Kitchen Confidential (4 page)

He was actually nice to me after that. He'd let me stand and watch him decorate the voiture each night, a task he reserved for himself: the glazing and garnishing of a hot roast in a rolling silver display cart. He layered on his blanched leeks and carved tomato roses like a brain surgeon, humming quietly to himself, aware, I think, that soon they wouldn't be doing much of this anymore. My final proud accomplishment at CIA was the torpedoing of a dangerous folly being planned for the graduation ceremonies. The event was planned for the Great Hall, the former chapel in the main building. An idea was being floated by some of my class-mates-all over-zealous would-be pastry chefs-to create a display of pastillage, marzipan, chocolate sculpture and wedding cakes to wow and amaze our loved ones as they were herded into the ceremony. I'd seen the kind of work an over eager patissier can do-I'd seen their instructor's work-and most of it was awful, as so much pastry and garde-manger work is when the chef starts thinking he's an artist rather than a craftsman. I'd seen a much admired commemorative cake, depicting Nixon, painted in chocolate on a pastillage cameo, communicating by telephone with the Apollo astronauts in their space module, also chocolate on pastillage. I did not want my friends and family to have to gaze upon a horror like that.

I didn't want to be a killjoy. To dampen the enthusiasm at this proud and happy event by being a naysayer and a cynic was too close to what I'd been at Vassar, and those days, I liked to think, were behind me. I was sneakier in my strategy to put an end to this outrage. I submitted my own earnest proposal, requesting that I be allowed to contribute a piece montee to the festivities, even going so far as to submit a sketch of my proposed project:

It would be a life-sized tallow sculpture, depicting a white-toqued baby Jesus, with knife and steel in his tiny hands, held by an adoring Madonna. Needless to say, my beef-fat Madonna horrified the graduation committee. Rather than offend my disturbingly sincere, if quirky, religious beliefs, they scotched the whole display. An animal-fat Sistine Chapel was not something they wanted all those parents and dignitaries to see. And who knows what could happen if they opened the door for me? What other demented expressions of personal hell might wind up lining the Great Hall?

The ensuing ceremony was thus spared the prospect of decomposing aspics depicting Moses parting the Red Sea, or melting wedding cakes. A few days later, I had my diploma. I was now a graduate of the best cooking school in the country-a valuable commodity on the open market-I had field experience, a vocabulary and a criminal mind. I was a danger to myself and others.

MY TRIUMPHANT RETURN TO Provincetown-halfway through the program at CIA-came the following summer. Newly invigorated with obscure cooking terms, The Professional Chef and the Larousse Gastronomique under my arm, and my head filled with half-baked ideas and a few techniques I'd seen and maybe even tried a few times, I rejoined myoId comrades at the Dreadnaught, to much curiosity and amusement. A little knowledge can be dangerous and annoying. . but I had actually learned some useful things. I'd been working in the city weekends while at school, I could work a station without embarrassing myself, and I was enthusiastic about my new, if modest, skills. I was determined to outwork, outlast and in every way impress myoId tormentors at Mario's.

Dimitri, the pasta man, was years older than I was. Then in his early thirties, running to fat, with chunky-framed glasses and a well-tended handlebar moustache, he was markedly different from his fellow cooks at Mario's. Born in the USA of a Russian father and a German mother, he was the only other cook in P-town who'd been to cooking school-in his case, a hotel school in Switzerland. Though he claimed to have been expelled for demonstrating the Twist in that institution's dining hall, I always doubted this version of events. He became the second great influence in my career.

A mama's boy, loner, intellectual, voracious reader and gourmand, Dimitri was a man of esoteric skills and appetites: a gambler, philosopher, gardener,

fly-fisherman, fluent in Russian and German as well as having an amazing command of English. He loved antiquated phrases, dry sarcasm, military jargon, regional dialect, and the New York Times crossword puzzle-to which he was hopelessly addicted.

It was from Dimitri's fertile mind that much of what I'd come to know as Mariospeak had originated. Brainy, paranoid, famously prone to sulking, he both amused and appalled his co-workers with his many misadventures, his affected mannerisms and his tendency to encounter tragicomic disaster. Fond of hyperbole and dramatic over-statement, Dimitri had distinguished himself after a particularly unpleasant breakup with a girlfriend by shaving his head completely bald. This would have been, in itself, a rather bold statement of self-loathing and grief, but Dimitri pushed matters to the extreme; the story went that he had no sooner revealed his snow-white skull to the world than he went to the beach, got drunk and sat there, roasting his never-before-exposed-to-the-sun scalp to the July ultraviolets. When he returned to work the next day, not only was he jarringly bald, but his head was a bright strawberry-red, blistered and oozing skullcap of misery. No one talked to him until his hair grew back. Dimitri saw himself, I think, as a Hemingwayesque, hard-boozing raconteur Renaissance man, but he was completely under the thumb of his mother, a severe, equally brilliant gynecologist, whose daily calls to the Mario kitchen were much imitated.

'Alloo? Is Dih-mee-tree zere?'

We'd met before, of course, the previous year, when he'd known me, no doubt, as 'Mel'. But I was a broiler man now, a CIA student, a curiosity. It was permissible for Dimitri to talk to me. It was like Hunt and Liddy meeting; the world would probably have been a better place had it never happened, but a lot of fun was had by all.

Dimitri was scared of the outside world. He lived year-round at the tip of the Cape, and he liked to fancy himself a townie. He did a damn good imitation of a local Portuguese fisherman accent, too. But Dimitri was-as the Brits say-quite the other thing. We'd have drinks after knocking off at our respective restaurants and try to outdo each other with arcane bits of food knowledge and terminology. Dimitri, like me, was a born snob, so it was only natural that when our lord and master, Mario, decided on two employees to cater his annual garden party, he selected his two would-be Escoffiers, the Dimitri and Tony Show.

Our early efforts were, in the cold light of day, pretty crude and laughable. But nobody else in town was doing pate en croute or galantines in aspic, or elaborate chaud-froid presentations. Mario tasked his most pretentious cooks with an important mission, and we were determined not to let him down-especially as it allowed us time off from our regular kitchen chores and all the overtime we needed. We threw ourselves into the task with near-fanatical once-in-a-lifetime zeal and prodigious amounts of cocaine and amphetamines.

As a fly-fisherman, Dimitri made his own lures; this obsessive eye for detail carried over to his food. For Mario's garden party, we spent days together in a walk-in refrigerator, heads filled with accelerants, gluing near-microscopic bits of carved and blanched vegetables onto the sides of roast and poached fishes and fowls with hot aspic. We must have looked like crazed neurologists, using tweezers, bamboo skewers and bar straws to cut and affix garnishes, laboring straight through the night. Covered with gelee, sleepless after forty-eight hours in the cooler, we lost all perspective, Dimitri at one point obsessing over a tiny red faux mushroom in one corner of a poached salmon, muttering to himself about the distinctive white dots on the hood of the Amanita muscara or psilocybin mushroom, while he applied dust-sized motes of cooked egg white for 'authenticity'. He buried all sorts of horticultural in-jokes in his work-already insanely detailed Gardens of Eden made of leek strips, chives, scallions, paper-thin slices of carrots and peppers. He created jungle tableaux on the sides of hams that he considered, 'reminiscent of Rousseau's better efforts' or 'Gauguin-like'. When I jokingly suggested Moses parting the Red Sea on the side of a striped bass, Dimitri got a faraway look on his face and immediately suggested a plan.

'The Israelites, in the foreground . we can use straws to cut the olives and egg whites for their eyes. But the Egyptians pursuing in the background. . we can cut their eyes with bar straws, you know, the zip-stix! So they're smaller, you see! For perspective? I had to physically restrain him from attempting this tableau.

We had been under refrigeration for three days straight when we finally collapsed in the Dreadnaught's cocktail lounge at 4 A.M., unshaven, dirty and crazed. We woke up a few hours later, covered with flies attracted by the tasty, protein-rich gelee that covered us from head to toe.

The garden party was, to be modest, a smashing success. No one in dowdy old Provincetown had ever seen anything like it. We became instantly notorious, and we made the most of it, printing up business cards for a planned catering venture called Moonlight Menus. The cards, commissioned from a local artist, depicted us sneering in toques. We proceeded to hand these things out to local businessmen, telling them blithely that not only did we not need, or even want their business, but they couldn't possibly afford us, as we were easily the most expensive and exclusive caterers on the entire Cape! Two highly trained specimens like us had more than enough business, thank you very much. There was, of course, no business. But the strategy worked. In the coke-soaked final weeks of 1975 p-town, there were plenty of local businessmen eager to impress their friends with an elaborate end-of-season bash. And we were only too happy to encourage them in even grander pretensions, filling their heads with names and dishes we'd culled from my Larousse (few of which we'd actually attempted) and quoting staggering prices. We knew well how much these people were paying for cocaine-and that the more coke cost, the more people wanted it. We applied the same marketing plan to our budding catering operation, along with a similar pricing structure, and business was suddenly very, very good. In no time, we were able to leave our regular jobs at the Dreadnaught and Mario's, lording it over our old co-workers in brand-new Tony Lama boots, and brandishing shiny new Wusthoff knives when we dropped by for a quick visit and a gloat.

Our customers were restaurateurs, coke dealers, guys who ran fast boats out to motherships off Hyannis and Barnstaple to offload bales of marijuana. We catered weddings, parties, private dinners for pizza magnates, successful leather and scrimshaw merchants. All the while, I filled Dimitri's head with the idea that what we were doing here, we could do back in New York-only bigger and better.

Ah, those heady days of happy delusion, spirited argument, grandiose dreams of glory and riches. We did not aspire to be the new Bocuses. No, that wasn't enough. Jacked up on coke and vodka, we wanted nothing less than to be like Careme, whose enormous pieces montees married the concepts of architecture and food. Our work would literally tower over the work of our contemporaries: Space Needles, Towers of Babel, Parthenons of forcemeat-stuffed pastry, carefully constructed New Babylons of barquettes, vol-au-vents, croquembouches . the very words excited and challenged us to reach higher and higher. We had some successes-and some failures.

A steamship round (a whole roast leg of beef on the bone) sounded like a good idea; it was, after all, big. Until we overcooked it. An all-Chinese meal we did was so overloaded with dried Szechuan peppers that we could hear the muffled wails of pain from the next room. And I recall with horror a blue wedding cake, layers of turquoise-colored buttercream and sponge cake, decorated with fruit that looked more like Siegfried and Roy's beach house than anything Careme ever did. But we did have some notable successes as well. Provincetown's first Crown Roast of Veal with Mushroom Duxelle Stuffing and Black Truffle-Studded Madeira Sauce for one-and our mighty Coliseum of Seafood Blanquette.

The client was a restaurant owner, and we oversold ourselves somewhat. Committed to our pastry terrordome, we soon found that there wasn't a mold quite large enough for this ambitious effort. What we wanted was a tasty yet structurally sound 'coliseum' of pastry crust into which we could pour about 5 gallons of seafood stew. And we wanted the whole thing to be covered by a titanic pastry dome, perhaps with a tiny pastry figure from antiquity, like Ajax or Mercury, perched on top.

We didn't know if the thing could be done. Other than old engravings from Larousse we'd never even seen anything like what we were attempting. There was no suitable spring-form mold, something we could line with foil and fill with beans and then blind-bake. We couldn't cook it together with the blanquette; it would never hold. The bubbling veloute suspending our medley of fish and shellfish and wild mushrooms would make the walls too soft. And the dough: what crust could support the weight of 5 gallons of molten stew? As game time approached, we were getting worried. We set up our operations center in our client's restaurant kitchen and promptly bivouacked to a bar for some serious strategizing.

In the end-as it so often does-it came down to Julia. Julia Child's recipes have little snob appeal, but they also tend to work. We took a recipe for dough from her book on French cooking, and after rubbing the outside of a large lobster steamer with shortening, stretched and patched our dough around and over it. It was exactly the opposite of the prevailing wisdom; fortunately, we didn't know that at the time. For our dome, we used the top of the pot, and the same principle, laying our dough over the outside of the round lid and baking it until firm.

When we finally slid the things off-very carefully, I can tell you-Dimitri was characteristically pessimistic. Would it hold? He didn't think so. It was a lot of stew we were planning on pouring into this thing, and Dimitri was convinced it would crumble at the table mid-meal, boiling hot fish and lavalike veloute rushing onto the laps of the terrified guests. There would be terrible burns involved, he guessed, 'scarring. lawsuits. . total disgrace'. Dimitri cheered himself up by suggesting that should the unthinkable happen, we were obliged, like Japanese naval officers, to take our own lives. 'Or like Vatel,' he submitted, 'he ran himself on his sword over a late fish delivery. It's the least we could do.' In the end we agreed that should our Coliseum of Seafood Blanquette fall, we'd simply walk quietly out the door and into the bay to drown ourselves.

Party time came and we were ready-we hoped. First there were hors d'oeuvres: microscopic canapes of smoked salmon, cucumber and caviar; Dimitri's chicken liver mousse with diced aspic; little barquettes of something or other; deviled eggs with fish roe; a lovely pate en croute with center garnishes of tongue, ham, pistachio and black truffles, and an accompanying sauce Cumberland I'd lifted right out of my CIA textbook. Our crown roast was no problem. It was the blanquette that filled our hearts with dread and terror.

But God protects fools and drunks, and we were certainly both foolish and drunk much of the time. Things went brilliantly. Our coliseum's walls held! The crown roast, decorated with little frilly panties on each gracefully outward-arching rib bone, looked and tasted sensational. We were given a standing ovation by the dazzled guests and grateful client.

When we next showed up at our old kitchens for our weekly gloat, our heads were too big to fit in P-town's doors. We were already planning on hunting bigger game. We had newer, more sophisticated, even richer victims in mind for our learn-as-we-go operation. In New York.

SECOND COURSE WHO COOKS? WHO'S COOKING YOUR FOOD anyway? What strange beasts lurk behind the kitchen doors? You see the chef: he's the guy without the hat, with the clipboard under his arm, maybe his name stitched in Tuscan blue on his starched white chef's coat next to those cotton Chinese buttons. But who's actually cooking your food? Are they young, ambitious culinary school grads, putting in their time on the line until they get their shot at the Big Job? Probably not. If the chef is anything like me, the cooks are a dysfunctional, mercenary lot, fringe-dwellers motivated by money, the peculiar lifestyle of cooking and a grim pride. They're probably not even American.

Line cooking done well is a beautiful thing to watch. It's a high-speed collaboration resembling, at its best, ballet or modern dance. A properly organized, fully loaded line cook, one who works clean, and has 'moves'-meaning economy of movement, nice technique and, most important, speed-can perform his duties with Nijinsky-like grace. The job requires character-and endurance. A good line cook never shows up late, never calls in sick, and works through pain and injury.