Under the Table (8 page)

1 tablespoon grated lemon zest

1 generous teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 recipe Pâte Brisée, rolled out into a 9-inch pie pan and chilled

Fresh berries, for serving

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
   
2. Sift the flour, salt, and nutmeg into a small bowl and set aside.
   
3. In a medium bowl, cream the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Add the egg yolks one at a time and whisk until well combined.
   Add the buttermilk, lemon juice, zest, and vanilla, stirring after each addition. Sift in the flour mixture slowly and whisk until thoroughly incorporated. Pour into the prepared crust.
   
4. Bake in the middle of the oven until puffed and set, 35 to 40 minutes. Let cool to room temperature before serving.
   
5. Serve with a bowl of fresh berries.
   

NOTE: Fresh buttermilk can be found at farmers' markets and some upscale groceries, and makes a delicious difference to the taste and texture of this pie, but supermarket buttermilk works just dandy, too.

 

Makes one 9-inch pie

W
hile each day at chef school seemed like one long, tiring, sweaty stint at the stove, the weeks of Level 1 were flying by. We were more than halfway through our first level and I was struggling, no doubt about it. While my attempt at an apple tart was passable, and I was able to cook carrots to the basic degree of acceptability, and I hadn't burned anything (at least not recently), I couldn't help but feel less than thrilled with my progress so far. My phone calls to my mother had become a soap opera chronicling day-to-day life at chef school, full of dramatic twists and turns, each recipe I prepared a cliff-hanger. Every call ended the same way: me, full of despair, whining about the latest disaster, my mother's soft voice radiating calm and assurance. She had been through all this, and I believed her when she told me that I could do it.

Still, it was difficult. While Chef Jean would never actually compliment any of our efforts, it seemed somehow that whenever he orbited by my station on his rounds, I was doing something wrong. Inevitably, Chef would waggle one long, scarred forefinger in the general direction of my chest and make that noise peculiar to the French, a sort of tooth-sucking, tut-tutting noise. It embodied frustration on my part and disappointment on his. But I was determined to get better, to avoid hearing that brisk “tut tut tut” one more time. I studied, prepared, and practiced. I went through a metric ton of vegetables refining my knife skills. I chopped, peeled, shredded—and started over again from scratch. Blisters became calluses. I was hoping that I would be able to show Chef Jean that I had what it takes to be a chef with our lesson on potatoes. Potatoes I could manage, I was sure of it.

The humble potato's dirt-crusted exterior and pockmarked skin do little to endear it to the highly refined aesthetics of a classically trained gourmet. Despite garnering millions of corpulent admirers with its deep-fried, fast-food perfection, the potato's glorious incarnation as the “French” fry is a bit of a misnomer. The French did not eat potatoes until relatively recently in their nation's long history of gourmandizing. The starchy tuber was considered fit only to feed hungry livestock until the mid-eighteenth century. In an effort to find a more abundant, inexpensive source of food for the peasant class during an especially wet year that caused the wheat crops across the country to fail, the eighteenth-century agronomist and economist Antoine-Auguste Parmentier proposed that the potato play a new role: as a starchy staff of life necessary to the survival of the French peasant. But to take something seemingly fit only for the pigs to eat and expect a French housewife to serve it at her dinner table was out of the question—
quelle horreur!

The French peasant did not welcome change, and so a vigorous image makeover of the potato was begun. Many classic potato recipes now go by lofty-sounding names—from the decadent
pommes de terre à la duchesse
to
pommes de terre Anna
(said to be named after one of the Russian czar's children) to
pommes de terre dauphine, pommes de terre marquise,
and even
potage Parmentier,
the rich and creamy potato-leek soup named after the potato's first French champion. Other potato recipes are a reference to places—from the rather (suitably) boring boiled potatoes of
pommes de terre à l'anglaise
to the more decadent creations known as
pommes de terre à la Lyonnaise, pommes de terre à la Parisienne, pommes de terre à la Savoyarde,
even
pommes de terre Pont-Neuf,
named for the oldest bridge in Paris. Naming some potato recipes after glamorous places and members of a royal family may seem like second nature to our advertisement-laden society—
pommes de terre Paris Hilton,
anyone?—but it was a revolutionary bit of marketing in those days. And it worked.

Another reason for the success of the potato in France is its
extreme versatility: what was once fit only for the family cow could also be dressed up with the addition of a little cream, a bit of butter, perhaps a truffle or two, to be served as part of Christmas dinner. There are hundreds and hundreds of recipes for potatoes—mashing, baking, boiling, and frying are only the beginning. Potatoes are also easily maleable. Their strong starch molecules are a marvelous building material, and not only for the moats, castles, and volcanoes often sculpted on dinner plates. By the nineteenth century, chefs like Marie-Antoine Carême were sculpting elaborate fantasies of edible potato starch architecture to grace the finest banqueting halls in the world. The French, with their intense flair for decoration, came to embrace the potato with open arms.

 

We, too, were ready to embrace the potato. Who wouldn't welcome the chance to make and eat the scads of French fries we would be churning out? Unfortunately, my extremely high–waisted chef 's pants, complete with pleated waistband, had already grown a bit tight, and I wasn't sure how the carbohydrate-rich lunch was going to square with my more recent efforts to restrain myself in the kitchen. With the student loan weighing down my already sluggish bank account, I could barely afford to buy a Diet Coke, and a new, roomier wardrobe was out of the question. I would have to try to resist the temptations that continually presented themselves in front of me. After the French fries, of course.

After our morning lecture, we broke into our teams to begin peeling potatoes. Mountains and mountains and mountains of them. I suddenly understood why institutions, from colleges to jails to the army, had switched to powdered potatoes—no one, not even prisoners, should have to peel such large amounts of this vegetable. My vicious French peeler seemed to be working against me. I was afraid of its sharp twin blades—I knew they were waiting for my attention to wander, just for a fraction of a second, to gouge a deep trench into my hand. I was clutching the peeler so hard that I began
to get a nasty blister on my index finger. Still, there didn't seem to be an end in sight—every potato I peeled and then plunked into a bucket of cold water only seemed to send another tumbling down the pile to my waiting hands. Tucker, who never complained about the interminable prep work involved in all of the recipes, began to move more and more slowly. At last, we finished our pile. Chef Jean noticed, and immediately volunteered us to help schlep in the
other
fifty-pound sack of potatoes that needed to be peeled. Even Tucker was aghast, and actually committed the first cardinal sin of chef school: Never
ever
question a direct order.

“Oh, come on, Chef. We aren't going to use that many potatoes today, are we?” As soon as the words left his mouth, a collective hush fell over the classroom. I tried to make myself as small and unobtrusive as possible.
Be the potato,
I mentally chanted, hoping to escape the incipient wrath of a Frenchman whose judgment had been questioned.
Just be the potato.
I willed myself to become one of the pile of dirty lumpish tubers. I knew I should stand by my partner, share the onslaught of abuse, but I could feel my loyalties shriveling under the heat of Chef 's blazing stare.
Here it comes,
I thought. Invective like a bolt of lightning would come down from on high and strike Tucker stone dead. I held my breath.

But there was no explosion, no blinding white light that swallowed Tucker whole. Chef Jean merely pinned Tucker to the spot with his piercing stare, testing the sharpness of a paring knife against the callus on his thumb. One long moment passed, and then Chef said, very matter-of-factly, “No. It is true; we are not going to be using all of these potatoes in class. But the Level 2 students in charge of family meal today are short-handed, and so we are going to help them out. That is what good chefs do. When one falls behind, is in the weeds the whole shift, you help them out. You do what you can to make their life easier, because one day, it will be you.”

With that, Chef dumped the sack of potatoes out on the front counter. He didn't say another word, but one by one, we filed up to
the front and took a bowlful of potatoes back to our workstations. We peeled the extra potatoes, not because Chef had asked us to, because, really, he hadn't. We peeled the potatoes to help out someone else, because soon we might find ourselves in their chef 's clogs. I was amazed at what a virtuoso of guilt Chef Jean was.

Once we had peeled enough large brown Idaho potatoes to fill all four industrial-size garbage bins in the room with potato peelings, we were ready to master the vegetable. We would start with the art of the French fry. Or, because it would be too egomaniacal even for the French to call it that, the
pommes frites
. Fried potatoes are divided into categories depending on how many times they are immersed in bubbling hot oil before they are fully cooked. There are the fries fried once, including the
pommes cheveux, pommes pailles, pommes gaufrettes,
and
pommes liard
. Twice-fried potatoes include the
pommes allumettes, pommes mignonettes,
and
pommes Pont-Neuf.
There is only one type of potato that is fried three times, the show-stopping
pommes soufflées.
In total, there are almost a dozen ways to enjoy fried potatoes, each one specifically designed to accompany a different meat or fish.

The type of fried potato most Americans are familiar with, as a supersized side to their hamburger meal, is made by a two-step process. The potatoes are cooked in oil ranging from 300° to 320°F until the insides are cooked and fluffy but the outsides remain pale, with no hint of color. Then, right before being served, the potatoes are dipped once again in oil, this time a bit hotter, from 350° to 375°F, to cook the outsides to a perfect golden brown. In fast-food restaurants, the potatoes are cooked through the first step, then flash-frozen, shipped, and browned when you decide whether you would like fries with that. Almost all other fried potatoes are fried only once, in peanut oil heated to 350° to 375°F. The oil is hot enough to prevent soaking into the potatoes, but not so hot that it would cause the potatoes to brown before the insides are cooked. The difference between these different sorts is merely one of shape.

But before a potato can be fried, it must be peeled and cut to the appropriate size and shape. To this end we had all been equipped with a French mandoline, widely regarded as the most vicious of the various bloodthirsty tools we budding chefs would be working with. A French mandoline is a beautiful, intimidating piece of equipment, all gleaming stainless steel and wickedly sharp blades. And heavy as sin. I actually had one of my own, tucked away in a kitchen drawer at home. I was too frightened of it to confront it directly, and every time I opened the drawer to retrieve the lemon zester or a stray piping tip, it seemed to stare balefully at me, its various limbs folded under it as if preparing itself to spring right at my throat. I tried not to think about the monster while I contemplated its more work-worn cousin, lying here on my cutting board, doubtless just aching to chop off one of my fingers. Chef Jean explained how to coax its hinged legs out from underneath its heavy, rectangular body before maneuvering it into proper working position: nose to the ground, working bits—a sliding plane and fan of razor-sharp teeth—erect and in their proper places. Armed with a naked potato in one hand, we steadied the mandoline with the other and began to slice.

Mastery of the mandoline is dependent on a forceful hand and a large reserve of patience. I thought I was finally making friends with my mandoline, but it was uphill going. The blade seemed so dull, I really had to push
hard
to get any slices out at all, and they certainly weren't very beautiful or even. I was valiantly struggling, whispering words of encouragement to the little stainless steel beast, when I heard a snort of derision from behind me. It was Assistant Chef Cyndee, who was rapidly becoming known as a mean-spirited witch. She never missed a chance to belittle one of us, to openly mock our best attempts at the curriculum recipes, to move at least one in our class to tears with her parodies of our efforts. When I heard that lewd giggle behind me, I knew my enemy was not the piece of machinery in front of me, frustrating my efforts, but the snake behind me, her fangs already out, dripping with poisonous sarcasm. I braced
for the assault, willing myself not to turn around but to continue to work, however unsuccessfully, at my task. I knew she wouldn't be able to restrain herself for long.

She didn't. Suddenly she whipped the mutilated potato from my hand and spun me around. “What, exactly, do you think you're doing?”

There was no answer for the question that wouldn't reek of insubordination, so I just stood and waited.

“I don't think I have ever seen this before. Chef, come over here and look at this. This is priceless.” Here she paused for breath before moving in for the kill.

“This idiot…” she started. Oh, how the word stung. Assistant Chef Cyndee could barely walk and chew gum at the same time, and yet she had every right, in the trenches of kitchen warfare, as my superior, to call me an idiot—“this idiot has been using the mandoline backward. Everyone, come here and have a look at how NOT to use kitchen equipment.”

Here she surrendered herself to loud, piercing laughter that shook her plump frame and caused her significant backside to sway like a cow having an epileptic seizure. The truly horrifying thing was that she was right. I
was
using the mandoline backward. Somehow I had reversed the instructions Chef had given us on setting the blasted things up. It seemed that I was, in fact, a total idiot, and quite possibly a moron. Why hadn't I realized my mistake? I could feel my face burning with shame, and I was sure that everybody else was secretly snickering along with the horrible Cyndee. This was not something I would be able to live down anytime soon. To my surprise, when I caught the eye of Ben, the tall, very quiet, and hardworking student who made a fourth at our kitchen island, he wasn't laughing at my misfortune at all—he shot me a deeply sympathetic look. Even Chef Jean seemed to pity me as I stood there, red-faced. He flipped the mandoline into the right direction, ran a fresh potato over it a few times, and handed it to me. “Voilà. Now try
it.” I did. Much better. Perfectly shaped potato matchsticks cascaded effortlessly from the mandoline. I quickly shredded another three potatoes and soaked the shards in water, rushing to catch up with the rest of the class.