CHAPTER 23
GODS, MONSTERS, AND SLAVES
LESSON HIGHLIGHTS: BLOODY QUAIL, SWEETBREADS, THE HIGH COST OF PRESENTATION, AND THE RELIGION OF ESTEBAN
My cutting board is covered with gristle and flesh, my apron drenched in blood. Somehow, I hit a blood line in my quail as I was deboning it. Who would have thought that such a small bird could contain so much blood? I’ve experienced blood and guts before, especially with fish, but the feel of hacking into such a fragile body unnerves me. I could crush this skeleton with one hand, as if it had bones made of toothpicks. Chef Bouveret asks what’s wrong.
I hold up my still bloodied hands as I tell him. “Je suis un monstre.”
He laughs and replies, “C’est pourquoi les femmes font de mauvais bouchers.” That’s why women make poor butchers.
Today, we’re making quail and veal sweetbread pastries with shiitake mushrooms. I must bone the bird’s tiny legs and slice the slivers of breast off its delicate carcass. Then I move on to the sweetbreads.
“Sweetbread” has always struck me as a vastly euphemistic term for a gland. A lot of people think the term refers to brains, but sweetbreads actually come from the thymus gland or the pancreas of calves or piglets under a year old. (In some countries, llama thymus is a delicacy, but there aren’t many llamas in France.) It’s a curious expression, as they taste neither sweet nor like bread. To me, they’re a velvety and mild version of liver, although I’m hardly a connoisseur. Ever since experiencing food poisoning from undercooked pig kidneys in China a few years ago, I’ve been reluctant to eat much organ meat.
The grayish-white lumpy mass of sweetbreads is soaked to eliminate any impurities. Nestled in water, like the caul fat, they look remarkably like withered human brains. Then we remove any excess sinew. We slice, season with salt and pepper, then sauté in butter for two minutes before setting aside.
Quickly, I dice carrots, onion, and celery. For the sauce, Chef DuPont instructed us to add only enough vegetables to equal 10 percent of the volume of bones, a much smaller percentage than we’d use for stock. So for ten ounces of bones, we use just one ounce of mirepoix. The reason, he says, is to allow the meat flavor to be enhanced, not overwhelmed by the vegetables.
I recall my past struggles with puff pastry. No more. I give my pastry a final two turns, roll it out into a decent rectangle, and then slice it in half lengthwise with a paring knife. A slip of parchment goes under one piece, and I begin layering the stuffing with pieces of sweetbreads and quail breast. I repeat this until I’ve used everything and then place the other piece of puff pastry on top. Instead of meat-stuffed meat, it’s meat-stuffed pastry, a more difficult and elegant variation. Swathed in egg wash, the pastry goes into the oven to cook for about thirty to forty minutes.
With that, we wait. As we usually do, we chat.
A dark beauty in her late twenties, Isabella was born to a Brazilian father and Italian mother in the United States and lived there as a child before her parents moved back to São Paulo. She speaks Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Italian fluently. Her French is very good, too. Even looking at her in her kitchen whites, you can tell that in another era Isabella would have been a glamorous movie queen. “Dahrling,” she purrs to begin each sentence in her Brazilian/Italian accent. “Dahrling, could you pass me an onion? Grazie, dahrling.”
By contrast, Margo exudes a get-out-of-my-way kind of ambition that seems very American. After a lucrative legal career for a couple of big corporations, she retired at age fifty. My guess is that she’s spent her life sitting front-row center. It turns out she ranked first in her Intermediate Class. She doesn’t say, but it’s obvious her burning desire is to place first in Superior, too. She has no apparent plans to use her degree. This is recreation.
“So I bought 70 of food magazines yesterday,” Margo says while we wait. “The woman at the newsstand thought I was a little crazy.”
Isabella and I exchange quiet glances. That’s $95 on food magazines.
“I just want to get great ideas for how to present my plates,” she continues.
Jenny listens to all of this intently. She’s the lovely, blond ex-pat wife of an American executive. They live in the swank Passy neighborhood in the Sixteenth arrondissement. We’ve had only six lessons, but I’ve watched her as she’s cooked across from me. She’s confident, sometimes doing things her own way. She’s been gifted with marvelous taste buds; her food is always delicious. Invariably, her plates look unique, different from the chefs’, yet alluring. She doesn’t need magazines.
“May I borrow a couple of your magazines?” asks Isabella. Margo’s face takes on friendly false smile, and her voice goes up a notch.
“Sure, I’ll bring them in,” she says. It sounds hollow. Margo turns back to her stove. Forget comrades, I realize. To Margo, we are competition.
The next day, I meet up with Isabella at a bookstore devoted to cookbooks on rue Dante, near Saint-Michel. She’s lusting over a massive oversized book about the work of Ferran Adrià, the chef of El Bulli in Spain, considered by some the best restaurant in the world. The book shows off his experimental cuisine, which features the likes of culinary foam made of beet and melon, foie-gras ice cream, and pasta made of seafood. The unwieldy book costs 165.
“It’s even more than Margo’s magazines,” Isabella laments. Together, we flip through the pages. His work looks not like haute cuisine but small nuggets of Modern art. Some of it reminds me of science-fiction food. Small red squares that taste like cherry? Is the future of food a variation on Soylent Green? Will it leave deglazing and sautéing in the dust?
But I like the ethos. In his twenty-three-point “synthesis of El Bulli cuisine” are some remarkable comments, one of which explains the look of the food: “A culinary language is being created which is becoming more and more ordered, that on some occasions establishes a relationship with the world and language of art.”
This statement catches my attention, too: “The barriers between the sweet and savoury world are being broken down.”
Who decides what is quality cuisine anyway? Some of the sauces we learned in Basic were once thought daring, revolutionary. The unusual combinations we’re learning in Superior are trendy; unconventional pairings with classic technique are common on haute-cuisine menus. But it makes me wonder more about the general nature of evolution. We can reinvent anything, even ourselves, and some things will change, but in the end, something familiar always remains. Mike might enjoy chocolate foam, but he’d probably never crave it the way he would chocolate-chip cookies. Why? The chefs at El Bulli can never compete with the memory of his mother pulling them hot out of the oven when he came home in his Little League baseball uniform.
Ultimately, Isabella leaves the store without her book. We head to the St.-Germain-des-Prés outlet of the teahouse chain Mariage Frères. In Paris, it’s chic to drink expensive tea. We each order a pot.
“My parents are both psychiatrists, very successful,” she says. “So they say to me, ‘Isabella, you must get a degree in psychology.’ So I did. I worked at it for a while. I didn’t like it. Always in my heart, I wanted to be a chef. I was deceiving myself trying to be something else. I gave in to my passion and came to Europe to study cooking. First, I went to Italy. I studied in a beautiful castle for three months, learning to make Italian food.”
“Why Italian?” I ask.
“My grandfather,” she says. “I loved him, and he loved food. As a little girl, I helped him make fresh pasta each Sunday. He grew up in Brazil, but he was Italian. When he got old enough, he went to Italy to study violin professionally. It didn’t work out. He sold his violin, filled the case with prosciutto, and headed back to Brazil.”
After the Italian cooking course, she went to work in a one-star Michelin restaurant as an intern. “I was the only woman in the kitchen, and they kept teasing me, calling me ‘samba’ and asking what I looked like in my bathing suit,” she said. “They treated me like a slave. They made me do all these awful jobs, but that’s what you do when you start out. It’s always the way.” After three months, she confronted the chef who teased her most: “I don’t want trouble; neither do you. The others listen to you. If you stop the teasing, they’ll quit, and I won’t have to say anything to the owner.” He stopped. They let her start filleting fish. But it was too late. She left and went to Paris.
“I chose Le Cordon Bleu because it’s famous, so when I went to find a job, people would know I was serious. People hear your name, they know nothing of your cooking. They hear Le Cordon Bleu, they know that name.”
But the name will get you only so far. “It is very hard work in a kitchen,” she begins. “I mean, you are a slave when you start a career, even if you go to a place like Le Cordon Bleu. It is hot, you’re on your feet, the hours are long, you smell not so good at the end of the shift. You work weekends, holidays. You lift heavy things, you get dirty. Always, there is stress and yelling when there is a service. You need a lot of passion, or you will burn out in the kitchen. This I know. But I don’t want to use my passion for anything else. Cooking, that’s all I want to do now.”
The next day, Isabella and I go to school on our day off to represent Superior Cuisine at a sort of welcome party for Basic students.
As I wander with a glass of cheap white wine in my hand, I chat and meet a dozen of the students in the Basic class. I am struck that the makeup of the incoming class always seems so similar: many Asians, a handful of Americans, some serious students, some young women learning to cook and speak French, and some students like me and Isabella, refugees from other careers finally coming to terms with what they want.
One guy from Israel finds the classes are too easy. “Wait a couple of months,” I tell him. “You’ll feel differently.”
Another student from America was sure she was going to flunk. “The chefs hate me,” she says. I feel a stab of nostalgia. Everyone thinks that sometimes, I tell her. It’s normal. “Just cook from your heart and you’ll be fine.”
Among them are a pack of Brazilians. Amazingly, Isabella went to high school with one of them, a heavyset guy named Renato who wears black wraparound glasses. Somehow, I end up with them at an old Belle Époque bar not far from Les Halles. Renato’s wife, a pleasant woman with a musical accent, is there, as is their friend, a thin guy named Marcos, who speaks French and Portuguese but no English. Then there’s Esteban from Spain.
Esteban is an assistant in the basement. I’ve seen him before, but then he’s hard to miss. He’s handsome, with a shaved head and pierced nose, lower lip, and tongue—an uncommon look among Cordon Bleu students. His eyes are hard and blue. His job at school makes him privy to all the gossip, and this seems to empower an already strong rebellious streak in him.
“These chefs, I won’t call them ‘Chef So-and-so,’ ” Esteban tells us over bottle of wine number one. “I call them Monsieur Savard, Monsieur Gaillard, but never ‘Chef.’ ” Calling them “Chef” has been so pounded into me that to call them “monsieur” seems like heresy. It’s about respect; Esteban thought it should be mutual. He remains unimpressed by the chefs who seem to worship at the feet of Escoffier.
Over bottles number two and three, he tells us all in great detail about the massive, beautiful meal he plans to prepare for his father and his brother when he returns to Spain.
By bottle number four, he’s on to the restaurant he plans to open, probably in Madrid. I tell him about the conversation with Isabella.
“It’s true, when you are in the kitchen, most of the time you are a slave, a slave to the customers,” he says. “But then they eat their meal, and if they like it, then I am a god!” He puffs up his chest and points to himself.
Such is the religion of Esteban.
“Is that what keeps you from calling the teachers ‘Chef’?” I ask.
“Exactly,” he says, flicking an ash off his cigarette. “I’ve already been a mechanic, a salesperson, and now I’ll be a chef. I am as important as they are, you see? I have the same power. We all do.”
By this time, we were all drunk. No one had ordered food, save a plate of charcuterie and some bread. Everyone got tired of translating for Marcos, so we all just speak French.
Wine has a powerful effect on the ability to speak a foreign language. In my current state, I’m certain I speak fluently.
I wake up the next morning thinking in French. I decide to keep on speaking it, regardless of whether someone asks me something in English. I want to stay in this immersion, as if I’m on the precipice of speaking French and won’t be able to come back if I stop. It’s like being a child. You understand, but you can’t speak much beyond simple phrases. But one day you know you will because everyone else can.
The wine might have helped my French, but the hangover does nothing for more wrestling with my least favorite fish, the dreaded hake. This time, the fish is to be wrapped in prosciutto. Isabella and I joke about her grandfather’s violin case.
Once we’ve filleted the fish, we place a large sheet of heat-resistant plastic wrap on the counter and lay out slices of prosciutto. On top of this, we lay a slice of fish and spread a dense mixture of fresh herbs, garlic, black olives, and olive oil. Another fillet of hake tops that, and it all gets rolled up tight in the plastic, like a hard candy. We put it into the freezer to firm up and then cut one-inch slices from it, sautéing them in hot olive oil. Voilà! Each is a perfect little ham-wrapped parcel. Chef DuPont tastes everything and approves. “Bon travail,” he says.
Today, the sous-sol has been generous; I have about six portions of fish. I call the Italian landlords to see if they want some for dinner. “Ah, Kath-a-leen, we cannot take-uh de fish,” he explains. “We head to Rouen-a for de night.”
I look for the world’s smartest homeless man, but I’ve not seen him since my return. So I head home on the Métro. At the Montparnasse station, I see a heavily disfigured young woman. She sits quietly, jean jacket buttoned up, a hand-lettered sign in front of her. “J’ai faim,” it begins. I’m hungry. Anything, please.
I walk past her, caught in the throng of Parisians anxious to get home. On the platform, a train stops. The hake weighs heavily in my hand.
I turn around and walk against the tide of people.
She looks up expectantly, surprised to see someone coming the wrong way. “Vous désirez du poisson?” I ask, bending down to her.
I can see a map of deep scars around her bald head. Burns, I think, horrible to experience and maybe worse to live with. Her green eyes glow against her purple, discolored skin. She adds something about her “petit garçon,” her little boy.
I’m a culinary student, I tell her. I often have food, and I’ll look for her. I walk away but turn to see her looking through the various zipbags, the fish for once served with a generous side of vegetables. Happy and almost hugging herself, she looks at me. She smiles and, like Chef Bouveret, gives me a thumbs-up.
Maybe Esteban is right, I think, as I walk back down to the platform. In the kitchen, I might be a slave to the chefs. But now, feeding this woman made me something remarkable. At first, it feels godlike.
But once off the Métro at Belleville, I walk home through the poor streets. Some local kids around eight or nine years old follow me down my street. At first, they’re asking for something. Then, realizing I don’t comprehend, they start tossing out taunts in French that I don’t understand.
How quick the fall can be from godliness to humility.
Rouget Farci aux Olives et aux Tomates, Enrobé de Prosciutto, Citron Beurre Blanc au Citron
RED SNAPPER STUFFED WITH PROVENÇAL TOMATO SPREAD, WRAPPED IN PROSCIUTTO, WITH LEMON BUTTER SAUCE
Serves four
This is an easy recipe that can be used with any firm whitefish, such as cod, grouper, sea bass, or halibut. This uses the Provençal tomato spread from page 133. The spread can be made a day or two ahead and stowed in the fridge until needed. The spread and prosciutto are salty, so don’t add extra salt to the fish before baking it.
4 slices (about 2 ounces) prosciutto
4 fillets (about 5 ounces each) red snapper
Fresh ground pepper
½ cup Provençal tomato spread (see page 133)
LEMON BEURRE BLANC
1½ cups (350 ml) white wine
½ shallot finely chopped, (about 2 tablespoons)
1 tablespoon champagne or other white-wine vinegar
6 peppercorns
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, cut into small pieces and chilled
1 tablespoon lemon juice
Coarse salt, ground pepper
Preheat oven to 350°F/180°C. On four sheets of parchment paper or foil, lay the slices of prosciutto. Lay a fillet of fish atop each slice. Top with a piece of plastic wrap and flatten by lightly banging the fish with the bottom of a pan. Flatten just enough to make the fish roughly the same size as the prosciutto and an even thickness. Season generously with pepper. Spread on a tablespoon of the tomato mixture and roll each up like a pinwheel. Wrap parchment paper or foil around the rolled-up fish, and crimp or twist the ends like a hard candy to tightly seal. Place seam-side down atop foil in a casserole or roasting pan. Place in oven and bake for at least twenty minutes until the flesh is firm and cooked through. Make sure minimal juices are escaping package during cooking time.
As the fish cooks, make the sauce: Combine wine, shallots, vinegar, and peppercorns in a small saucepan and boil to reduce to about 1/3 cup of liquid. Lower heat until the liquid stops bubbling. Do not allow liquid to keep boiling or sauce will separate when butter is added. Add butter, one or two pieces at a time, whisking constantly to incorporate completely before adding more. If the sauce bubbles, remove pan from heat, whisking constantly to cool it before resuming. When all the butter is incorporated, add the lemon juice. Check seasonings, adding salt and pepper to taste. Strain in a mesh sieve before serving.
Remove fish from the oven, checking doneness by gently squeezing sides of the package. The fish should feel firm, not mushy. Cut open parchment and remove fish. Slice each into two or three pieces per person and put on a plate with the lemon beurre blanc.