Under the Table (21 page)

I vowed revenge.

Rabbit Ragoût

Rabbit is the other other white meat, and, frankly, better than veal, pork, or chicken. Because it is so lean, it does not require the long braising time that veal does, and it has a much better flavor than chicken. If you have a hard time tracking down rabbit (and don't feel like ordering it online), you can substitute stew veal or skinless chicken thighs.

 

One 3-pound rabbit, cut into serving pieces (have your butcher do this if you are uncertain how to do it)

Salt and freshly ground pepper

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 ounces bacon, diced

12 ounces mushrooms (button, wild, or a mix), quartered

1 medium carrot, peeled and finely chopped

½ medium yellow onion, finely chopped

1 stalk celery, finely chopped

3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1½ cups dry white wine (I have even used dry vermouth in a pinch)

1 ounce dried porcini mushrooms, rehydrated in 3 cups hot water

1 bay leaf

½ cup heavy cream

Cooked Fresh Pasta, for serving

1. Preheat the oven to 325°F.
   
2. Pat the rabbit dry with paper towels and season very lightly with salt and pepper. Sprinkle 1 tablespoon of the flour over the pieces. In a medium ovenproof pot or Dutch oven, brown the rabbit pieces
   over medium-high heat in the olive oil. When the pieces are nicely browned on all sides, about 5 minutes, remove them from the pot and set aside.
   
3. Wipe out the pot and return it to medium heat. Add the bacon. When the bacon begins to render its fat, add the mushrooms, carrot, onion, celery, and garlic. Sift the remaining 1 tablespoon flour over the vegetables, season lightly with salt and pepper, and cook until the vegetables are soft and lightly colored.
   
4. Add the rabbit pieces to the pan and cover with the white wine. Add the porcini mushrooms and their soaking water, being careful to leave behind any dirt that has settled to the bottom. Add the bay leaf.
   
5. Cover and cook in the oven until the rabbit is tender, about 1 hour. Remove the bay leaf.
   
6. Over medium heat, reduce the liquid in the pot by half (if this has not already happened in the oven). Add the cream and cook for 5 minutes more to thicken. The sauce should be thick enough to coat a spoon. Taste and adjust seasonings.
   
7. Serve piping hot with wide ribbons of fresh pasta.
   

Serves 4

Fresh Pasta

Nothing tastes quite as good as fresh pasta you have made yourself. It is very easy to make, especially if you have a pasta machine, and takes almost no time. I have even made this in the food processor—a must if you are tripling or quadrupling the recipe, as we often did for the restaurant in school. For the rabbit recipe on Chapter 21, I like to roll out the dough by hand, without using my machine, and cut it into wide, irregular ribbons. Somehow this rustic touch makes it taste better to me than the precision-cut, mass-produced varieties in the supermarket, though if you are pressed for time, or are just plain unwilling to make pasta yourself, store-bought pasta is fine.

 

2 cups all-purpose flour, plus extra for dusting

1 teaspoon salt

4 eggs

1 egg yolk

1 teaspoon olive oil

Cold milk (optional)

1. To make the dough in a food processor: Put the flour and salt in the bowl of the food processor. Give it a quick blitz to blend. Add the eggs, yolk, and olive oil, and pulse on and off until the dough comes together in a ball. If the dough doesn't come together, add a teaspoon or two of cold milk, just until the dough combines. Remove the dough from the processor and knead it for a few moments until it is smooth and soft, like a piece of vintage Italian leather luggage. Wrap securely in plastic wrap and let rest for at least 30 minutes at room temperature or up to a day in the refrigerator.
   
2. To make the dough by hand: Sift the flour and salt together into a large pile on your work surface. Make a well in the dry ingredients
   and add the eggs, yolk, and olive oil to the well. Using your fingers, stir together the wet mixture, slowly incorporating more and more of the flour until it is all combined. Add a few teaspoons of milk if the mixture is too dry to work. Knead strenuously until a supple dough has formed. This may take as long as 10 minutes, depending on how much oomph you put into your kneading. (I like to really work out my aggression by kneading, so bear that in mind. If you are a gentle kneader, it will certainly take you longer.) Wrap in plastic wrap and let rest as in step 1.
   
3. To roll out the dough: Segment the dough into four pieces. Either use a pasta machine, following the manufacturer's instructions, or roll out by hand: Dust the work surface with a whisper of flour. With a heavy rolling pin, use even pressure to roll out one piece of the dough as thin as possible without tearing it. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside. Repeat with the remaining dough, covering each piece with plastic wrap.
   
4. Return to the first piece of dough. Again roll it out as thin as possible. It should stretch a bit more this time around. Once the dough is
   ¹
   /
   ₈
   inch thick or a little less, it can be cut into shape. If not, put it aside and repeat rolling out the rest of the dough before rolling out the first piece one more time. Once the dough is thin (
   ¹
   /
   ₈
   inch), cut it into the desired shape.
   
5. To cook the pasta: Bring a large stockpot full of well-salted water to a boil. It should taste like the sea. Once the water is boiling hard, add the pasta. Cook for a scarce 2 minutes, until the pasta is al dente and just floats to the surface of the water. Drain and serve immediately.
   

Makes 1 pound of pasta, enough to serve 4 generously as a main course or 6 as a first course

W
hen we were not deeply engaged with our pursuits as budding craftsmen in edible art, one afternoon a week we were treated to wine class. Wine class was another special perk for the day students, one that the night students didn't get to participate in. While our tuition was slightly higher, I really didn't mind so much on that first afternoon of class, as Chef Pierre brought out several bottles of frosty cold white wine for our first adventure in palate education.

Wine has always been a particular passion of mine, ever since I worked at a small winery during college. Granted, the winery was tucked away in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, an area known more for its spectacular views than for its
terroir,
but I caught the wine bug nevertheless. I was lucky enough to work for a man who loved wine tremendously and wanted everyone to love it as much as he himself did. During business hours I was busy preparing plates of hot baguettes and rare, runny cheeses, and keeping the wine refrigerator stocked with chardonnays, seyvals, and rieslings and the bottles of cabernet franc and cabernet sauvignon just this side of cool. After work I was allowed to sit in on the late-afternoon discussions between Jim and his fellow grape growers, usually over some dusty, exotic bottle of wine. They talked about the weather and its effect on the upcoming harvest, and what flavors and textures they could detect in the wine they were drinking. Shrouded in a paper bag, the wine's origins and varietal were a mystery, and they would all try to identify the grape, the wine, the country of origin, even what vineyard and year. It was fascinating instruction in
the subtle tastes, textures, and nuances possible in wines, and also a great education on how much was possible to tell about a wine with the proper palate.

So I was thrilled that along with my culinary education, I would also be getting further education of my wine palate. Not that I had not been working on it pretty diligently, but it would be so nice to have an official guide, a chef, no less, on my personal adventure. There was just one tiny snag: Chef Pierre was a recovering alcoholic.

This was not a totally shocking discovery. Chefs are, by their very natures, a hard-living breed. They are famous for working late into the evening and womanizing early into the morning. Booze and drugs just seem to be the lubrication that keeps the creative (and other) juices flowing and the candle burning at both ends. It was slightly unusual that Chef was on the other end of the spectrum, having discovered this unfortunate aspect of his personality and taken steps to curtail its effects on his life. It can't have been easy, as the kitchen is often awash in alcohol, even if you are just counting what is used in the recipes. Everything from sauce for lamb to fish fumet may have the aromatic and powerful addition of wine, and ice creams, chocolate sauce, even pastry cream, are often fortified with spirits of a harder nature.

We all learned about Chef Pierre's abstention from alcohol through a mistake. This was not unusual. We made mistakes all the time, and had come to the happy conclusion that if we learned something from them, they were not a waste of time or ingredients. This particular mistake was one of Penny's many, many disasters, also not an unusual event in the kitchen. This time, Penny had been in charge of preparing a batch of pastry cream for the
bande de tarte aux fruits,
a summery confection made from a rectangular base of baked puff pastry dough, slathered with pastry cream, and then smothered with the freshest fruit of the season, all neatly laid down in rows of stark precision and made shiny with a liberal application of apricot glaze. It was not a difficult dessert to create, once the puff
pastry had been properly made and rolled out to the correct size, with the help of a yardstick and a razor-sharp knife. By this point in Level 2 we had all made pastry cream so often that I could make it in my sleep and thought nothing of whipping up a batch of my own at home to serve as a light dessert with summer's bounty of fruits and berries.

Penny, however, seemed to have forgotten the injunction laid down by Chef Jean in the days of Level 1: “It doesn't matter what the recipe says—if I say to leave it out, then leave it out.” We had been instructed never to add Kirsch, the strong, cherry-flavored brandy, to our batches of pastry cream. None of us ever had, mainly because it would mean a special trip to the storeroom. I didn't care for the taste of cherry brandy, anyway. But somehow, Penny managed to make the pastry cream, go to the storeroom, request and receive a double measure of Kirsch, and add it to the cream without anyone else's knowledge. So when Chef Pierre checked on the progress of Penny's brigade, there was no one to warn him that Penny had slipped him a Mickey, and none of us knew yet what disastrous consequences the seemingly innocent pastry cream would have.

With his characteristic lack of pretense, Chef Pierre began by tasting all the component parts: blueberries, kiwis, strawberries, a tiny hunk of puff pastry, a heaping dollop of pastry cream, scooped up on one hairy forefinger. Suddenly Chef Pierre gagged in a most spectacular fashion, spewing the cream down his pristine shirt front and making a running dive toward one of the giant sinks. Without even bothering to remove his chef 's toque, he stuck his face under the faucet and ran water into his mouth. We stood around, stunned, unwitting spectators to a poisoning.

“Holy shit!” shouted Chef, as soon as he could talk again, water from the faucet still clinging to his chin. “Who made zat?”

Penny reluctantly raised her hand, asking innocently, “Did I do something wrong?” We all gaped at her. We had all done something wrong at some point, like oversalting the salad dressing or
undercooking the chicken, but none of us had actually poisoned a chef before. It was awe-inspiring. I just wish she hadn't chosen Chef Pierre as her victim—I was getting very fond of him, in spite of the ribald jokes he was always telling and his tendency to shout insults at us from across the crowded kitchen. Chef Pierre was talented, and watching the easy confidence with which he moved about the kitchen, instructing when necessary and demonstrating technique with a swift and steady hand, was a privilege. Chef knew how to teach us without words—a rare talent. And now, it looked as if Penny had managed somehow to incapacitate him in one small bite of pastry cream. I wheeled on her.

“Penny, what did you do?” The class turned on the budding Lucretia Borgia like a wolf pack on the lone sheep in their midst.

“Oh, I'm in trouble. I'm definitely in trouble” was all Penny would bleat, over and over again, clutching her hands and rocking back and forth, her eyes darting wildly around the room, looking for an escape. There would be no help for her. We were all a little reluctant to approach the bowl of cream, which sat ominous and undisturbed on the marble of the pastry station. The furrow made by Chef 's meaty forefinger was still clearly visible in its pale yellow surface. Finally, Angelo stuck his own paw into the bowl and tentatively took a small lick of the goop with his pierced tongue. We leaned forward, in fascinated horror, waiting for the terrible fate that would befall him. His face wrinkled up; eyes screwed tightly shut, he swallowed slowly. We held our collective breath. Suddenly, Angelo's eyes opened and he shrugged. We let our collective breath go in a gust. Not poison, then. But what?

Angelo began to talk. “It's not nearly sweet enough, and kinda grainy from the overcooked eggs, but not awful. It does have a funny aftertaste, though, like fermenting cherries.”

Uh-oh. We knew what Penny had done now, but why had Chef reacted so violently? It was definitely not the pastry cream we were supposed to make, but Kirsch was called for in the recipe, after all.
Surely he wasn't allergic to cherries. Sensing the mounting confusion of the class, Chef pulled himself together and then told us all what had happened. Chef was an alcoholic, and not even a trace of booze could touch his lips. Some people could give it up with relatively little effort, but Chef just couldn't come close to it without falling back to his old habits. He apologized, herded us all back to our stations, and worked us for the rest of the afternoon as if the incident had never taken place.

We students couldn't stop discussing it, however, over drinks that very afternoon at the bar in Toad Hall. The consensus seemed to be that we all admired Chef for his courage in admitting his alcoholism to all of us, and we admired him even more for working around temptation without giving in.

 

Days passed. I eagerly awaited our first wine lesson and volunteered to set up the glasses for the tasting. Since Chef would not be participating, that meant even more for the rest of us. But who would lead the class through the four
S
's of tasting wine: seeing, swirling, sniffing, and sipping? I fervently prayed it would not be Assistant Chef Cyndee. I did not respect her palate and doubted whether she would know the difference between a cabernet sauvignon and a cabernet franc. I needn't have worried. Cyndee would not be running the tasting for the class.

I would.

Chef approached me during lunch, calling me over to his makeshift office, which consisted of his grade book, his lunch, and a grease-splattered, tattered copy of our course curriculum. Expecting a reprimand for some mistake, I racked my brain trying to think of some recent mishap I might be culpable of. Nothing was coming to mind, for once. Talking around a large hunk of well-dressed salad he had just inserted in his mouth, Chef casually asked me about my wine experience. I waxed enthusiastic about my time at the winery, slightly embellishing my role from that of kitchen wench to
something a little more dignified. Cutting me short in the middle of a rapturous description of my first experience with dessert wines, Chef merely said, “You'll do. Here are the keys to the wine closet. Bring two bottles of the Sancerre out, and pour everyone a taste. I want you to run the tasting with them. Here are the official notes on the wine, in case you get stuck.” With that, he handed me the keys to the kingdom, a battered set of handwritten notes, and excused himself from the room, taking the remains of his salad with him.

Intoxicated by the first heady whiff of power I had ever known, I regarded my role as sommelier to my fellow classmates as a sacred trust, handed down from on high. I wasn't about to mess this up. As the bottles of Sancerre chilled in an ice bath, I read through the official notes on the wine and practiced my pouring technique. Thumb pressed firmly in the dimple at the bottom of the bottle, fingers splayed out in support, I poured imaginary glasses and raised my eyebrow, perfecting my professional sommelier's arch look. I needn't have bothered with the subtleties.

Everyone streamed back into class, fresh from the lunch break and full of excitement at the prospect of the first wine class. I was arranging the tasting glasses in even rows around the marble island, practicing my spiel so that it would come out perfectly in front of my classmates. I had just poured the last drop of honey-colored wine into the last glass. Already droplets of condensation were frosting the bowls of the filled glasses, as the heat and light of the afternoon wafted into the kitchen on the backs of my friends. Before I could begin my now carefully rehearsed patter about how to properly taste wine, and what notes they should be able to detect in this wine, Angelo wrapped his huge hand around a glass and threw its contents back in one mighty swallow. “Ahhhh. Thirsty,” he said, beckoning me back to fill his glass again. Oh, no. This was not the way I had imagined things going. I resolved to nip this unruly behavior in the bud.

“Wine is supposed to be savored! It is a gift from the gods!”
Admittedly, it was probably not the best argument to make. We worked hard in class, and when class was over, we partied pretty hard, too. I could understand why my fellow students were more anxious to get their swerve on than discuss the possible aromas of honeysuckle and wet dog (a terrible way to describe a wine's bouquet, but it had been done), and it would be hard to explain to them that learning to taste wine really had little to do with the sloppy happy hour drinks we had so often shared together. It was an uphill battle, but I was determined to share my enthusiasm with them.

I demonstrated how to judge a wine's body by determining how colorful it was—light-colored wines are usually light on the palate, without the power of the darker, more opaque wines, which have also usually been aged longer. I showed everyone how to hold the wineglass by its stem, so that body heat wouldn't warm the wine too much. I didn't think I had the chutzpah to insist everyone try the wrist flick that would swirl the wine, eliciting the smells and flavors locked in the wine's structure for proper sniffing, but I did insist that everyone first dip their noses deeply into the glass for a good sniff before finally giving the wine a taste. I am not sure how many of them could taste the crisp apples in the finish or detect the delicate perfume of acacia flowers in the bouquet, but at least I had managed to get them to hold the glass properly before quaffing its contents down. For a first lesson, I thought I did pretty well.

I returned the keys to the liquor closet to Chef as he strode back into the classroom to dismiss us for the afternoon. Pocketing the keys, he asked me how it went, a smile just barely kicking out from his eyes.

“It's harder than I thought,” I admitted, hoping that candor would perhaps earn me a bit more credit for my performance.

“Good,” said Chef. “Then everyone learned something today.”