Under the Table (20 page)

1 teaspoon baking soda

¹
/
₃
cup dark brown sugar

2 tablespoons freshly grated ginger

1 cup dark molasses

1 egg ¾ cup hot water ½ cup vegetable oil

1. To prepare the apple bottom: In a saucepan over low heat, stir together the butter and brown sugar until the butter melts. Add the apples and cook gently until the apples soften and caramelize slightly but still retain their shape, about 15 minutes. Remove from the heat.
   
2. To make the gingerbread: Preheat the oven to 325°F. Thoroughly grease a 9-inch round cake pan or ovenproof glass baking dish.
   
3. In a large bowl, combine the flour, ground ginger, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, baking soda, and brown sugar. Stir in the grated ginger and the molasses, then the egg. Once the egg has been fully incorporated, add the hot water and oil. Mix gently until everything is well combined.
   
4. Spread the apples and their caramel in one layer in the prepared pan. (I like to arrange them in a roughly circular pattern, but it doesn't really matter.) Gently pour in the gingerbread batter.
   
5. Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour. The gingerbread is fully baked when a toothpick comes out clean.
   
6. Let cool in the pan for 5 minutes and then invert the pan onto a large plate or platter. Everything should come out beautifully.
   

NOTE: To grease a cake pan, I like to use Baker's Joy, but Pam would work and butter is just fine.

 

Makes one 9-inch cake, enough for 6 people

I
went home to Virginia for the funeral. Even though I wanted to stay, to hold my grandmother's small, gnarled hand, to cook comforting food for my father, whose quiet devastation shook me more than tears, within hours of the service I was on my way back to New York. The midterm exam was coming with the first cool days of fall, and I couldn't afford to lose more than one day at school. So of course my train broke down and had to be pushed into the Wilmington, Delaware, station and I ended up taking a bus back into New York. I emerged from the Port Authority Bus Terminal onto Forty-second Street in the middle of a windy night—not good timing, but I didn't even register the seamier side of big-city night-life as I hailed a cab and made my way downtown. Being teased by the tranny hookers on Forty-second Street was the least of my problems. At last I turned the key in the apartment door and slipped into bed next to Michael's sweetly sleeping form. It was well past midnight, and I would need to be at school in a few hours.

Things were more and more hectic in the Level 2 kitchens, as we were fully occupied not only with our own daily tasks, but also with preparing as much as possible for the midterm. Not actually studying, but starting to prepare all the little things that would be needed in the heat of the test, like bread crumbs, veal stock, and chicken stock, and replenishing the kitchen with fresh containers of kosher salt, peppercorns, vegetable oil, and vinegar. We started cleaning the Robot Coupes, industrial blenders, food mills, and large ladles and spoons to a high polish. The Level 4 students were doing the same thing, but on a much larger scale. Because of the more complicated nature of their recipes, they had already begun to make their more
elaborate stocks and freezing them, portioning meat, and preparing the odds and ends that would be needed for their final.

There was just one small problem—the school had not been designed for so much stockpiling of ingredients, and everyone was running out of places to put things. The Level 4 students did not have large industrial refrigerators in their kitchen, merely little under-counter lowboys that needed to be cleaned out every afternoon so that the night-shift students could use them. The colossal walk-in refrigerator, the size of a studio apartment, was almost always full to bursting with plastic buckets full of congealed veal stock, five-quart cans of mustard, trays of bizarre experiments the chef-instructors had made and then covered with foil and forgotten about, and anything else that might come in handy sometime. This left space only in the large Level 2 refrigerators and freezers, space that we were already using for our own midterm exam materials and our daily allotment of ingredients from the storeroom. Things were getting messy, and the door of the refrigerator often opened to reveal an incredible muddle of leeks, carrots, bits of lamb, veal bones, potato scraps, and celery leaves all jumbled together, garnished with a disk or two of chilling puff pastry. It was only a matter of time before Chef Pierre noticed and exploded, which he did one hectic morning as we frantically tried to start our two recipes for
saucier
.

KABLAM! The door of the refrigerator banged shut like a gunshot, and Chef 's face went through its now familiar transformation from pink to fuchsia to beet red to a deep magenta before he began the now familiar refrain—“What the fuck eez this? What is going on here?” It was so familiar by now that it no longer caused me to tremble in my chef 's clogs—I barely registered it, actually, as I bent my head over my cutting board, minding my own business as much as possible. I had learned not to make eye contact or involve myself in these volcanic eruptions unless it was specifically targeted at my brigade. This seemed more of a general, whole-class condemnation and nothing to worry about. Until the ingredients for our two
dishes—roasted chicken
en sauce diable
and a
blanquette de veau
—began pelting our workstation and ricocheting into our faces. It was very unlike Chef to throw food—ingredients were a precious commodity that should be treated with care and respect. Chef must have been feeling the pressure of the upcoming exams, too.

Now was the time to get involved. Motioning to my teammates, we stashed our cutting boards, complete with vegetables mid-mince, under the workstation and dove into the fray. Junior neatly fielded a head of lettuce that seemed to be aimed at the students in garde-manger and began stacking a small pyramid of vegetables together in the family meal workstation. I started to pull out the trays of ingredients that were stacked haphazardly on top of one another in one walk-in, labeling them by their dish (it was easy to tell what tray belonged to what recipe, and what brigade, as we had all made the same recipes so many times by now) and consolidating them into one corner in a neat stack. Much better. Angelo and Jackie had repacked all of the
mise en place
we had prepared for the midterm in a neat arrangement in another fridge, and all that was left was to sort out the remaining ingredients that littered the kitchen and get back to work. Chef had backed off from his impression of a major-league pitcher and watched us put everything back with his hands folded across his chest in classic Chef Pierre posture. When we had almost finished, he said, “
Merci. Allez!
Back to work!” Merely asking us nicely to clean up the kitchen wouldn't stir us into action; it took an act of God, or Chef.

 

We returned to our station, our ingredients out now in a pile. The vegetables had been dealt with, for the most part, which just left the garnishes and the meats themselves. The chickens had been separated from their fellows and stored in a large bowl over ice, which was standard procedure. This left us only a large plastic bag of pale pink meat scraps, already roughly cubed. This was not that unusual—if a brigade had recently done the same recipe, they would have been faced with an entire breast of veal to debone, and the extra meat not
used in their recipe would have been carefully wrapped, labeled, and set aside in the fridge until the next group came along. One thing was strange, though: this package was unlabeled. This was (yet another) cardinal sin in the kitchen. Without a label clearly describing the contents of the package, to whom the package belonged, as well as the date on which it entered the refrigerator, things would often go missing—thrown away, stolen by another student (or instructor) for their own use, or sucked into the void where stray socks and car keys go. There was a moment's hesitation as I hefted the package of pink meat in my hands, wondering where its label had gone.
Probably got lost in the scuffle,
I thought, adding it to our little pile and getting ready to begin.

Ben and Tucker would be working on the chicken
au diable,
a quartered roasted chicken liberally laced with fiery hot mustard and seasoned bread crumbs and napped with a tart vinegar and tarragon sauce enriched with a powerful demi-glace. Junior and I would be tackling the veal stew, made by the cooking process known as braising—in which the meat is first seared, then cooked gently in a small amount of liquid—a wonderful technique for cooking especially tough cuts of meat. The long exposure to low heat, gentled by the addition of a bit of liquid, causes the fibrous tissues to slowly break down, yielding an exceptionally soft, almost buttery texture. The liquid is enriched by the juices from the meat released during cooking, and the whole is fortified with a bit more highly flavored liquid (usually wine and stock), reinforced with some well-cooked and seasoned vegetables, and it all comes together as a whole infinitely more delicious than its parts.

Braising is a cooking technique that also allows a degree of latitude in its preparation. While it is possible to overcook the meat, making it tough and stringy, in general, the longer the cooking time, the more tender the meat will be and the more delicious and rich the braising liquid. But this
blanquette de veau
was for the chefs' lunch, and so we had only a little less than two hours to let the veal
cook. After searing the veal, the meat must also be blanched twice to remove any lurking impurities in the flesh. These impurities take the form of an ugly grayish scum that rises to the surface of the water and must be removed before the meat can be added to the stew—otherwise the grayish scum will discolor the distinctive white sauce the blanquette is known for. This is a laborious process, taking on all the frustrating aspects of watching water slowly come to a boil not once, but twice—the slime must be skimmed, the meat drained and examined thoroughly for any clinging bits of albumin (as the scum is technically called), and then returned to a large pot called a
rondeau
to begin its braise.

As Junior and I patiently seared, then blanched, drained, and examined our bits of veal, it occurred to me that this veal was not as scummy as usual. Perhaps it had been washed before it was put away, I thought, and it had affected the veal in a good way. I didn't have time to ponder this aberration long, as we were going to be pressed for time, as usual. Braising can be done on the top of the stove or in the oven; in general, because ovens are able to sustain a low and even temperature, chefs prefer to braise in the oven. It makes a better stew, but it does take significantly more time—something we didn't have. We placed the veal in the pot and added a creamy velouté we had made. A velouté is a rich sauce made from a mixture of white veal stock and heavy cream or milk and thickened with a roux. We covered everything tightly with two layers of foil and stuck it on the back of the stove over a low flame while we got on with the garniture. A classic
blanquette de veau
is a creamy white color, broken only by the pale chunks of the meat and flashes of green from peas, brilliant orange from tournéed carrots, and the translucence of lightly sautéed mushrooms and pearl onions. All of these vegetables are prepared separately and added to the stew only when the meat has reached the proper consistency. While we peeled mushroom caps, cut carrots, and peeled pearl onions (one of the most thankless tasks in the kitchen), Junior and I would swoop by the gently simmering stew to check on the meat.

Taking a spoonful of the sauce and inspecting it for proper color and flavor went well, but the lumps of grayish meat didn't seem to be getting any more tender. In fact, the meat seemed to be going in the other direction, becoming progressively tougher each time we tested the stew. I kept hoping that at any moment the fibers would relax, the veal would become buttery soft. Once again, we were running out of time, and for once, Chef Pierre was too busy to rescue us. We had a whispered conference with Tucker and Ben, whose chicken was turning out beautifully, of course, blast them. We really had no choice, we had to add the garnish and send it out as it was. In large soup bowls we placed small mounds of molded rice pilaf, and surrounded them with odd numbers of carrots, onions, mushrooms, veal pieces, and peas, heavily sauced with the velouté. Then we prayed that somehow, between the kitchen and the dining table, the veal would magically become tender.

We gathered in a little cluster for the afternoon lecture, waiting to hear the comments of the chefs on our efforts. This was never a happy time for us students, as Chef Pierre read the often insulting comments out loud for the rest of the class to hear. No one escaped without some cutting comment, and frequently these judgments were so amusing in their phrasing that a student could be dogged by a new nickname for weeks—nothing could be worse than the nickname given to Wendell, a boy in our class who had royally messed up the recipe for coq au vin (use your imagination). I kept my head down and my fingers crossed.

As we progressed through the dishes prepared by the garde-manger and the fish station, it seemed as if perhaps we might escape a verbal thrashing—there were no terribly cutting comments so far. Perhaps the chefs had allowed themselves a bit of wine with lunch? Then Chef turned a page and began the comments written about our efforts in
saucier
. The chicken received high marks, and Ben and Tucker were rightly proud of their work.

On to the blanquette. Instead of reading out the commentary,
though, Chef began to read out the recipe, word for word, beginning with the ingredient list. The class waited in silence as Chef then went through the procedure, emphasizing words at random with his strong French accent. I could feel myself going red with embarrassment—this was excruciating. Finally he reached the end of the recipe. Silence descended. At last, he began to read the comments. The rice pilaf had been well cooked, as had the vegetable garniture. The presentation on the plates had been quite correct. The velouté had been well seasoned and was the proper creamy consistency and color. However,
blanquette de veau
is always made from veal, hence the
veau
in the recipe's title. We had used some pinkish meat, but it certainly wasn't veal. Perhaps Chef Pierre should once again demonstrate the difference between a calf and a pig to us?

The room exploded in laughter. Chef Pierre's eyes twinkled briefly behind his glasses, then he shouted for silence. He chastised us all for the sloppy way we had been keeping the refrigerators, and then apologized to us for giving us that bag of meat. It turned out that we had commandeered the scraps of pig meat the Level 4 students had been saving to make stock for their final exam. We would have to replace it before the final, but we were excused for our innocent error.

But our mistake was not soon forgotten. A week passed, and as we busily began yet another day in the kitchen, checking our tray of ingredients, gathering together all our pots and pans, and teasing each other, Chef Pierre staggered into the room. He was bent over in a modified crouch and seemed to be having some trouble walking. He barely made it to our station before collapsing. “Chef!” I shouted, dropping the plum tomatoes I had been holding to rush over to him. “Are you okay?” I asked breathlessly. Chef Pierre was leaning up against the stainless steel table for support, his hands clenched together underneath his apron. Suddenly, he flung the apron aside and flopped a large, long, very pink hunk of meat on my cutting
board. It was a whole pork tenderloin, but the way he was holding it between his legs, it sure seemed like something else. He and the boys in my brigade were howling with laughter. “So now you know what real pork looks like,” guffawed Chef. Tucker snickered. Faster than I could say
“merde,”
I had a new nickname, one that was going to haunt me for the rest of school: Miss Piggy.