6. Le Plaza Athénée

I HAD COME a long way. Or so I had thought until I presented myself to Lucien Diat, the executive chef at Le Plaza Athénée. In-standy, I reverted to that cringing boy who had come to Le Grand Hôtel de l'Europe in short pants.

"Presented myself" is not totally correct. No one presented himself to M. Diat. It would be more accurate to say that I was granted a brief audience before the Great Man (whose brother, incidentally, was Louis Diat, the famous chef at the Ritz-Carlton in New York). Enthroned in his glass-walled office above the kitchen, M. Diat—always Monsieur, never, ever Chef—received the documents I had been given at the Société in the dismissive manner of a king accepting the credentials of yet another ambassador from a small, inconsequential principality.

"You will be second commis," he proclaimed. "Get dressed and go to the garde-manger. "

Once again, I found myself near the bottom of a kitchen hierarchy.

But this was a kitchen unlike any I'd worked in or ever would work in again. I felt like some kid from the minors finally striding out onto the turf of Yankee Stadium. No doubt about it, I was playing in the Big Leagues. Le Plaza Athénée had—and, now run by Alain Ducasse, still has—one of the very finest dining rooms in the world. To serve two hundred meals a day, the hotel employed forty-eight full-time chefs, four times the number of us who had served the same number of customers in Aix-les-Bains. M. Diat organized his kitchen in a rigidly structured brigade. Below M. Diat was the sous-chef, also called I'aboyeur (the barker), because his job was literally to bark out orders over the intercom system. Below that were ten chefs de partie, each in charge of a separate area such as sauces, the cold department, fish cooking, roast and grill, vegetables, and soup. There was a night chef, a turning chef to replace people who were off and another to fill in for any chef de partie on vacation, a chef de partie for the afternoon, and a chef in charge of the pastry department. Below each chef de partie was a first commis; below each first commis a second commis, and in some departments, third commis trainees.

At Le Plaza, the first commis were between twenty and thirty years old, and the chefs de partie between thirty and sixty years of age. Diat's machinelike brigade worked according to very strict and well-defined laws. The chefs de partie had their own dining room and locker room with showers. We commis had our own place to change, shower, and eat, and even there, the first commis dined on one side of the table, we second commis on the other.

Each of us stayed at one job until we had mastered it. Then, once we performed to M. Diat's satisfaction, which is to say flawlessly in even the most minute detail, we'd get moved to another department to start all over again. When a cook had made the rounds of all stations as a second commis, he would move through all the stations as a first commis. The result was a staff that had tremendous depth. A commis in the garde-manger knew exactly how to trim a veal chop because he had also spent months working at the elbow of a grill chef who would discard any cuts of meat less than perfectly trimmed. But bad cuts never reached the grill chef because the commis working the grill had also worked in the garde-manger and could whip out a knife and fix any problems on the spot.

During my stay at Le Meurice, none of the sixteen cooks had ever changed jobs. Unless someone had died or retired, I would have been the commis in Le Meurice's vegetable department forever. By contrast, M. Diat's style of management was more representative of the traditional French brigade de cuisine, and it was diametrically opposite to what often happens in kitchens now in restaurants in the United States, where the emphasis is on specialization. Today the idea is to take someone, often an immigrant from Latin America, and train him or her to do one specific task. And that's it. The person may know nothing else about cooking, but nobody will be able to touch him or her at that job, be it turning a carrot or grilling a hanger steak.

One thing that we were absolutely denied at Le Plaza was any room for what today would be called self-expression, though none of us would have thought of using that New Age term. All of our efforts were directed toward performing individual tasks in the precise manner of the house. There were no recipes or written procedures. Working beside M. Raimo, the chef poissonnier (fish cook), I watched his every move while making sure all the ingredients and utensils were at the ready a half-second before his hand shot out for them; I anticipated his moves with the foresight of an operating room nurse. After a time, the chef let me try my hand at a garnish. Finally, on a busy day, he had me cook. I imitated everything I'd ever seen him do, producing a fillet of sole that had the look, smell, and taste that only the sole at Le Plaza Athénée had. Not better than Maxim's or Le Meurice's, but as good as theirs and distinct from any other sole anywhere. Perfection was when a diner had no idea who was "cooking tonight" or had no occasion to ask such a question. Be it Jacques Pépin or any of twenty other commis, the sole would taste exactly the same every time. Ours was not the flash of star chefs. It was the toil of the many.

Every day as meal service began, M. Diat emerged from his office and descended upon the kitchen. Even if I was in the walk-in fridge, I would know the moment he entered because the noise level dropped by half. He crossed the room and stationed himself at the pass, the counter where chefs put plates for pickup by waiters. Not a single dish left the kitchen without passing through M. Diat's hands and receiving his blessing.

Lord help the poor cook whose work didn't meet M. Diat's standards—something that very rarely happened.

"What is this?" M. Diat would say, his voice never rising above conversational tones. "Put this back in the oven."

Or: "Present this platter again."

Then there was his look, a look that will recur in my nightmares as long as I live, not so much a look of anger as one of disdain, a gaze that lasted but a fraction of a second, yet made it clear that your pathetic little error was far beneath the level of his contempt. Quaver in the glare of those pale gray eyes, and you never made the same mistake again.

And if you did, there was The List. I first encountered The List one morning when I reported to work and came across a scrum of my fellow commis jostling for a glance at a piece of paper thumbtacked to the wall. They were like schoolboys, and Teacher had obviously posted the results of final exams. Some of my coworkers left with their heads down, shrugging off their disappointment by saying, "It's okay. Maybe next time." Some strutted off with smiles. Most merely sighed with relief.

The List outlined our assignments for the next six months. Whether we had risen to a more prestigious station, fallen to one not so desirable, or stayed in place was the only way to tell if we were doing a good job. No one, certainly not M. Diat, would have dreamed of paying a direct compliment.

***

"BONE IT OUT."

So much for the orientation session to my new post at Le Plaza Athénée's garde-manger.

The chef de partie, Chef Berutti, pointed to a leg of veal flopped over a butcher-block table. The appendage looked as if it had been hacked off the back end of a calf only moments before and hastily skinned for my benefit. Otherwise, it was still pretty much in working order.

My new boss's instructions, while explicit, were hardly detailed. I realized that the veal leg represented his version of a test. Pass, and he would know whether he could trust me. Flunk, and ... well ... Le Plaza did have those third commis positions.

It had been a long time since I had boned a leg of veal. Working from faded memories dating back to my apprenticeship, I separated the leg into different muscles: top round, bottom round, top knuckle, top sirloin, and shank. I then trimmed each of these cuts. It was an exacting process. Affecting a false nonchalance that I was far from feeling, I concentrated on the job and finished it to his liking.

In the garde-manger at Le Plaza, I was exposed to esoteric, expensive, and often unusual foods: exotic fruits like papaya, mango, and cherimoya. But the strangest of all arrived one morning in a basket from Hediard, a fancy specialty store. Chef Berutti placed the basket in the walk-in fridge and kept it under constant guard.

"What are those fruits Chef is so worked up about?" I asked another commis.

"Des poires avocat, "he replied. "Avocado pears."

I had a weak spot for pears. I adored all varieties: Cornice pears, Anjou pears, Bartlett pears. To be watched over so carefully by Chef, a poire avocat must have been the ne plus ultra of peardom. I was dying to sink my teeth into one.

The opportunity presented itself the next time I found myself alone in the walk-in cooler. I glanced around for Chef. Not seeing him, I snatched the largest and juiciest-looking pear, polished it briefly on my jacket, and vigorously bit it. My teeth penetrated thick, leathery skin and stopped jarringly upon contact with something hard and slime-covered. I drew back, surprised and queasy. How could people eat these pears? Notwithstanding the skin and the pit, the flesh itself was oily, mushy, not at all sweet.

Avocado misadventures aside, I must have been performing satisfactorily because when M. Diat next posted The List he had promoted me to the rank of second commis at the grilling and roasting station, where I came under the tutelage of Chef Duclos, whose motto was a quotation from Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: "On devient cuisinier mais on naît rotisseur" (One can become a cook, but one has to be born a roast cook).

Chef Duclos was certainly born to his calling. Unlike most of the cooks in M. Diat's kitchen, who, contrary to stereotype, were trim and wiry, Chef Duclos was a short, almost perfectly round gent. He looked as if he had spent his life feasting on fat roasted capons and juicy racks of lamb. Despite his girth, Chef Duclos worked with the grace and artistry of a professional dancer. Dainty sliding steps, delicate twirls, deft arm motions—his every movement was orchestrated, economical, beautiful to the eye. He could put in an entire shift without moving his tiny feet outside the same two-foot circle. To accomplish this, his mise-en-place was arranged in a strict order with no variation whatsoever. If he had been suddenly struck blind, Chef Duclos would have been able to continue working by feel alone. The beurre maitre d'hotel, butter for use on steak, always rested just above his cutting board on the right corner, next to the watercress in ice water. His chopping knife lay on the right side of the board, with his spatula, fork, and paring knife on the other side. It was amazing to see him work; calm, deliberate, confident, precise, there was not one gesture lost, not one extra movement.

Chef Duclos prepared the best roast chicken I had ever tasted. He started with fine birds from my native Bresse region, chickens that had been allowed to run outside in the sunshine, flapping their wings, scratching for seeds and insects. Bresse chickens had firm-textured flesh with pronounced differences between dark and white meat and the slightly gamey taste that is true chicken flavor. The skin was crunchy, buttery, salty, and nutty. Chef let the best qualities of his chicken come through, seasoning it with nothing more than salt, pepper, and butter, cooking it to order in a very hot oven, basting every ten minutes or so. There was no magic in Chef Duclos's chicken. What made his chicken the best was the perfection of every small step. The best chicken and butter. A searingly hot oven. Just the right amount of carefully made stock. Removing the bird from the oven the second it was cooked.

To serve his chicken, Chef Duclos took the copper saucepan (there were only copper and cast-iron saucepans in Le Plaza's kitchen) from the oven, placed it on the edge of the stove, and transferred the chicken to a hot silver tray that he had grabbed from a shelf behind him, without looking. With one hand, he poured the fat out of the saucepan, added some white wine and brown chicken stock to the pan with the other hand, put it back on the stove for a few minutes to reduce the liquid, and then strained it into a sauceboat. He did this in one fluid motion in just a few seconds, without stepping to the left or right. Simultaneously, he closed the oven door with the toe of one shoe, blindly plucked a handful of watercress from behind him, and arranged it next to the chicken on the tray. Still without moving forward or backward, he took a tablespoon of butter and dropped it into a hot saucepan. When it had turned a hazelnut color, he poured it over the finished bird, then pivoted on his two feet. Holding his plated chicken in one hand, he grabbed the sauceboat in his other and placed them on the pass at the pickup station, where M. Diat awaited to render judgment.

Chef Duclos and I prepared a great deal of Dover sole and loup de mer, a type of striped bass, always over intense heat. We seasoned each piece with salt, pepper, and a dash of peanut oil, then marked it with an exact quadrillage, perfect cross-hatched grill lines. We removed the fish after a minute or two, brushed it with melted butter, and finished it in a hot oven. The result had a taste of charcoal yet was never dry or overcooked. In addition to the fish, we grilled lobster and langouste (spiny lobster) and flavored them with herb butter. However, it was the adjacent grill, where the meat was cooked, that was the busiest. Entrecote minute (a thin slice of beef sirloin), filet mignon, poussin (a tiny, young chicken), and veal or lamb kidneys—each had to be grilled perfectly in its own time and with a specific intensity of heat.

The veal chops of Chef Duclos were nothing short of perfection. First he seared and marked them on both sides on the grill. Then he browned each one of the four edges, keeping the chop upright by leaning it against a chunk of raw potato, cut so its bottom could be wedged between the bars of the grill.

One of the most important things I learned from working with Chef Duclos was how to deal with the orders as they came in. There were no rules; each cook developed his or her own system. The orders arrived in groups, and as the sous-chef barked them out, the workers in each section had to register and remember their roles in the respective dishes. There could be no mistakes. When the waiter was ready to pick up a dish, it had to be ready or it would set back the table and, with a trickle-down effect, mess up the whole kitchen and dining room.

"Two trout, rack of lamb, chicken," the sous-chef announced. Immediately, two dozen cooks took note. In the vegetable department someone started the appropriate side dishes. A commis in the garde-manger cleaned the fish, trimmed the lamb, selected a chicken, and ran them to the appropriate stations, sliding for the last ten or fifteen feet across the sawdust-strewn floor. Sauciers corrected the individual sauces needed. It was organized chaos, but somehow synchronized. That table's orders, involving dozens of individual tasks, would arrive at the pass at the same instant, all perfectly prepared. I loved it. I felt invincible. Often, in the middle of lunch or dinner, the ordering, the cooking, and the plating of food became so rushed and so frantic that it gave me a high. Barked orders imprinted themselves in my brain automatically, even if I was simultaneously plating one dish while sauteing food for another. As the orders came in, I set out reminders for myself, an empty skillet on the stove, a clean plate in the middle of the cutting board, or a piece of parchment paper on the table, some memory jogger to tell me that I had a trout with almond to put in that skillet in a half hour, that a pilaf of rice and mussels was to go on that plate, and that the parchment paper was to become a papillote, or paper casing, for a veal chop that I'd have to start preparing ten minutes before the trout in order for the dishes to come out at precisely the same time.

***

SOMEHOW, a year passed. The List appeared, and I found opposite my name the words "first commis." If a second commis is the buck private of a kitchen brigade, a first commis is more like a lieutenant, someone who has survived a few battles, who remains calm under fire, and who has earned a measure of trust. Before my second year was out, I had attained what was considered the ultimate first commis posting: the sauce. To be considered a great saucier was the highest accolade a cook could receive. The subtlety, intricacy, and lightness of a sauce could make a dish.

Stock is the basic ingredient of most sauces, and stock was critically important at Le Plaza's sauce station. Back in Bourg-en-Bresse, the only stocks Chef Jauget used were brown and white chicken stocks. For the brown stock, the chicken bones were roasted to a brown color in the oven before they were tossed into the stockpot, whereas for a white stock the roasting was omitted. In addition to these, we made white veal stock, white fish stock, and white beef stock for consommé at Le Plaza. Sometimes we reduced the white fish stock, usually made from sole, to a syrup to make an essence, or glace, to finish sauces for fish. We made brown lamb stock and brown veal stock that we reduced by half and lightly thickened for a demi-glace. The demi-glace had no salt and was basically fatless and fairly mild, so it was perfectly adaptable to various dishes. It took on the taste of a bordelaise with a reduction of red wine; of a périgueux with truffles and Madeira; or a chasseur wi th tomatoes, white wine, and tarragon.

A slight variation in seasoning, viscosity, reduction, or cooking time could make the difference between an average and a superlative sauce. Some sauces, such as veal and chicken velouté and béchamel, had to be cooked slowly for two to three hours to stabilize them so they would not break down when used to finish specific dishes. If a reduced veal stock had achieved the right taste and color but its consistency was still a shade thin, it was pulled off the fire and thickened with arrowroot so that it did not become too potent and had the proper consistency.

These stocks and sauces played an indispensable role in every dish, either as a thickener or as a flavoring agent. For example, creamed spinach, fresh spinach sautéed in butter and seasoned with nutmeg, salt, and pepper, with cream added, was brought to the right consistency with a tablespoon of precooked béchamel. A seemingly simple dish such as fillet of sole cooked with white wine and shallots might require three sauces: a fish velouté to give it the proper texture, a fish glace, a dash of hollandaise, and sometimes, a bit of whipped cream, if the fish was to be glazed under the broiler. There was a strict order to follow, but within that structure the talent of the chef could come through.

After we had boiled the beef and poultry bones long enough to be strained for stock—twelve hours—we would re-wet them, a technique called remouillage. We then simmered them again for another five to six hours. We strained the second liquid through the finest chinois (strainer), then reduced it to make a glace de viande. The g/acewas the color of caramel and had the consistency of heavy syrup when hot but was hard as a block of rubber when cold. Like the demi-glace, it had no salt and no fat, but it was very potent. It had transcended the level of a sauce and become a flavoring agent. The glace was the secret weapon of the cooks, an alchemist's gold that would transform an ordinary veal chop into three-star fare.

As first commis in the sauce department, I had the responsibility of producing the glace de viande. I inevitably made too much for the needs of the house, and I sold the extra to caterers in les Halles, sharing the profit with the chef saucier. This was an accepted part of kitchen tradition—a special bonus for the all-important saucier and his lieutenant.

***

WITH SO MANY young chefs between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five toiling under the same roof, there were a lot of pranks played at Le Plaza. Our chief dupe was an old fellow named Félix Séoul, known to us le père Félix. Because of his long years of service, he worked outside the hierarchy of the brigade. Père Félix was a living culinary encyclopedia. He had worked with Escoffier and had an amazing memory of the hundreds of garnishes in classical cuisine. Whenever there was a discussion among commis as to the composition of a dish, Père Félix was called upon to arbitrate and resolve the argument. He was infallible.

Père Félix loved red wine and regularly consumed a bit too much, becoming tipsy by the end of the night, when he was responsible for writing down the inventory of the walk-in icebox. Near-sighted as well as pleasantly drunk, the old man shambled into the fridge and scrupulously counted beef tenderloins and jars of cream left for the next day. Then he wobbled out, jotted this information on a sheet of paper, and reentered the fridge to check on other items. As soon as he was out of sight, one of us erased what he had just written on his list. Eventually, he emerged from the icebox, squinted at his list, shook his head in puzzlement, and went back into the box to work on his inventory again. Whenever he left his glasses on the table, we snatched them, coated them with our beautiful, clear aspic, and returned them to the table.

When he reached the age of sixty-five, rather than retiring, Père Félix became the head chef of Le Plaza's employee kitchen, a position of high honor and respect. In his new position as our communard, the name given to the staff's cook, Père Félix was always cheerful and ready to prepare a special omelet or piece of chicken for one of us, and cook it as carefully as he would have for the most important VIP at Le Plaza. It was well executed, polished fare, the only way he knew to cook.

I may have been the highest-ranking first commis in one of the best restaurants in the world, but like any chef, I was still perfectly capable of producing a culinary disaster. Fortunately, one of the worst of these happened well out of the sight of M. Diat. On my days off I worked—usually thanks to the Société—in an incredible array of restaurants from the Salvation Army's soup kitchen to the three-star Maxim's. The short stays were unbeatable experiences. Arriving at a restaurant at 9:00 A.M., I was sent to one department or another by the chef and, within seconds, was working to earn my day's pay. There was no time to get accustomed to the habits of the house or acquainted with fellow workers. One day I worked the rôtisserie, the next the fish department, and the next the garde-manger.

Passing through so many kitchens, I acquired taste memory. I identified each restaurant by specific smells, looks, and tastes: the lobster soufflé at Le Plaza Athénée, the whitefish at L'Hôtel d'Albion, the crayfish gratin at Le Grand Hôtel de l'Europe. All had some peculiarity, some flavor, some aroma. These tastes went beyond recipes; there was a tour de main, a sleight of hand, and a spirit in each dish that made it unique.

The Bible of all these tasks was Le Répertoire de la cuisine, a pocket book measuring seven by five inches and less that one-half inch thick. I still use it today. First published by Gringoire and Saulnier in 1914, it contains more than seven thousand recipes. All the known garnishes used in the professional pre-nouvelle French kitchen cuisine are there. The recipes are usually explained or defined in one line—an elliptical set of chefs' crib notes: "Armenonville. Artichoke bottom, cocotte potatoes, concassé tomatoes, and string beans." When confronted with an unknown or forgotten recipe, I pulled Le Répertoire surreptitiously from my pocket and consulted it before I started ordering the ingredients needed for the dish.

These shifts as an extra were great learning experiences, but they could lead to colossal mishaps. I spent a couple of days once at Fouquet's, the famous restaurant at the corner of the Champs Elysées and avenue George V. The chef sent me to the fish department as first commis. There the chef de partie ordered me to make hollandaise. I put forty egg yolks and a cup of cold water into a sturdy saucepan and started beating the mixture on the stove. I was terrified of overcooking the yolks and ending up with scrambled eggs, so I kept sliding the saucepan from the hot center to the cool side, whisking furiously to achieve the desired frothy texture without curdling the eggs. I did not give the yolks enough heat, and the mixture started foaming and rising in my pan, finally overflowing onto the stove. At this point, I added clarified butter, but instead of turning the mixture velvety and creamy, it liquefied it into a mess.

***

BY MODERN STANDARDS, the fare we produced daily at Le Plaza seems rich, arcane, and overly ornate. But this was nothing to the baroque feasts the brigade was capable of producing when M. Diat decided that the theme of a dinner should hark back to the culinary extremes of nineteenth-century classic French cuisine. M. Dupré, the owner of Le Plaza, ordered just such a meal when he invited a hundred of his friends, which was to say le tout Paris, to a banquet to celebrate the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, France's answer to the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont rolled into one. Our formally attired guests seated themselves in a private salon and started with a truffled consommé, followed by lobster en Bellevue, which technically should consist of medallions of lobster meat decorated with truffles and glazed with shellfish aspic. But M. Diat had wanted the presentation of the dish to take the form of an underwater still life. Lobster shells were positioned atop rounds of bread shaped to imitate rocks on the ocean floor. Barquettes (boat-shaped pastry shells) filled with smoked salmon mousse, artichoke bottoms stuffed with red beet purée, eggs mimosa (stuffed eggs), and croustades of foie gras were arranged at the base of the rocks to resemble colorful corals, anemones, and other bottom-dwelling lifeforms.

M. Diat chose pheasant en volière (in aviary) as the main course. The presentation called for us to create a true-to-life diorama worthy of a major natural history museum. Each pheasant would appear to be tending two nests, one full of eggs, one cradling newly hatched chicks. As a first step, Chef Duclos had slowly dried the colorful male pheasants' tails, heads, and wings, with feathers still attached, in an oven, and then secured them with large wood skewers into roasted loaves of bread, to reconstruct the bird. He placed a hot roasted pheasant on the bread in the center of the feather decorations. Surrounding the pheasant were nests made of waffled potatoes and straw potatoes secured on small bread pedestals. We filled the nests of waffled potatoes with small pommes soufflées (potato soufflés), imitating eggs, and the nests of straw potatoes with roasted ortolans, which are tiny, fatty buntings, each about the size of a chickadee.

As a sweet finale, M. Diat had the kitchen make ananas voilé en surprise, a "veiled pineapple surprise." The pastry cooks filled whole hollowed pineapples with pineapple sherbet, arranged them on rolling tables, and surrounded them with slices of fresh pineapple macerated in sugar and kirschwasser. They piled apples, peaches, bananas—all made of blown sugar—between the pineapples and draped ethereal strands of pulled sugar, known as angel hair, over all. Lights in the base of the tables gave the sugar an incandescent glow.

Having access to an expertly staffed (and free of charge) dining room was only one of the many perks that came with working at Le Plaza Athénée. I didn't earn a lot of money, much less than I would have made cranking out pig's feet at a neighborhood bistro. Most months, I spent my entire paycheck within a few days of collecting it. But I was rich in other ways. In addition to having five weeks of vacation a year, we received not one, but one and a half days off a week. Medical and dental care were paid for, and Le Plaza employed a full-time nurse to tend to minor illnesses and to treat the inevitable cuts and burns of our trade. The hotel gave us uniforms, and we had spacious and clean rooms in which to shower and change. We could play on Le Plaza's soccer and basketball teams or paddle a little canoe reserved for our use down by the Seine.

To me the biggest perk of all was that we had access to Le Plaza's private library, whose shelves bulged with the best in classic and modern literature and philosophy. One of the older commis, Lucien Vergé, befriended me and became something of an informal tutor, suggesting books that I should read and inviting me to join in serious discussions with a group of young people who gathered nightly at the cafés.

Decked out in tailor-made suits that cost far more than I could rightfully afford, I became a regular at the "in" spots. One evening at Café Cyrano in place Blanche, an older guy asked if we minded his taking a vacant seat at our table. There was nothing unusual in this. Nor was there anything out of the ordinary in his immediately joining the conversation, which concerned a play we'd recently seen. Our newfound companion was a wonderful addition to the table. Not only did he spring for drinks (always welcome), but he spoke eloquently and knowledgeably about all aspects of the theater. He seemed to know everybody who was anybody. I listened to him, transfixed.

Too transfixed. It soon became obvious that he misunderstood my intentions. During a lull in the conversation, he brushed my arm and quietly suggested that we depart together. I begged off, and the evening progressed with the same engrossing conversation and steady flow of wine.

On the way back to the room I kept in a small hotel on rue des Abbesses in Montmartre, I commented to a friend about the stranger.

"He knew everything about the theater," I said.

"You don't who that was?"

I shrugged.

"That," my friend said, "was Jean Genêt."

Café Cyrano was a far cry from the lecture halls at the Sor-bonne, but I was picking up an education. I became a voracious reader, an avid participant in late-night philosophical conversations. True, my motives were not always pure. I liked to show off a bit, particularly when a couple of girls joined us. At some level I was overcompensating. I felt embarrassed that I had so little formal education.

A good number of the girls who befriended us were hookers, anxious to spend some no-strings-attached time with boys their own age by watching a movie or going dancing. They had a lot more disposable income than we did and no qualms about picking up the tab. These encounters were usually but not always platonic.

All in all, I was working hard and living well. Life was good until my concierge handed me an official-looking letter: my draft notice.

Gnocchi à la Romaine

(ROMAN GNOCCHI)

YIELD: 4 SERVINGS

 

ATHOUGH MOST PEOPLE associate gnocchi with the Italian kitchen, gnocchi à la parisienne (little dumplings made with choux paste) and gnocchi à la romaine, made from semoule des blé dur, called semolina in Italian, were standards on the menu of Le Plaza Athénée. I still love semolina gnocchi and make them a few times a year for family and friends. They make a great starter to a meal and are just as good as an accompaniment with poultry or veal.

 

2	cups whole milk
¾	teaspoon salt
¼	teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
	Dash of grated nutmeg
½	cup semolina (granulated hard durum wheat flour)
2	large eggs
1	teaspoon good olive oil
¾	cup grated Comté or Gruyère cheese (2 ounces)
¼	teaspoon salt
¼	teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
½	cup heavy cream

Bring 1¾ cups of the milk to a boil in a medium saucepan with the salt, pepper, and nutmeg. As soon as the milk boils, pour the semolina into it in a steady stream while mixing it in with a whisk. Reduce the heat to low, and cook for 1 to 2 minutes, stirring occasionally with the whisk. The mixture should be very thick and smooth.

Meanwhile, break the eggs into a small bowl, add the remaining ¼ cup milk, and beat with a fork until smooth. Add to the semolina in the pan, and mix in well with a whisk. Cook and stir for about 30 seconds, until very thick. Set aside while you line a 9-×-6-inch baking dish with plastic wrap, so the ends overhang the sides of the dish. Pour the mixture into it, and using the plastic wrap liner, press on the dough so that it is about ¾ A inch thick. Let cool.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Cut the cold gnocchi dough into 3-inch squares (you will have 6 squares), oil a gratin dish with the teaspoon of oil, and arrange the gnocchi in the dish, leaving a little space between them. Sprinkle the grated cheese, salt, and pepper on top, and bake for about 15 minutes, until lightly browned and hot. Remove from the oven, and move the oven shelf 6 to 8 inches from the heat source. Pour the cream over the gnocchi, and return the dish to the oven. Immediately switch the oven setting to broil, and broil the gnocchi for about 5 minutes, or until nicely browned on top. Serve.