THENASTYBITS Read Free Page B

puta vida, muttering half-formed recriminations.
    Now, I've heard and seen some very fine chefs sneer at The System. "I would never do that," they say, when told of some culinary outrage performed in another kitchen. "Never!" they insist, with all the assurance of an officer on the prewar Maginot Line. But when the Hun starts pouring over the wall, and there's no fire support, and the rear guard is in full retreat—these same chefs are often the first guys to commit food crimes that even the most pragmatic practitioner of System D would never (okay, almost never) do.
    Fast well-done steak? I've watched French grads of three-star kitchens squeeze the blood out of filet mignons with their full body weight, turning a medium to well in seconds. I've watched in horror as chefs have hurled beautiful chateaubriands into the deep-fat fryer, microwaved veal chops, thinned sauce with the brackish greasy water in the steam table. And when it gets busy? Everything that falls on the floor, amazingly, falls "right on the napkin." Let me tell you—that's one mighty big napkin.
    System D, arguably, reached its heyday in the Victorian-era railway hotels, where the menus were huge and it was not unusual for an extra two hundred guests to show up wanting, say, the Fricassee of Lobster Thermidor—for which only fifty portions were ever available. Suddenly, Thermidor for fifty was transformed into Thermidor for two hundred. Don't ask how. You don't want to know. It is possible that the system began with the ever-changing requirements of volume cookery, only to be perpetuated by subsequent generations as the golden age of mammoth hotels began to wane and the enormous dining halls and banquet facilities of days past were faced with the necessity of serving grande luxe-style meals and bloated menus with ever-shrinking staffs and more stringent economizing. I suspect that some of the classic dishes of that era reflect System D philosophy, particularly the efforts to get more bang from limited ingredients. Potage Mongole, for instance, allowed a chef to take a little pea soup and a little tomato soup, combine them, and come up with a third menu selection. New York's fabled Delmonico's offered, at one time, a staggering array of soups, numbering over a hundred. One can only assume that not all of those were made individually and from scratch every day. Parsimonious and forward-thinking Frenchmen—already inclined to make the most of humble (read cheap) ingredients, utilized every scrap of stock meat, hoof, snout, tongue, organs, creating dishes that are now popular stand-alone and frequently expensive favorites, ordered on their own merits, rather than served as cleverly disguised by-products.
    The traditional bistros that grew up around Les Halles, Paris's central marketplace, were fertile ground for hotel-trained cooks and chefs to take System D to even more extreme lengths. They had limited space to work with, most had limited capital, and the markets—whence came their clientele—generated huge amounts of what might have been considered unpalatable foodstuffs. If you're stocking your larder from a place proudly named The Tripe Pavillion, you tend to develop a cuisine heavy on boudins, tete de pore, confit of ears, stomach lining, shanks, pates, and galantines. Don't take my word for it. Read Orwell, or Freeling, or Zola's masterful Belly of Paris; nothing I've said here or will ever say approaches the terrifying accounts of mishandled food, criminally misrepresented menu items, marginal sanitation practices, and dubious sources of supply in these classic accounts. Orwell describes working ankle deep in garbage and outgoing dinners in one such establishment—and this was by no means a slophouse. Even today, French veterans of bistro cooking are masters of System D, inured as they are to working in tiny kitchens with dollhouse-size ranges, producing ten or twelve menu items despite access to only minimal storage, refrigeration, and work area,