The Making of a Chef Read Free

Metz and Tim Ryan for allowing me into the Culinary Institute of America. I do not remember a single significant request that was turned down. Dr. Fred Mayo was generous with his time and offered valuable guidance through the labyrinthine institute. Andrea Harding likewise worked hard on my behalf, as did Janis Wertz. All chef-instructors were generous with their time in answering my questions; many, however, such as Todd Philbrook (sorry about the show plate!) and Tom Griffiths, do not appear in this narrative though I owe much to them. Of the many reference books I used, the most valuable was the Culinary’s own, The New Professional Chef; as far as basic cooking methods and standard ratios, I know of no better cookbook. Finally I am grateful to all the chefs and students who appear in this book for their time and their willingness to be a part of this story.
    I would like to thank my agent, Elizabeth Kaplan, to whom I am permanently indebted.
    No one can know how judicious and intelligent Bill Strachan, my editor, has been in his work because his effect is so subtle as to be invisible and yet he improved the manuscript enormously. I am grateful to him.
    Thanks forever to R.P.
    Â 
    I would like to thank my mother, Carole, who, besides being an awesome mom, is the personification of human generosity and high spirits.
    Â 
    Words do not exist to adequately thank my wife and daughter, as the reader will soon appreciate. They are to me the most miraculous duo on earth, and I would be lost without them.

Secret Sharer
    T he bundle waiting for me on the couch had been secured with butcher’s string and looked as ordinary as laundry. I tucked it beneath my arm and strode out of the office and through Roth Hall, the main building of the Culinary Institute of America, slipped into a bathroom, and closed myself off in the farthest stall. I removed my sweater and jeans and stuffed them into my leather shoulder briefcase. I untied the bundle, shook out one of two pairs of houndstooth-check trousers, and stepped into them, then buttoned the immaculately white, double-breasted chef’s jacket over my white T-shirt. I jammed the extra set of pants into the briefcase along with my street clothes, snapped it shut, grabbed my black overcoat and knife kit, and pushed out of the stall.
    I stopped at the mirror. I had not been in a uniform since high school football and I sent myself an ironic lift of the eyebrows, then an uncertain shrug. The figure in the mirror—dressed as a culinary student—looked like me and did not. The figure seemed more a secret sharer. I could not dwell long on this uniformed other self—I had only a few minutes to find K-8, the Skills kitchen run by Chef Michael Pardus.
    I hustled down a dark brick corridor—to my right a long, glassed-in kitchen, to my left display cases inlaid into the brick facade. I turned left at Alumni Hall, the main dining room, once the chapel of this former Jesuit monastery, strode past a dishwasher’s station, and turned left again. The
first kitchen on my left was K-8 and I would arrive, thankfully, a minute or so before two, when this class was scheduled to begin.
    I stepped through the doorway and eighteen pairs of eyes cranked in my direction.
    Chef Pardus halted in mid-sentence. The seventeen students, already lined at attention along four large stainless-steel tables, two on either side of the room, regarded me curiously. Chef Pardus wore the standard chef-instructor uniform, similar to the students’ but with fancy round white buttons on his chef’s jacket running up each breast, green and gold stripes along the collar, a green name tag pinned above his breast pocket, and a paper toque that was an inch or two taller than the students’. He was trim, measured about five feet ten inches without the hat, which revealed a few light brown curls kept well above his collar, and he wore wire-rimmed glasses.
    â€œMichael,” the chef said.