Under the Table (29 page)

NOTE: Sometimes the cake will fall a bit in the center because it is so dense. Don't worry! I always throw a few berries, edible flowers, or even silver dragées on top and it looks gorgeous.

 

Makes one 8-inch cake, and can be doubled easily

I
n a fit of temporary dementia, I decided that this would be a good year to celebrate Thanksgiving at my house. School was beginning to get extremely hectic—we were a mere three weeks from graduation, and that meant the final exam was looming. Classes were being held on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and while many of my classmates were electing to use our one day of excused absence to travel, I was too nervous about the fast-approaching exam to take a day off. So I invited my parents and brother up to New York for the holiday. I thought that, as an almost full-fledged chef, Thanksgiving couldn't possibly be too arduous a task for me.

Of course, I was wrong. Thanksgiving is a favorite holiday for so many people because of the memories it conjures up of a time long past, a deeply held nostalgia for the Thanksgivings of childhood, against which any attempt to emulate would fall flat. This realization came to me only afterward, of course. That, and doing all the actual cooking, takes a great deal of fun out of things.

I was expecting my parents and brother on the 2:45 train from Washington, D.C. School ended at 3:00 pm, but by the time they had gotten off the train and fought their way downtown through the massive snarl of traffic, I would be at the apartment to meet them. Wednesday morning, gale force winds woke me up. Rain beat on the windows, and forks of lightning were the only light in the sky. I tried not to think of the weather as an omen. As usual, I threw on whatever clothes were handiest, splashed some food in the cat's bowl, kissed the still sleeping Michael (he had no idea what was in store for him), and flew out of the house. I was immediately soaked
to the bone, as the storm seemed to intensify the second I opened the apartment house door. Trying not to take this as an omen, either, I rushed down the street to Balthazar for my morning cup of coffee.

Balthazar restaurant and its tiny bakery next door were an anchor for my little corner of the city. On the weekend, it attracted oceans of tourists, who washed up in great waves of humanity that covered the sidewalk and even streamed out into the street in torrents, but at seven-thirty on a dark November morning, it was an oasis of calm—the sharp, comforting smell of espresso and the yeasty scent of freshly baked baguettes were a welcome balm to my frigid senses. Unlike an American bakery, where one's purchase is unceremoniously crammed in a wax paper bag or stuffed willy-nilly into a plain white cardboard box, at a French patisserie, and at Balthazar, one's purchase is nestled in paper, and then a tiny box, the perfect fit for the yummy little treat, is gently folded into place around it. But I wasn't here for a treat, and I had a very long day ahead of me. I placed my order for two coffees—in case the morning was particularly difficult, I wanted to be prepared with an extra boost of caffeine—and headed back into the storm, to make the short walk to The Institute. With the wind whipping the puddles into miniature whirlpools, it turned into more of a quick run.

After changing and heading downstairs to the Level 4 kitchens with my red toolbox and knife kit, I was glad I had gotten to school early. The kitchen was oddly silent, and our class, what remained of it, was already hard at work, trying to cover the gap in manpower. While I couldn't imagine that the restaurant would be particularly busy on a dark day like today, we would have to ensure that everything was just as usual, regardless. Wayne was absent, Amanda was leaving at ten o'clock, and Tommy, while present in body, seemed to be mentally far away, back in Florida with his little girls. Either that, or he was using one of his last opportunities to mentally undress Amanda. I couldn't decide.

This left me with Jared. Jared was a tireless worker, moving
methodically from one task to another without pause. He was also a gifted chef, with a good sense of what would go well with what, and a nice steady hand with the seasoning. But Jared was not good at cooking meat, for some reason. He simply could not tell when to flip a tuna steak or remove a chicken from the oven. While most of the rest of us had developed a bit of a sixth sense about these things, prodding a steak with a finger occasionally to check for doneness, but mostly going on instinct, Jared seemed unable to. He would ease a pork medallion into a hot sauté pan, and then stand back, or worse, walk away to start another task, without any sense of when to take the poor hunk of meat off the heat. Unless watched assiduously, Jared would turn out a tray of meat that was alternately deep red and raw and blackened beyond recognition. It was a baffling mystery—how could a chef so talented in every other aspect of the culinary arena be defeated by such a basic task? One memorable day Jared had used my expensive electric thermometer to check the doneness of the
boeuf en croûte
and then left it in the meat as it went back in the oven. Both the thermometer and the ninety-dollar hunk of tenderloin were burned beyond recognition. Jared couldn't even remember the way we had learned back in Level 1 to determine doneness in a piece of meat, using the fleshy part of the hand between thumb and index finger. A pinch of the flesh at the very edge of the hand is what rare meat feels like, while medium rare is the feel of the hand a bit farther in, and medium, medium well, and well are further in toward the firm flesh of the hand.

Since Jared, Tommy, and I were in
saucier,
cooking deep-fried quail with a panoply of small, finicky sides and garnishes, I was hoping I could keep Jared occupied with the vegetables and away from the meat, and I could interest Tommy in frying the quail to keep his mind occupied on the meal, and not on Amanda's imminent departure. Despite the walk-in refrigerator incident, I wasn't sure what was going on with those two. Neither seemed to be making any effort to hide the fact they really, really liked each other, but on the
other hand, it was rare to find them actually doing anything more than giving each other long looks or perhaps a very subtle squeeze under the table at Toad. I didn't have the time to waste thinking about what was going to happen to the star-crossed couple on my team, though. I hadn't even begun to plan what we would have for Thanksgiving dinner, and time was definitely running out.

Unlike everyone else in America, my family has never liked turkey at Thanksgiving. We have never liked turkey, period. So while the rest of the nation spends Thanksgiving wrestling a mutant, grotesquely large Butterball around the kitchen, dripping bacteria-laden poultry juice from sink to stove and back again, tying up the oven for seven hours trying to cook the factory-farmed behemoth, my father agitates that this be the year we serve lasagna for dinner. However, we do still have some hidebound notions, mostly from my brother, and poultry of some sort is always on the menu. For several years my mother and I sweated over the creation of that Frankenstein's monster, the turducken—where a chicken is boned and stuffed inside a duck, which is boned and stuffed inside a turkey, each layer generously padded with swathes of stuffing. But the effort seemed too great for a party of only five people, and none of us had ever cared for the turkey portion of the monster, so I thought perhaps this year I might scratch it from the starting lineup, despite my virtuoso abilities now with a boning knife.

I found that butchering meat seemed to be my special talent at chef school. The instructors recognized it, and would often pull me aside to do an extra leg of lamb or chicken or veal shoulder while everyone else did other things. Angelo joked that I was the daughter of a butcher who moonlighted as an enforcer for the mob. While that wasn't true, I was very proud of my ability to break down a carcass. I had been premed in college, and while I hadn't made it to med school, at least I was putting some of my skills to good use.

But I still hadn't decided on the main attraction at Thanksgiving dinner as I prepped the teeny tiny bodies of the quail for their
meeting with the deep-fat fryer. For a moment I toyed with the thought of having quail for our special dinner, but I would need a gross of them to sate the appetite of the men in the family. They were delicious, even their delicate bones edible, with a satisfying crunch on their way down, but they were just too small and they cost the earth.
There must be gold hidden in their craws,
I thought, as I neatly impaled a semi-boneless carcass and sank it in the waiting marinade. The side dishes would remain the same as they had every year of my memory, a seemingly endless array of carbohydrates ranging from dressing (southerners never ever call it stuffing) to mashed potatoes to a panful of tiny pearl onions that have been cooked
glacer à brun
(a process I could now perform in my sleep) to my mother's special rolls—great, soft white pillows of warmth, the perfect foil for a pat of butter. Then, of course, there were the pies: apple, pumpkin, pecan, buttermilk, chocolate, and sometimes mincemeat or cranberry-apple Dutch, or peach made from the jars of preserved peaches we canned earlier in the year, during the hottest days of July and August.

Needless to say, I hadn't found time to even think about getting the guest room ready, much less go grocery shopping. In the margins of the recipe I began making lists of all the things I would need from the various grocery stores in our area—from extra plates from Pearl River to a tablecloth from Broadway Panhandler to potatoes, beans, onions, carrots, pounds and pounds of butter, heavy cream, candles, and wine. I wasn't sure I hadn't bitten off more than I could chew with this, and I thought about ordering in Chinese for dinner.

And I
still
hadn't come up with a good idea for the main event. Perhaps inspiration would strike during lunch service, or I would overhear some fantastic idea from another student in the locker room. Lunch was a pretty quiet affair, and even though all the brigades were short on manpower, the wretched weather kept patrons away. If possible, the conditions outside had worsened since my quick run to class that morning. There were reports of flooding around the neighborhood, and hail had been spotted by an excitable
Level 1 student. Not the sort of weather in which to sightsee, and not the sort of weather to schlep sacks and sacks of groceries around in the gloom. I wondered what I was going to do with my family for four whole days. I wondered how I was going to manage to cook Thanksgiving dinner, ensure that no one picked a fight with anyone else, keep my own sanity, and start studying for the final exam. I wondered if the rain was ever going to let up.

It didn't. Not by the time class was over for the holiday, and we packed up our knife kits and red toolboxes. I was taking all of my tools home for the duration of the break—after all, I was going to need all the help I could get. Sure, I felt like a dork, traipsing through the puddles, the heavy plastic toolbox banging painfully into my shins every step or two, but also vaguely powerful, with my knife roll slung over my shoulder. It was only a six-block walk home, but I half hoped that on the way I could accost a mugger, save an old lady from a purse snatcher, or even perform an emergency tracheotomy with my newly sharpened paring knife. This, I thought, as I stepped menacingly into the street, daring a passing cyclist to come too close, or even think about splashing my already soaking wet jeans, was why it was a good idea not to go around with concealed weapons. They gave one a completely false sense of confidence.

Confidence was the last thing I had, and even the good spirits I was carefully keeping dry were dampened a bit when I arrived home and found that the trains had been delayed because of flooding on the tracks and the family wouldn't be in until midevening. They would be tired and hungry and grumpy by the time they finally arrived at the apartment, and worse yet, they wouldn't be any help carrying groceries. I was going to have to do the heavy lifting myself.

I stood at the window, looking out at the gathering dark. While it was only four o'clock, the city had already sunk into an early night, a feeling further enhanced by the heavy dark curtains of rain still falling steadily. This wasn't going to be any fun, I thought, but it wasn't going to get any easier, either. Taking a deep breath and a
grocery list that had grown as long as Santa's list of bad boys and girls, I headed out to hit the grocery stores in my neighborhood. I trekked over to Gourmet Garage at its converted warehouse space in lower SoHo. It seemed that everyone else had made the trek as well. I was forced to do battle for a midget-size shopping cart, using a neat ass-bump maneuver I usually used to shut the oven door to edge out a particularly grabby Wall Street type. I was then forced to repeat this same maneuver every two or three feet, avoiding other shoppers who were using their own versions of pushing and shoving in order to get to everything from the onions to the decaffeinated coffee beans. I was quickly worn out. I hadn't even made it over to the meat case yet.

Carried along in the tide of humanity, I eventually found my way there and took a number to wait in line. As I waited, I surveyed the various meats, fish, and poultry laid out like bangles in a jeweler's window. It was then I saw the cockroach. Not really a big deal, I thought. After all, this is a big city, and the cockroaches are everywhere, even if you couldn't always see them. In a grocery store, even a nice one like Gourmet Garage, there were bound to be a few lurking in the dark corners of the storeroom. But this guy wasn't the shy type. There he was, crawling up the glass on the meat case. Check that. He was on the
inside
of the case, in there with the filet mignon at $25 a pound, the $22 wild salmon steaks, and the $30 lobster tails. I fought my way to the head of the line, deaf to the hisses and name-calling behind me, and caught the eye of the counter guy.

“Get in line, lady,” he snarled as he turned to help the next customer.

“Wait!” I said, and then, pitched loudly enough so that everyone in line behind me could hear, I said, “There's a cockroach in the meat case! Right there, on the inside of the glass, see?” I pointed to the bug, which was now waving his antennae around, as if greeting his audience of stupefied patrons now staring at him.