Under the Table (26 page)

A
s we entered our third level, it was no longer possible to ignore the personality of Penny, whose bumbling shadow and irritating chatter seemed to permeate every moment at school. While we had all been aware of Penny from the very first day, I had managed to keep my interaction with her to a minimum, exchanging groggy hellos across the bench in the women's locker room, and occasionally helping her measure out her ingredients when we were both waiting for a turn at the scales. I could not be accused of being uncharitable, but I was not in chef school to babysit. I was there to be the best chef I could be. That did not entail holding Penny's hand through every simple exercise in common sense. Luckily, in Levels 1 and 2, I didn't have to. Penny was always someone else's problem.

Until the day she became my problem. As we convened in the Level 3 classroom for our first day of work after our holiday week in bread, the familiar buzz was back in the air—people were busy trying to figure out who would be in which brigade for this upcoming session, and the now-familiar social dance of alliances made and broken filled the air. The ultimate designation of the new brigades was a collaboration between our old instructor and our new instructor, and we had no say in who would become our new teammate, but somehow talking about the possibilities made us feel less powerless in the decision. No one was trying to ally themselves with Penny. No one was even talking to Penny, and she stood with her hands clasped in front of her, her chef 's hat askew, as always, on her short gray hair. I tried not to think about what it would be like to be in a brigade with her, and devoutly hoped that I would escape her presence, as I had in the
previous two levels. Finally, Chef Robert appeared in the classroom, his chef 's jacket snowy white and his face set in a forbidding scowl.

After calling roll, he read out the newly assigned brigades one by one. At last, it seemed that Tucker and I were going to be separated, but he would have a wonderful time in the all-boys brigade he was now a member of. Imogene would be joining my new friends Philip and Ravi in a group, while Ben and I would remain teammates, with Jackie and…Penny. There was a little hush when Chef called her name, and much as I tried to fight it, I knew my face had frozen into a mask of shocked distaste. Not only would we have Penny all the way through this, the acknowledged most challenging level, but we were also going to be the short-handed group, once again. This was getting ridiculous!

Ben and I tried for a whispered conference before the class broke into its new formations. He was furious—his normally stony face was contorted, and his handsomely tanned skin had turned an ominous, dusky rose color.

“Oh. My. God. Darling!” he wailed. “Of all the people in the class! Holy crap! Penny!”

I shared his sentiment, but even as Ben was speaking, out of the corner of my eye I could see Penny's bulk bearing down on us, her red toolbox gripped tightly in one wrinkled hand. Jackie had already joined our little conference, and her big, liquid brown eyes reflected Ben's sentiments exactly. So what if she was irritating, I thought wildly to myself as Penny loomed closer and closer; we couldn't actually be
mean
to her. She meant well, surely. And she could cook—we were in Level 3 already. It wouldn't be babysitting, not really. I pasted a grin on my face just in time.

“Penny!” I boomed, a shade too loudly. “So exciting to have you join our little group!”

Jackie and Ben were staring at me like I had totally lost my mind. Maybe I had. I was preparing to martyr myself and throw all my ambitions and hard work aside.

“So, Penny, since we will be short one person for this level, why don't you and I work together and Ben and Jackie can work together?” I couldn't stop talking. I wanted to cram something, anything, into my mouth to shut myself up.

The incredulous looks on Ben's and Jackie's faces became even more astonished, and as I heard myself uttering the words, I couldn't believe them, either. What was I doing?

It was too late, though. I had volunteered for the kamikaze mission, and it looked like I was going to go down in flames. I shepherded Penny to our new station and began explaining our assignment. The explanations continued unabated for the rest of the term. Penny couldn't remember how to make an omelet or prepare pastry crust. She swore that she had never caramelized onions, something we had done almost daily since the second day of classes. She couldn't understand the chef shorthand our recipes were written in now, and could not go from one step to another without patient discussion and gentle prodding. Sometimes, the prodding wasn't so gentle. The herculean task of explaining, demonstrating, prompting, and making sure that we made it through each recipe, with Penny intact, was all mine. I didn't blame Jackie and Ben for keeping as far away from the train wreck that was Penny as possible. I would have, too, if she had been anyone else's burden. But she wasn't. She was my responsibility, like a puppy that refuses to be housebroken, and I still felt sorry for her—more so now that I realized how far behind the rest of us she was, and how hard it was for her to perform the simplest of tasks in the kitchen. This feeling of pity lasted for a month, until I finally realized that Penny wasn't the fluffy, harmless old biddy I had taken her for.

 

It began our first day in the pastry kitchen, while we made Calvados ice cream, apple-laced
pain perdu,
and hundreds of petits fours for a private party in the restaurant. Chef Paul, the chef-instructor in charge of the pastry station in Level 3 and Level 4, led us gracefully
through the recipes and new techniques. Chef Paul was acknowledged to be one of the most talented chefs in the school, and he was blessed with one of the most easygoing dispositions as well. Perhaps this was because Chef Paul did not come from France, but from the black sand beaches and volcanoes of Hawaii. He was also very good-looking. Everyone loved Chef Paul, except, it seemed, Penny. While we stood at the stove, poaching tiny apple dice in simple syrup and flipping the crisp, golden brown slices of brioche soaked in eggs and cream, Penny began talking to me in what she thought was a whisper. It was more like listening to Mr. Ed when he'd come down with a bad case of laryngitis.

“Well, I don't like him,” she said, using her greasy spatula to gesticulate at Chef Paul's back, clad in a perfectly tailored and immaculately white chef 's jacket. I wasn't paying a great deal of attention, as Penny had let the oil in her pan burn and ignite a small grease fire, which I was trying to stifle with my side towel. I didn't pay a great deal of attention to very much that Penny said—mostly because I realized she often wasn't making any sense—but this time, I finally took some notice.

“Penny, what are you talking about? Chef Paul is excellent, probably the best chef we'll have! Why don't you like him?”

The wattles that swathed Penny's decidedly undelicious neck began to shake indignantly and her voice lost any sort of control, unfortunately. “He's
GAY!
” she shouted indignantly. “That's a sin! It's utterly disgusting!”

I couldn't believe what I was hearing, and neither could anyone else, judging by the blanket of silence that had suddenly descended on the pastry kitchen. You could have heard a grain of sugar drop. I was appalled—to me, it had been obvious that Chef Paul and several of my classmates were playing for the other team, and that was just fine with me. In a million years, it would never have occurred to me that anyone, even someone who'd spent their entire life in Riverdale, Indiana, would condemn someone else for their sexual preference,
let alone a talented senior-level chef-instructor. Penny must have been totally nuts.

Jackie strode over to us at the stove and began to remonstrate with Penny in a low voice—for once I was too shocked to play minder to Penny myself. But things weren't going well—Jackie and Penny began to get louder and louder, and the other students were cutting their eyes away from the worsening situation. Chef Paul merely kept instructing the Level 4 students on how to properly roll fondant over a layer cake, a small smile on his face the only indication he was aware of what was going on. I was glad he wasn't taking Penny's ignorance to heart, and even more glad he seemed to know it was not a sentiment anyone else shared. But Jackie and Penny were definitely about to come to blows and Ben and I were going to have to do something.

Just then Jackie said, “You really can't say that sort of thing. It makes you look ignorant! What are you—a total jackass?”

Penny came right back with “Of course, you think it's okay. You're just a nasty little slut anyway!”

Another shocking revelation from Penny—slut? I wasn't even aware she knew what the word meant. But Jackie was enraged now, and as Ben dragged her out of the room to cool off, I could hear her shouts echoing down the hallway—“Slut? Slut? She actually called me a SLUT? I'LL KILL her!”

I turned on Penny, who was now humming tunelessly to herself, a smile on her face as she calmly went back to her place at the stove. But I couldn't let that pass—she had insulted one of my favorite teachers and one of my friends. I couldn't keep sheltering her and doing all her work for her if she was going to act like that. I was going to have to say something.

“Um, Penny? You need to apologize to Jackie. She is your teammate and you shouldn't have called her a name. It's just mean. Maybe you could say something nice to Chef Paul, too? Okay?”

Penny stopped humming and fixed her pale blue eyes on me.
Funny, I had never noticed how predatory they looked before—how brightly wicked they suddenly seemed.

“You, you're just a bossy little bitch,” she spat at me, her sharp little teeth resting on her chapped lips. “Well, you can't make me do anything. You're just a little know-it-all trying to push me around. I won't do anything you say!”

Her voice had risen to a high-pitched shriek at the end of this tirade, and then suddenly it was over. She turned and went back to humming quietly to herself, placidly running her spatula around her pan, as if nothing had happened. Whoa. Penny
was
totally nuts. Without a word, I went back to work, finishing up the recipe, tidying the workstation, and getting ready for service. I didn't say another word to Penny, not that day, not for the last two weeks we worked together, and not for the rest of the school year. I was through babysitting.

 

Months later, I was lunching with a friend who told me about the symptoms her father displayed before he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. The mood swings, forgetfulness, and abrupt personality shifts reminded me of Penny's increasingly erratic behavior. I found myself wondering whether Penny had been diagnosed in that little town of hers, or whether she was still on the loose somewhere, making people's lives hell.

T
he
poissonnier
station was proving to be the most difficult station for me in the kitchen, and nowhere more so than in Level 3. While we had mastered the basic techniques of preparing food in Levels 1 and 2, the recipes we were working on now were infinitely more complex. There were many more flourishes, more elaborate garnishes, more steps in each recipe. Compounding this was the fact that fish is almost always prepared at the last moment, throwing our already frantic efforts into desperate overdrive. Today was even worse than usual.

The dish assigned to the fish station was a monkfish stew with aïoli croutons—a perfect balance of tender white flesh swimming in a light broth flecked with tiny bits of carrot, leek, and sweet celery leaves, garnished with aïoli, that intoxicating emulsion of garlic, olive oil, lemon, and bright orange egg yolk so evocative of the sun-drenched south of France. This is, indeed, the way the final dish appeared to the diners, as an almost effortless mélange of flavors that had been casually tossed together and simmered briefly before appearing, as if by magic, in a cloud of fragrant steam.

This is the prevailing philosophy of most modern cuisine, I think. The appearance of ease is carefully constructed; a cashmere throw tossed seemingly carelessly over exquisitely starched and folded 1,000-thread-count sheets. Old-school French cuisine—poached salmon trapped in a prison of glossy aspic with tiny tomato-skin roses and parsley flowers,
boeuf en croûte
smothered in puff pastry swirls and flourishes, flanked by rows of fluted mushrooms—is now out of vogue. Order was once king, and diners knew
they were getting their money's worth by the conspicuous care that went into every detail, every single aspect of the dish receiving an almost obsessive level of attention, made obvious by the elaborate carvings on everything from carrots and celery to tiny radish flowers. Then, the pendulum swung, and the avant-garde regarded this as an unnatural affectation, order imposed by an outmoded technique on the inherently “wild” nature of fruits and vegetables.

The level of effort in these seemingly casual dishes remains the same, though. Carrots, leeks, and celery are still meticulously and obsessively cut into tiny perfect pieces, usually a fine dice called
brunoise,
and there are still many hands at work fussing over a plate of food, trying to give every morsel the appearance of an unstudied, graceful delicacy. Careful carelessness. So it was with the monkfish stew. The tiny, perfect little cubes of vegetables floating so casually in the broth were the result of three failed attempts. The carrots, leeks, celery, and Swiss chard had already been diced, blanched, shocked, and set in the
mise en place
for lunch service when Chef Robert, back from his illicit liaison in the walk-in refrigerator with Assistant Chef Cyndee, casually poked his finger through them and announced in his gratingly high, nasal voice, “
Non
. These are not right. Not at all. Too big. Who was it who cut these? Do you not know what
brunoise
means? Small squares. Perfect squares. Use your ruler. Get it right. Do it again.”

This was perhaps the most frequent refrain heard at chef school: Do it again. And again. And again. And again. Hands became fatigued from clenching knives in tense frustration, blisters broke, and calluses formed to the steady refrain of “Again.” Jackie was dispatched to the storeroom for another load of vegetables to be peeled, diced, blanched, shocked, and tucked into their stainless steel bowl
mise en place
squareboy yet again. This was a waste of precious time. Lunch service started at 12:30 precisely, and everything had to be in place, stations wiped down, nonessential equipment stashed away, and the brigade at the ready waiting for the orders to appear on the
board and fire on the line. Redoing the garniture for the stew meant that instead of being able to move on with the prep work, the brigade was stalled, unable to advance to the next round of tasks, while the others must pick up the slack. On a brigade that was already short one member, this meant that we would not have time to take the half-hour family meal lunch. Work became feverish, veggies reduced again to perfectly even squares, then to perfect matchsticks, and from matchsticks to perfect dice as quickly, and precisely, as possible. We did not have time to begin the dish yet again.

Meanwhile, the monkfish beckoned from the lowboy. Two of the ugliest fish I had ever seen lay nestled nose to tail in a long steel pan over ice. Someone would have to break those puppies down into serving sizes, and then clean the bones and head and get the fish stock going for the broth. That someone was me.

There is a reason that until recently, monkfish were considered garbage fish by fishermen. They are hideous; a huge head with a gaping, slimy maw takes up more than half the body, which seems to taper off behind it. It is also strangely flat, like a manhole cover with fins and a tail. They are the color of sludge, a flat brown shading paler on the underbelly. The eyes seemed almost piggish, and far too small in comparison to that terrible gaping mouth. I am not afraid of gutting fish, and have gone deep-water fishing for mahi mahi many times with Michael, proudly reducing my catch to fillets. But most fish, even after being on ice for hours, have a certain briny beauty reminiscent of their home in the blue waters. Mahi mahi are electric in their shades of yellow and teal, swordfish retain their magisterial purple-blue shading, and even trout keep their shimmering iridescence. Monkfish look like malevolent sea mud, alive or dead.

The phrase “You are what you eat” was coined for these fish. Monkfish will swallow anything, and though they feed mainly on other fish, they are bottom dwellers, and anything that floats by, from used condoms to Coke cans, is fair game. That is why, once I
had successfully filleted, skinned, and portioned the meat from the carcass, Chef Robert told me to get out my fish tweezers. Fish tweezers are used mainly for removing the odd bone from fillets. Fine as a hair, each tiny bone must be located by feel, each fillet gently and thoroughly prodded and squeezed with bare hands, as deftly as a doctor palpates a patient for illness.

But that was not the purpose for the tweezers this time. When I asked Chef what he would like me to do next, he grinned, the sly “Oh, what a stupid student” grin I hated, and said, “Look closeleee. What is that in the fish, eh?” As I bent down and peered at the fillets, I saw it. Something was wiggling. Something small and white, like a tiny length of dental floss, was emerging from the flesh and seemed to be waving at me. Worms.

“They have parasites, these feeesh, because they live on the bottom. Find these parasites, these
petites
worms, and pull them out. Then put the fish in the refrigerator for service, okay?”

What can you say to that?

“Yes, Chef.”

 

For the next forty-five minutes, I inspected the fillets and carefully pulled the little buggers out. There was only one or two of them, but I couldn't get the image of the tiny worms, deeply embedded in the firm white flesh of the animal, out of my mind all afternoon.

During service, fish is prepared to order,
à la minute,
while meat dishes (almost always) have been cooked in advance and are quickly heated and plated when an order fires. If a table orders a
filet de boeuf
and three monkfish stews, that means that the plates must all be ready at the same moment, so that everything goes to the table piping hot, which means that the fish station is frantically cooking, sweating, and swearing, while the meat station leisurely rearranges garniture one last time. This is the way it went for us. Despite the heat of the day, unseasonable for October, the monkfish stew was a very popular dish, and we were in the weeds all afternoon, braising
the fish, reducing the broth, and arranging the tiny vegetable dice just right, so that everything was casual perfection.

The day wasn't over yet. After service, and the inevitable cleanup, Chef announced we would all need to stay late for a lecture in the Level 2 kitchens with a special guest. Someone would have to stay and peel vegetables for the demonstration. Somehow I knew who the lucky soul would be.

So there I was, peeling the hundredth carrot of my day, when the special guest came in. I was deeply immersed in the rhythm of my task. Wash, peel, drop. Wash, peel, drop. Wash, peel…I didn't hear him come up behind me. Suddenly, a gnarled hand shot out and stopped my efforts.

“
Non, non, non.
Gently. Do not try to kill the carrot, it is already dead. Gently, gently. Like this.” And with that, the great chef André Soltner took my peeler and the carrot I was brutalizing, and without apparent effort, smoothly skinned it, leaving no bevels from the peeler, just smooth, orange flesh. “See? A nice, clean carrot.”

He gave me a spoon and asked me to gently smooth off the edges of all the carrots I had already peeled. I couldn't believe I had failed at peeling carrots, right in front of perhaps the greatest living French chef in the world. My face burned, and I finished the carrots with my head down, willing the tears of embarrassment and frustration not to come.

I shouldn't have worried. Chef Soltner is an incredible teacher. There were no belittling comments about my work, no stupid-student smiles to mark my awkward progress. He calmly arranged his knives from his knife kit and reviewed my second attempt with a smile.

“
Bon.
Thank you.” He acknowledged my effort! I was in heaven.
Chef Soltner let me peel his carrots! I am king of the kitchen!

The demonstration was about the lost art of garniture. We were to learn the secret to the intricately carved and worked potatoes, the carrot flowers, and apples reborn as feathery birds. The same work
that was hopelessly unfashionable and would never grace the tables of the most hip New York restaurants. It is surprisingly difficult. Chef Soltner's hands flew over mushroom caps as he spoke of a time in the business when this was something every chef could make, and would make with every spare second, with any odd leftover pieces of carrot or parsnip, or anything that happened to be lying around. This elaborate decoration was a way to make patrons feel like they were getting something truly spectacular with their meal, but it was also a way to keep knife skills sharp. Tiny carrot sculptures were emerging from the man's hands. Potatoes became feathery lattices that were then transformed into deep-fried architecture. An ordinary mushroom emerged with two tiny fish cavorting on the cap, enclosed in a perfect circle of neat, interlocking triangles. A few wedges cut from an apple became, in this man's hands, an exotic bird, a phoenix rising from the ashes of a brunch buffet. We tried to mimic him. Some were more successful than others. I didn't have the knack. The bird I carved looked more like a pigeon that had been flattened by a speeding taxi than a bird of paradise, but it wasn't that important. What mattered was that we were trying our hands at a skill that was soon to be lost entirely. At the end of the lecture, Chef Soltner accepted our wild applause with a small smile and said that he hoped that one day we could make this sort of thing popular once again, so that diners could marvel at a plate made glorious with a few deft flicks of a knife in a skilled chef 's hand.