in the mood to try and relive it, and I didn’t want to be a drag on their good time. I put the Dead on and drove home to my girlfriend. We had a drink together, watched an episode of
Criminal Minds
we’d recorded, and went to sleep by 11:30.

“C
OYAC’S A ROCK STAR
,” one instructor told me. “Even among us other chefs, Coyac’s a rock star.”

Gerard Coyac’s résumé listed the titles saucier, poissonnier, rôtisseur, and executive chef for a dozen or so restaurants in New York City, the Hudson Valley, and Connecticut. He had been the chef for the commodore of the French navy and for the New York Stock Exchange Club.

Even before I knew who he was, I’d noticed him. White haired and red faced, eyes popping, wiry, and short, he moved straight backed down the hallways, head snapping to the left, to the right, a walking synonym for intensity.

He was, people said, a repository of tradition, a caretaker and tender of the methods and science of the gilded classics. Coyac was the CIA’s principal of the old school.

Skills III under Coyac felt like a true sink-or-swim proposition. The class devoted more time to the basic techniques we covered in Skills II—sautéing red meats, sautéing white meats, stewing, poaching, roasting—and one class to vegetarian cooking. The fruits of our labor would, for the first time, be eaten by other students, and Coyac was said to run his Skills III kitchen with no less seriousness than he’d run his professional kitchens.

My growing predilection for French cuisine would get a serious bolster in his class. But Coyac famously brought a lot of volume to his
teaching and, in essence, I didn’t want to get yelled at. Viverito’s reprimands were bruising enough, but the guy still—you could simply sense it—pulled back at some point. Coyac allegedly did no such thing.

A few years prior, I’d had my arm tattooed and it hurt. In the middle of it, I grew shaky in the stomach, and the world whooshed in and out of my vision like I was looking through fog. The tattoo came out nicely and was worth the unpleasantness. I willed myself to recall this lesson—but the tattoo took two hours. This class would last three weeks.

On a Tuesday afternoon at 1:30, my new Skills III group clustered outside of Coyac’s kitchen, waiting for the morning group to finish up. Adam was there, as were Lombardi, Carlos, Brookshire, and a few from Skills II with whom I hadn’t done much interacting: Ox, Yoon—fresh from the Korean army, and Sean—whom I had decidedly mixed feelings about. Sean seemed to rack up a serious debit of absences, sicknesses, and tardies and still talk his way out of them. He didn’t play well with others. He was greedy with communal ingredients. There were a lot of new faces, but one was familiar. Tara was in our group—the loon from my first lunch on campus, a complex of twitches and insanity. She was standing away from the rest of us, arms crossed, lips pursed, looking very much at home in the alternate universe she occupied on her own.

These were to be the members of my group until graduation. Statistically, some of us would drop out, others would experience some delays, but this was the core.

Coyac walked past, gave us a glance, and swept into the kitchen. The morning group began to straggle out, and we made our way in. A couple of people were dispatched to the storeroom to pick up the day’s food supply and the rest of us milled around. The room was narrow. There were five workstations, a bank of stoves, two sinks, and a large reach-in refrigerator. And the omnipresent fluorescent light—which made everyone’s skin look sallow, and as if we were about to have mug shots taken—followed us everywhere.

The food arrived, and Coyac made an announcement. A life in France rendered his accent hermetic. Our group was silent and still.
No one had any idea what he’d just said. So he said it again, looking incredulous, but this time gestured at the food. We swooped in and began putting it away, heaving bags of whole, raw chickens, long loins of beef, and packages of root vegetables and potatoes into appropriate homes. He said something else, during which I caught the words “ingredients” and “station,” but I didn’t know what to do with this knowledge. He’d posted a chart on the wall, we noticed, and it broke us down into teams of three or four, assigned us a station, and indicated which menu our team would be preparing. I found myself at station number 2, standing with Sean, Carlos, and a new guy, another ex-army Korean student, named Joe. Joe had not spent much time in the States, and most of his English vocabulary consisted of obscenities.

In Skills II, each of us had roasted a single chicken, prepared two servings of potatoes and vegetables, made just a cup or so of sauce. Now we’d be doing ten to fifteen servings each class. This was daunting, but not because of the quantity—roasting many chickens is not much more difficult than roasting one, and the only foreseeable difficulty in making mashed potatoes for fifteen instead of two was that peeling took longer. The problem was in trying to organize the activities of four people so that things flowed in a unity of effort rather than resulting in unruly clashes and collisions.

At 2:00, according to our syllabus, Coyac would lecture for about forty-five minutes. At around 3:00, we’d begin cooking. Things needed to be ready around 5:30, and the doors opened to the public at 6:00. Just before the lecture, Sean, Carlos, Joe, and I stood around our steel worktable. We’d gotten cutting boards for ourselves, bains-marie for our equipment, and some plastic containers for our trash.

“So who does what?” Sean asked the other three of us. “How do we do this? Do we each take a turn at everything? Does one person tackle one thing?”

Carlos said, “Nothing here is difficult. Peel some potatoes. Break down some broccoli. Peel some carrots. We’ve got two hours. There are four of us. This is nothing.”

“Fucking easy,” Joe said.

“Yeah, it is easy,” I said. “But let’s all of us truss up the birds and peel the potatoes. That’s the pain in the ass stuff.”

Coyac called us over for lecture and went through, step by step, the process for prepping and cooking the chicken. His accent lost its murk the more he spoke. The oven, he informed us, must be preheated to 500 degrees. The ten chickens were to be trussed, then placed in an oiled pan. The chickens would then be roasted in the farthest reaches in the back of the oven for twenty minutes, and basted periodically. Mirepoix—celery, carrots, onions—would be placed in the pan and, when the juices gathered and spilled from the cavity when a chicken was tipped, and those juices ran clear and were not streaked with red, the chickens were to be removed from the oven, placed on a sheet tray, and kept near the stove until needed.

After the lecture, we started. Coyac had told us to get the chickens in immediately, so I hurried. There are a thousand ways to truss a chicken, but my way was not Coyac’s way. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” he intoned. He cut a length of string from the spool on our workstation, picked up my knife, and cut my truss away. He made deft motions with his hands and the bird was hog-tied. He began muttering as he worked: “Dammit … shit, shit …” and so on. “There,” he said to me, “that is how you truss a
poulet
. Did you remove the wishbone?”

“Uhhh … ummm …”

“Oui or non? Oui or non? Oui or non! Hurry up!”

“No, I didn’t remove the wishbone.”

“Dammit!
” He slashed at his handiwork with my knife. “So not for you following directions? This is great. Fantastic. Why I get out of my bed I don’t know.” He had the wishbone out. “Why I bother I don’t know. Did you season the cavity? It doesn’t look like you seasoned. Watch me season. What is this shit?” His face glowed crimson, his eyes bulged to the point of popping.

I watched. He cut another length of string and trussed the bird, picked it up, and tossed it into one of the pans. It thumped and bounced.

“Come on, come on, let’s go, let’s go!!” He shook his hands at me. I
grabbed the next bird and started cutting away the wishbone. I left too much flesh attached and it snapped as I was pulling it loose.

“Dammit.” He hung his head, shook it, and walked away to the next table. My teammates had stood watching the whole exchange. They each grabbed a chicken and began removing the wishbone.

I mentioned to my team while we were working that I really liked making sauces, and the three of them were in immediate agreement that the pan gravy would be my project. When the birds were done, I’d have to boil off the liquid in the pan, and remove the bulk of the fat. I’d continue cooking the mirepoix until it caramelized, then
singer
—sprinkle flour over the whole mess to make a quick roux. I’d add chicken stock. I’d bring it all to a boil, strain it, and simmer until it was done. I’d also attract Coyac’s attention. I’d been watching him as we prepped the chickens and nothing escaped his notice. It was actually somewhat incredible. He could have his head down, attentive like a surgeon, focusing on someone’s work and making comments, and as someone else moved to drop shallots into a hot pan, he’d snap his head up and yell that the pan was too hot before they were even near it. You had the feeling that you could never take—never even ponder the idea of taking—a shortcut because of some sixth or seventh sense he had, a culinary ESP with which he could anticipate what you’d do minutes before you did it.