Don't Try This at Home (24 page)

You're in the Army Now

ALAIN SAILHAC

Alain Sailhac began his career in France in the 1950s, cooking at
the Hotel Claridge and Hotel Normandie. He worked in
kitchens
all over the world before moving to New York City and
becoming executive chef of Le Cygne, where he earned the first
four-star rating ever awarded by the
New York Times.
He went
on to become the executive chef at Le Cirque, which also earned
four stars. Among his many honors is being named Chef of the
Year by the Master Chefs of France in 1997. He currently serves
as executive vice president and senior dean of studies of the
French Culinary Institute in New York City.

I
N 1956, I was called upon to serve my mandatory time in the French army. Because I was a cook with experience in Paris
restaurants, I was appointed chef de cuisine of a base that abutted the "Zone Interdict," the dangerous no-man's-land on the
border of Tunisia and Algeria, which was fighting for its independence.

The base was an odd collection of barracks, tents, and houses that had been abandoned by their fearful occupants. I was in
charge of two kitchens and a staff of about twenty cooks. The food in the army wasn't very exciting. For breakfast, we served
coffee and bread. Then we served lunch and dinner in the mess hall, a big tent with long wooden tables and folding wooden
chairs.

As chef de cuisine, I was also in charge of cooking special meals for visiting generals and preparing daily rations for the
men—essentially anything having to do with food was my responsibility. The rations were a nighttime job; I'd spend hours packing
up little boxes with the designated provisions, including two cigarettes per soldier. It was one of the reasons that I developed
a schedule shared only by the camp lookouts: I'd work at night, killing the downtime by playing poker with the other insomniacs,
and sleep during the day.

There were several kitchen challenges unique to a military base. For one thing, the number of soldiers stationed there changed
all the time; one day you might be cooking for a thousand guys, the next for fifty, so meal preparation involved plenty of
improvisation and last-minute adjustments.

For dinner, we made stew a lot because it was the smart thing to do with the tough pieces of meat we were supplied by the
military; and if you had extra, you could serve it again a day or two later. Occasionally, we'd get a good leg or shank of
some animal and we'd roast it, but even then it sometimes came out chewy. There's only so much you can do with poor ingredients.

But sometimes we got lucky. Our base was very secluded; you couldn't set foot outside its perimeter because we were under
constant bombardment by the enemy. Two rings of barbed-wire fences surrounded the compound, with just enough room between
them to walk around the circumference of the encampment.

Sentries were on the lookout at all times, training rifles on the rugged terrain. Their orders were to shoot anything that
moved,
on sight,
because if the enemy was within range, that meant we were within
their
range, and there wasn't a second to spare.

So, they'd see something move, and they'd shoot it dead. More often than not it wasn't an enemy soldier, but rather a wild
cow, donkey, pig, or some other animal that had stumbled into view. When that happened, they would sneak out into the no-man's-land
outside the camp and quickly drag the carcass back, delivering it to my kitchen door. I'd come up with something to do with
it, and run it as a special.

Even with these occasional treats, however, the men were still apt to complain about the lack of meat. And who could blame
them? They were risking their lives; they deserved a good meal.

So one day, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I grabbed my rifle, went out to the edge of the base, and began walking
along inside the barbed-wire corridor, my eyes trained on the craggy land just beyond my reach.

Before too long, I spotted a wild steer grazing on a meager patch of grass. With enthusiastic thoughts of the meal I would
soon prepare, I raised my rifle, took aim, and squeezed the trigger.

But I missed—the shot ricocheted off a nearby rock.

The steer spun its head around in my direction and, with a snort, it started charging at me. I got off another shot, but only
nicked him in the side, making him even angrier. He picked up steam, running so hard that I was sure he was going to burst
right though the fence and trample me to death.

I was frozen in my tracks, unable to turn and run.

My heart racing, I got down on one knee. With slippery, shaky hands, I aimed my rifle, steadying its butt on my shoulder.

This time, I was patient. Waiting. Waiting.

Finally, I pulled the trigger.

Boom!
I hit the steer right in the head, dropping him instantly.

I sank to the ground, looking up to the heavens in relief.

I was saddened and upset. Sure, I had been butchering animals for years, but I had never killed anything larger than a chicken.
And I certainly never found myself fighting for my life against an animal bound for the kitchen.

It's funny, I suppose, that this was the most intense life-and-death moment I experienced in the army, but it didn't seem
so at the time. The men were happy to have beef for dinner that night, but this horrible incident haunted me for days.

Accidents happen in the army. They happen with machinery. They happen with coordinates and directions. And they happen with
food.

Every day, at four in the morning, I made coffee, 200 liters of it, in a big, stainless-steel vat. Then I sweetened it with
about 12 pounds of sugar.

As the chef, and the only person in the mess hall at that hour, I got to have the first cup of the day. So one morning, as
usual, I made the coffee, added the sugar, poured myself a cup, and took a sip.

I spit it right out.

It was the most disgusting coffee I had ever tasted. I looked at the cup, then at the vat, in search of some kind of explanation.
But it looked fine. Had I imagined it? I
was
pretty tired. Curious, I tasted it again—and immediately spit it out again.

I wasn't imagining anything. And then it hit me, what must have happened. I had put 12 pounds of something in the coffee,
alright, but it wasn't sugar.

It was salt.

In the army, you can't just make another 200-liter vat of coffee, because you don't have extra provisions like that. So to
try to cover up my mistake, I added 12 pounds of sugar to the vat.

I poured myself a cup and tasted it.

Somehow, it was even worse.

What was I going to do? Soldiers need their coffee. They
love
their coffee. But what could I possibly do? Baffled, I decided to say nothing, just wait and see. Maybe nobody would notice.

Within minutes, the first soldiers began coming in for breakfast. A group of four men each took a hunk of bread and fixed
themselves a cup of coffee, then sat at a table.

All four took a sip.

And all four spit it out.

One of the men waved me over.

"What'd you put in this coffee?" he growled at me.

"Why, nothing. What's wrong?"

"It's disgusting."

"Maybe there's something wrong with the coffee. I'll go check," I said, and left, hoping that maybe they would leave before
noticing that I never came back.

But already more soldiers were on the way. It was a busy week at the base and about four hundred men had slept there the night
before.

I watched from the kitchen as soldier after soldier went through the same routine: pouring a coffee, sitting, tasting it,
spitting it out, and then looking around for a chef to scream at.

Soon enough, four hundred people had spit out their coffee and a big, angry mob was beginning to form.

Finally, I emerged from the kitchen, admitted my mistake, and made my apologies to the troops. They laughed and shook it off.

But not the base commandant. He was so upset with me that he sentenced me to one week in the brig.

Hearing of this, my captain upped the punishment to two weeks.

The brig wasn't really a prison. It was just a small, standalone room with a locked door. There was no actual cell and no
other prisoners with me. While I was there, I slept a lot, and talked though the window to the guard who paced back and forth
outside with a rifle resting on his shoulder. Three times a day, he'd let me out and we'd go for a walk.

It ended up being a nice little break. I was almost disappointed when they let me out of the brig after just one week.

Each soldier is supposed to serve twelve to eighteen months in the army, but because we were at war, I ended up staying in
the army for twenty-eight months. They say that time in the military builds character, and mine certainly did: I never shot
another living thing and I never put salt in the coffee again.

The Big Chill

MARCUS SAMUELSSON

The youngest chef ever to receive three stars from the
New York Times,
and winner of the James Beard Foundation Award for
Rising Star Chef in 1999 and Best Chef/New York City in 2003,
Marcus Samuelsson was born in Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, and
trained all over the world, before making Swedish food hip at
Restaurant Aquavit in Midtown Manhattan. He is also an
author of cookbooks in both Sweden and the United States.

THE GLORIFICATIONOF celebrity chefs has created the impression that my colleagues, and the cooks who work for us, spend our
lives clowning around in the kitchen, then head off into the night, gallivanting around town and partying until dawn.

Sure, there are moments like that for any chef or cook, but generally speaking, our work is more serious and taxing than most
people realize. This is especially true of ambitious culinary students and novice cooks who lead disciplined, cruelly solitary
existences that can be aptly compared to those of Olympic trainees or long-distance runners. They might blow off steam together
after work, but for the most part, their goal demands stamina of the mind and body and a single-minded devotion to their work.
Without that sense of purpose, it's likely that they'll crack under the pressure, retreating from the industry or letting
it destroy them.

I've seen guys crack in all kinds of ways. I once saw a cook so fatigued and distracted that he stuck his hand in a meat grinder
and didn't get it out until four fingers were gone. I've seen good cooks driven to acts of self-destruction, going broke or
turning to heroin. It's always the same: the pressure slowly builds, sometimes over several years, until they simply can't
take it anymore. They say "fuck it" and do something drastic and stupid.

Kitchen professionals are prone to breakdowns because nobody cares about their problems. At the end of the day, you're all
alone. When you fuck up, nobody wants to know the reason; they just want to chew you out and leave you to pick up the pieces.

There have been many moments in my career when I, myself, was this close to throwing in the towel. Like when I worked for
a cruise line and the
entremetier
(cook in charge of vegetable preparations), after months of smooth sailing, suddenly "went down"—a phrase we used to describe
when someone fell victim to seasickness. Normally we'd have called the corporate headquarters and had a replacement cook flown
in to meet us at our next port of call. But we were too far out to sea to orchestrate a switch. Like any true pro, the
entremetier
tried his best to hang in there, working himself so hard that he vomited, repeatedly, into a garbage can right at his station.
Finally we kicked him out, and in a gesture of camaraderie, attempted to cover for him by divvying up his dishes, one to the
meat station, one to the fish station, and so on.

That didn't work. It's just too much to monitor the doneness of fifteen pieces of fish
and
saute, say, some brussels sprouts to order—so even though the
entremetier
tried his best, and the rest of us were doing one-and-a-half jobs each, all that mattered was whether or not the kitchen unit
was getting the job done, and we weren't. Everybody, and I mean
everybody
', came into the kitchen to chew us out, including the captain of the ship itself.

You know that old expression, "It's not whether you win or lose; it's how you play the game." That line was definitely
not
coined by a chef. Because for a chef, it's
only
about whether or not you pull through. If you fail, nobody cares how hard you tried.

My loneliest, most discouraging professional moment came in the winter of 1988 when—thanks to the placement department of
my culinary school—I was hired as a
commis
(lowest cook on the totem pole; a cog in the culinary machine) at La Terrasse, the fine dining room of the Victoria-Jungfrau
hotel in Interlaken, Switzerland, an insanely ritzy hotel that catered to a mix of superwealthy Americans, Europeans, and
Arabs, many of whom stayed for months at a time.

The kitchens of Victoria-Jungfrau in general, and La Terrasse in particular, had a reputation more or less comparable to that
of the Navy Seals boot camp. The assumption was that they would break you and you would quit or be fired, and go crawling
back to wherever you had come from. Turnover was so brisk that new students arrived every day, from places as far away as
India and Japan. The upside was that those who survived were the best of the best, exactly the people you'd want to work with
and learn from. And if you yourself could make it through all the hardships, then you'd be a better man, and a better cook.

Everybody had their own reasons for subjecting themselves to the rigors of this kitchen. I was there because I was eager to
leave Sweden and cook at a three-star Michelin restaurant in France. But I was only eighteen and didn't feel ready yet, and
thought that a turn in a place like La Terrasse would prepare me.

The setting was like something out of an opulent dream: a resort, more than a century old, set against the spectacular Jungfrau
Mountain, where guests alternated between spa treatments, scenic hikes, and gourmet meals.

Days were long in the restaurant's huge kitchen. You worked all morning—me, at the
garde manger,
or salads and cold appetizers, station—preparing and serving lunch, and also doing advance prep for dinner. The not-so-secret
personal goal of each cook was to get your dinner prep done before lunch, so that when the last lunch order was out, you could
take a few hours off, either catching a nap in your little dormitory-sized room in the staff residence out back, or maybe
sneaking in some skiing before returning for dinner service.

From the day I arrived, I led a very solitary existence at Victoria-Jungfrau. First of all, I don't think they had ever seen
a black man in the kitchen before me. They sure as hell didn't expect one to show up when they hired a guy named Marcus Samuelsson
from Sweden. But what can I tell you? I was born in Ethiopia, orphaned at a young age, and raised by a Swedish family. Anyway,
it's my real name.

Then there was the language barrier. The chefs in that kitchen spoke German and French, a little English, and maybe a little
Italian. I spoke none of those languages. This wasn't just a social handicap. Every morning, there was a kitchen meeting in
which the executive chef, a real ogre in his sixties, reviewed the day's menu in German. I didn't understand him, and the
printed menu, written in French, was of no use to me either. So I was dependent on my direct supervisor (the
chef de partie,
the person in charge of a station such as meat or fish, whom I refer to as
"my
chef") and colleagues to help me make sense of my work for the day after we left the meeting.

I had scarcely been there two weeks when New Year's Eve rolled along. As it is for any restaurant, New Year's Eve was one
of the biggest nights of the year for La Terrasse, both for the diners, and for the staff, who planned to work hard all day,
then reward themselves by partying until dawn.

My chef and I were charged with making one dish that night: smoked salmon served with a thin sliver of avocado terrine. To
make the terrine, you prepared a bechamel (a white sauce of flour, butter, and milk), then folded in an avocado puree. The
mixture was poured into a mold and a gelatinous liquid was poured over it. It was then refrigerated so the gelatin would set
up and suspend the beautiful puree.

My chef took the salmon for himself, assigned me the terrine, and we got to work in our little corner of the kitchen. He retrieved
a whole salmon from the butcher and began making the preparations for smoking it, removing any lingering pin bones from the
animal's flesh with a pair of kitchen tweezers.

Eagerly, I went to get some gelatin from the supply room, but discovered that all they had was the powdered variety.

Having only used sheet gelatin, I turned the package over to read the instructions. On the back of the box there were what
I'm sure were very helpful tips, written in not one but three languages: German, French, and Italian. This was about the time
when I realized that this wasn't going to be my day.

Rather than asking for help—which I'm not sure I could have done anyway, since I didn't speak anyone's language—I decided,
with all the confidence and lack of foresight of an eighteen-year-old, to wing it. I bloomed what felt like the right amount
of gelatin, prepared the terrine, set it in on a steel utility rack in the walk-in refrigerator, and left for the afternoon.

This was one of those times when you know you've made a mistake and spend several hours delaying the admission of it, even
to yourself. I spent the afternoon in my room, trying to catch a nap, but I couldn't sleep. As I tossed and turned, I couldn't
get the image of that green glop out of my mind, and I grew more and more anxious as the afternoon wore on.

When I returned to the kitchen at around four o'clock, I hesitantly went to check on the terrine, fearing the worst. Which
was just what I found. Not only had the terrine failed to set, but it was disgusting, with a green slush in the center of
the mold, and an algaelike attempt at coagulation along the edges.

This was the second moment when I could have reasonably raised my hand, admitted my mistake, and salvaged the day. It would
have been very simple: we would have let the failed version melt, then added the proper amount of gelatin, and refrigerated
it.

Instead, I decided to pop the terrine in the freezer and
force
it to set up.

Now, in most kitchens, the chef will make his rounds before service, checking on sauces and other preparations at the stations
at which they are prepared. But at La Terrasse, a kitchen steeped in tradition and formality, we did it a little differently:
each cook presented his dish to the chef, showing it to him, then slicing off a taste for his approval.

As the presentation hour approached, I retrieved the mold from the freezer. It now resembled a partially defrosted, frozen
avocado soup, slushy around the edges with a little
granite
island of avocado in the middle. Even the smell of it was bad. It was like I had accidentally come up with
real
mold, the kind of thing you find in a filthy motel bathtub.

Slowly, shivering with the dread of what was to come, I approached the executive chef, who was giving off his customary glower.

"Chef," I mumbled, raising up the slimy green creation.

The chef took one look at the terrine and unleashed a fury at me the likes of which I had never heard, before or since. Miraculously,
the verbal beating my chef received for not detecting and solving the problem was even worse. It was a tongue lashing so severe
that this grown man was reduced to tears and, unable to recover from the shame, he left for the night.

As a consequence, the executive chef stepped in to cover for him. So this man who had just been telling me to go back where
I came from—in a foreign language that, for the first time, I understood perfectly—proceeded to lord over me all night. He
ordered me around imperiously, giving me a sneer so sharp I could have cut my finger on it. It was a terrible night. We didn't
even try to save the terrine. Instead, the chef instructed me to take a spoon to any solid portions I could find and make
little avocado quenelles. The next few hours were a blur of tears and quenelles, a cruel memory set against the echo of the
veteran German chefs snickering in the background.

I expected to be screamed at one last time after service had finished, but at the end of the night, the chef just left me
without another word. He went off to a corner of the dining room and quietly savored a glass of champagne. I wondered how
he could enjoy anything after a day in which he had had to publicly savage two of his workers. But now, years later, I understand:
the incident was just one event in one day of a chef's life. He had dealt with it and, because he had come up with the quenelle
solution, the guests were happy and he was able to move on without a second thought.

When the rest of the crew went out that night to party in the town and usher in the New Year, I staggered back to my room,
alone. I felt like the lowest of the low, and didn't want to see anyone.

But here's the thing: that was the night that I could have said "screw it" and quit. It would have been easy to leave. In
fact, it would have been the easiest, most appealing thing in the world. I had left a lot back home, including a girl I loved
and a group of teenage friends who were hanging out and having fun in the last days of that time of life when you really have
no responsibilities to anyone but yourself.

But I wanted to be a chef. I wanted it more than anything. So I swore to stick it out, to work seven days a week, to get harassed
in languages I didn't speak, to do whatever it took to make it.

Over the next two weeks the chef put us on the graveyard shift, a vicious, soul-crushing schedule meant to break us. There
were no days off. There was nothing but work, shouting, and more work. I saw lots of other cooks come and go during those
two weeks, unwilling to endure it, but I held on. I had made my decision, and there was no going back. I still had a long
way to go before I made it, but I knew that, at last, I was on my way to becoming one of those hardened veterans who had come
through Victoria-Jungfrau.

Ultimately, I learned German to near-fluency and, against all odds, stayed for two years at La Terrasse, becoming a
chef de
partie.
I learned everything that I would need to carry me on to those French kitchens I had set my sights on, and in time, to New
York City.

But as much as I grew in those two years, the most valuable lesson was the one that took place while I was absorbing that
harsh German punishment on New Year's Eve 1989. That was the moment when I resolved to never give anyone reason to speak to
me like that again. It's a strange, backward-seeming motivation for such a noble profession—taking inspiration from the desire
not to screw up—but like I've said, cooking is at heart a lonely business, and you do whatever it takes to get through the
day.