The Making of a Chef Read Free Page A

We’d been introduced the previous week, and he had given me course information and homework assignments.
    â€œYes, Chef,” I said. “Sorry I’m late.”
    â€œYou’re number eighteen. I’ve put you at Table One.” He pointed to my spot, smack in front of him at the head of the class. He stood in front of a beat-up, circa-1960 metal desk. Behind him on the board in bright ink marker he had written:

    DAY ONE
    2# mirepoix
2 tomato concassé
1 sachet
1/2 minced onion

    I took my spot and shoved my belongings on the shelf of the steel table.
    â€œDo you have a hat?” Chef Pardus asked.
    â€œThey didn’t give me one,” I answered
    â€œA neckerchief?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou need to have those in this kitchen. I’ll call central issue in a minute and see if we can hook you up.” Chef Pardus seemed a little annoyed. I was late and my uniform was incomplete.

    But I was here, and that’s all that mattered now, the physical fact of my presence. This was a physical place.
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    I ’d made it to Culinary Skill Development One, the first kitchen in the intricately scheduled curriculum at the Culinary Institute of America. It was a move I felt that, in some ways, had been foreordained a decade earlier.
    Shortly after I graduated from college and began work in New York City, my granduncle, Bill Griffiths, wrote a letter to me outlining some definitions of art, and in doing so, he described a meal he’d had at Gallatoire’s in New Orleans decades ago. “The total meal involved many things,” he wrote, “but what I have never forgotten is the potatoes. There were no fancy sauces, no tricky seasonings, no admixture with other ingredients—just plain small cubes of potato cooked in such a way that the surfaces were delicately crisp and crunchy and the inside, rich, smooth, and flavorful. One was simultaneously aware both of exquisite texture and marvelous taste. The lesson it taught me was that the chef hadn’t used the potato as a basis for displaying flashy, flamboyant skills, but had placed his skills as an artist in the service of the potato.”
    I found a fundamental truth in these words and I wrote the last sentence on a three-by-five-inch card and stuck it to the wall beside my desk.
    Nearly ten years after my uncle Bill wrote those words to me—faded but still affixed to my wall—I intended to learn how to cook and to write about how one learned. And I hoped to use my uncle’s words regarding art and potatoes as a kind of lantern to light my way. I would not strive to learn the sort of stuff being photographed for food magazines, but instead how to make the kind of potatoes Bill had described.
    My goal was both humble and presumptuous: I wanted to learn how to put myself in the service of the potato. This was to me the key phrase, in the service of, the axis, the unmoving shaft, of a statement with many ramifications. Is great cooking really art? Are chefs artists? What is wrong with flash and flamboyance? How could the lowly potato become so important in a meal as to be the one thing my uncle remembered decades later?
    Also, I love to eat potatoes.
    Given these two qualities—the desire to learn to cook and to write about it, with all the notions of artistry, history, gastronomy that inevitably orbit this learning, and a simple and perhaps atavistic love of eating—I had
hatched a plan to attend the Culinary Institute of America, the most prominent cooking school in the country, a food-knowledge mecca. What did they teach here? According to the Culinary Institute of America, what did a chef need to know above all? What was the inviolable core of a culinary education? What were the secrets of truly great cooking?
    All this I wanted to know, and I’d come here to impersonate a student. I would learn to cook as though my future depended on it. When I entered Chef Pardus’s Skills kitchen I