Authors: Michael Ruhlman

The Making of a Chef (14 page)

BOOK: The Making of a Chef

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Bellboy was the mandatory starting position for all those who intended to apprentice in the kitchen of Hotel Reichshof. One had to be a bellboy for exactly two years by order of the chef-owner of the hotel, who maintained that before one could understand cooking, one had first, Hestnar said, “to understand the meaning of customer service and hospitality.” From October 1950 until October 1952, Uwe (pronounced Ou-vay) carried bags. It was believed that cooking was about hospitality first, and then about food. Without hospitality there would be no guests to serve food
to
. If you were not willing to be a bellboy, you were not chef material. “You better live it,” Hestnar told me. “Nobody forces you.” He shrugged. “Become an electrician.”

After two years, the frightened Uwe moved for the first time into the grand professional kitchen of Hotel Reichshof, with its huge “piano range” and bright skylights and vast ovens. “I was allowed to hold a bowl for two years, with the chef's mise en place,” he recalled.

This was the apprentice system and it was how chefs traditionally trained in Europe, and still do, though the programs are slipping in some countries, Hestnar said. In the apprentice model you learned one-on-one. I asked which he thought was better, the apprentice system or a formal culinary education. He said that one-on-one meant you learned one person's training, only one person's ways.

Then he said, “Culinary arts is vast, so for a person to learn one method â¦”

Hestnar would often trail off like that, raise his eyebrows, shrugâyou figure it out for yourself. The main thing the apprentice system lacked, he affirmed, was theory. The whys of cooking. For instance, Chef Hestnar did not recall learning how to make a hollandaise, meaning that he was never taught. More likely he was told to make one, and by asking and watching he figured out what one did to achieve the final result. But no one ever told him, as Chef Pardus and Harold McGee had told me and Adam, and Greg and Ben and Erica and Susanne, that you had to break up the oil into infinitesimal bubbles that would be separated by water, mainly via the lecithin in egg yolks, to form a stable and tasty oil-in-water emulsion, which happens to go very nicely with asparagus.

Here, Hestnar said, “we do both at the same time.” Theory and training. And, he said, “There is a certain standard attached to it.” Again, he was somewhat cryptic on this pointâhe used Beethoven as the metaphor when I asked him to elaborateâbut I believe he meant that when we consider a Beethoven sonata, there is a certain standard we share in our expectations
of how it sounds. And yet interpretations vary, how long certain notes hung in the air, how heavily one hit each particular note. This finally determined its quality, its artfulness. The same with cookingâfirst you learned a standard, then you refined it. He said he could make a thousand hollandaise sauces and each would be different.

“Depending on what?” I asked.

The corners of his mouth turned down; his hand swept at the air as if dismissing the view out his window. “How I feel that day.”

I moved to my favorite subject: stock. Why did the Culinary Institute of America teach two different ways of making stockâthe standard way and the self-clarifying method? He had already explained that instructors have a certain amount of freedom to teach as they will, that they discuss methods, address problems among themselves. But the CIA had a party line, as Chef Pardus often referred to it. The Powers determined one method as standard, and that standard was taught. Wasn't teaching Skills students two methods of making stock contradictory, potentially confusing? Shouldn't there be only one? I was trying to bait him a little, which he must have sensed, because he didn't answer.

I tried a more direct route. “Is one way better than the other?” I asked. “Which do you prefer and why?”

He was quiet for a moment and then answered: “It's very interesting.”

He smiled. And it was here that it occurred to me that Chef Hestnar had a vaguely reptilian look. There was something hard and wily and mischievous, the way his eyes would narrow to slits and his mouth likewise would spread thinly across his broad square face. His accent also enhanced his elusiveness. I grew accustomed to his style and I waited. Eventually he said, “Let's see what Escoffier says, the bible.” He scanned the index and flipped the pages for white stock, dragged his finger down the page as I followed along. “It says bones and water. It doesn't say begin with cold water or boiling water,” Hestnar said. “Zo.”

He paused again, then checked
Hering's Dictionary of Classical and Modern Cookery
. This recommended blanching the bones. Hestnar's copy of
La Repertoire de la Cuisine
called for bones, mirepoix, and salt. Last, he pulled from his tightly packed shelves a book held together by a rubber band. It was a German book by Ernst Pauli, the title of which Hestnar translated for me as “Book of Learning of the Kitchen.” Removing the rubber band, Chef Hestnar said, “My schoolbook.” Pauli suggested one begin with cold water.

Hestnar closed this last book, sat back in his chair, and shrugged.

All right, there are many ways of making a stock, I thought. But he was still avoiding my question. “What about adding tomato?” I asked him.

He said, “Tomato, bay leafâthat's art.”

“But using the tomato to denature proteins in order to create a clearer stock in less time?”

He smiled and said, “That's applied theory.”

Yes. Excellent!
I thought. He didn't miss a beat.

Such was the nature of our conversation. It rambled; he sprinted, strolled, cut left, cut right. I wondered aloud why we were taught the dated cauliflower polonaise, a bread-crumb-and-egg mixture sprinkled on cauliflower and baked. He responded that he supposed they could do cauliflower with cheese sauce instead. I told him my question remained, why teach something so old-fashioned as that, so infrequently used, polonaise or cheese sauce?

He agreed that cauliflower was not often used anymore. “People don't want to pay five dollars for two ingredients.” And yet a more complex dish, one with twenty ingredients, he said, was in fact simpler because it was much easier to cover a mistake; with two ingredients a cook had no room for error. Therefore, cauliflower with bread crumbs or with cheese sauce was a true test of a cook.

This led him to the proliferation of cookbooks, a situation he scorns. “The shelves are bulging with cookbooks,” he said dismissively.

“You don't like that,” I responded.

He said that everything any cook could possibly need to know was contained in five books: Escoffier,
Larousse Gastronomique, Hering's Dictionary, La Repertoire
. I told him that was only four. “And CarÃªme,” he said. Then he said, “No one wants.”

Another long pause before he tacked again: “What makes culinary arts tick?”

I didn't know if he was actually directing this to me or offering it rhetorically. He had more or less lofted it into the air. He lifted his index finger, then spun in his chair to a file behind him, as if quickly reaching for a bat to knock this question into the bleachers. He riffled manila folders and turned to me with two sheets of paper. He handed them to me. They contained a chart or grid covering a page and a half. This, he said, was all one truly needed. Here were the fundamentals of culinary artsâall of Escoffier, Larousse, CÃ¢reme, as well as Julia Child, James Beard,
The Joy of Cooking,
and the TV Food Networkâin their entirety, distilled to a page and a half. “I would like to sell this for fifty dollars,” he said, “but no one would buy them.” Then he chuckled heartily.

I examined the sheetsâa list of twenty-six items and their ratios. Along the top ran the numbers one, two, four, six, eight, and sixteen; these columns were divided by base products, such as aspic, pÃ¢tÃ© Ã choux, sabayon, court bouillon ordinaire. Here, on this sheet, was his answer to an earlier question: one quart of water, two pounds of bones, four ounces of mirepoix equaled stock. “For a quart of stock, you must use two pounds of bones,” he said. “Will it be stock if you use three pounds of bones?” He shrugged:
You see what I'm trying to say? Understand?

I found the sheets mysteriously thrilling. For hollandaise sauce, the sheet listed six egg yolks and one pound of butter, nothing more. We had learned to make hollandaise by reducing cider vinegar with cracked pepper and adding this, strained and with lemon juice, to yolks whipped with clarified butter to make a hollandaise. But on Chef Hestnar's grid of ratios, he had reduced everything to its essence. Take away vinegar, pepper, and lemon, and you still had a hollandaise. Take away yolks or butter and it was no longer hollandaise. I found the ratio sheet beautiful. Like a poet chipping away at his words, polishing until his idea was diamond, Hestnar had removed every extraneous element of cooking.

I asked Chef Hestnar if I could hang on to the ratios and thanked him for his time. As I stood at his door, feeling as though I had worked up some sort of cautious rapport with him, I asked, “Of the two methods of making stock that we discussed earlier, which do you, personally, prefer?”

He took a breath. I honestly didn't know if he would answer. He seemed absolutely unwilling to make judgments or answer questions directly. But he knew cooking. He was a cook. He had been a cook in Hamburg and in Pennsylvania, in Washington, D.C., SÃ£o Paolo and Rio de Janeiro, Zurich, Geneva, England, and the Canary Islands. In his throaty German accent, he said, “In my experience, I have one hour too few and one day too few.” He smiled. “You understand what I am saying?”

Indeedâthere were many facts to consider when preparing a stock.

“W
hy,
Erica,
” I exclaimed. “Do you have
mascara
on?” Class had not yet begun and those who were here had begun to set their stations. Adam stood beside me steeling his knife. He would steel for
many minutes and, with great care, he would feel the edge with his thumb while holding it very close to his face. Eun-Jung was here, too, “shopping” as she called itâthat is, gathering all the carrots and parsley and shallots not just for her own mise en place but for the entire table (we had coalesced into a team by this point). Erica happened to be passing our table close enough for me to notice that, unusually, she wore makeup.

“Yeaaaah,” she said, “and eyeliner, too.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why wear makeup in a kitchen?”

“I think I have nice features,” she said. “Do you think I have nice features?” She turned her head slightly to the right then left.

Adam lowered steel and knife, chuckled with disbelief, and said, “Nothing like fishing for
compliments
.”

“I think I've got nice features,” she told us both, “and I wanted to â¦
accentuate
them.” She moved closer to me and said, “So I dolled myself up, yeah.”

Again, I asked her, genuinely curious, why one would where makeup in a greasy, sweaty kitchen.

Suddenlyâand Erica, I knew by then, could turn on a dimeâshe grew defensive. “Eun-Jung wears lipstick,” she said. Eun-Jung, hearing her name, looked up. Indeed, as always she had on her bright but unobtrusive lipstick. Erica said, “Look at that pink-ass shit.”

Adam rolled his eyes and, addressing the ceiling said, “Pink-ass shit.”

Hearing her own words, Erica took a breath, smiled wide with her teeth clamped shut, covered her mouth with her hand, and laughed. She turned bright red. Then she scurried off to her table.

We had grown familylike. I had been completely welcomed. At first, Ben, the group leader, wouldn't look me in the eye. He was cordial and answered my questions when I asked, but he was brief. Now, when I asked him about the events of his weekend he all but gushed. He had walked cold into the Gotham Bar and Grill on Saturday afternoon and asked to see the chef, Alfred Portale. “He's one of my idols,” Ben told me. He was hoping to extern there and had written Portale letters that remained unanswered. He was told Portale was in a meeting but that he could wait. Eventually, Portale, a former jewelry designer and now popularizer of vertical cuisine, spoke with Ben, who managed not to embarrass himself.

“I was like, âHoly shit, I can't believe I'm
talking
to this guy,'” Ben recalled.

Portale said he had just hired a CIA graduate and that there would be no
room for externs when Ben was looking, but he would be welcome to trail next Saturday night if he wished, that is, watch and work for one evening. Ben said he would be honored.

Ben cut himself before he'd been in the Gotham kitchen a half hour. “Sliced the tip of my thumb,” he said. “It bled a lot. I was
so nervous
.” He peeled pearl onions. “Same way we do here,” he said with surprise. He eventually calmed and proved proficient enough that the cooks let him on the line where he sautÃ©ed duck breasts.

“I cooked,” Ben said the following Monday. “I cooked
duck
.”

Adam, sounding jealous, said, “I can't believe they let you cook.”

BOOK: The Making of a Chef

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