Dimitri saw himself, I think, as a Hemingwayesque, hard-boozing raconteur Renaissance man, but he was completely under the thumb of his mother, a severe, equally brilliant gynecologist, whose daily calls to the Mario kitchen were much imitated.
'Alloo? Is Dih-mee-tree zere?'
We'd met before, of course, the previous year, when he'd known me, no doubt, as 'Mel'. But I was a broiler man now, a CIA student, a curiosity. It was permissible for Dimitri to talk to me. It was like Hunt and Liddy meeting; the world would probably have been a better place had it never happened, but a lot of fun was had by all.
Dimitri was scared of the outside world. He lived year-round at the tip of the Cape, and he liked to fancy himself a townie. He did a damn good imitation of a local Portuguese fisherman accent, too. But Dimitri was - as the Brits say - quite the other thing. We'd have drinks after knocking off at our respective restaurants and try to outdo each other with arcane bits of food knowledge and terminology. Dimitri, like me, was a born snob, so it was only natural that when our lord and master, Mario, decided on two employees to cater his annual garden party, he selected his two would-be Escoffiers, the Dimitri and Tony Show.
Our early efforts were, in the cold light of day, pretty crude and laughable. But nobody else in town was doing pâté en croûte or galantines in aspic, or elaborate chaudfroid presentations. Mario tasked his most pretentious cooks with an important mission, and we were determined not to let him down especially as it allowed us time off from our regular kitchen chores and all the overtime we needed. We threw ourselves into the task with near-fanatical once-in-a-lifetime zeal and prodigious amounts of cocaine and amphetamines.
As a fly-fisherman, Dimitri made his own lures; this obsessive eye for detail carried over to his food. For Mario's garden party, we spent days together in a walk-in refrigerator, heads filled with accelerants, gluing near-microscopic bits of carved and blanched vegetables onto the sides of roast and poached fishes and fowls with hot aspic. We must have looked like crazed neurologists, using tweezers, bamboo skewers and bar straws to cut and affix garnishes, laboring straight through the night. Covered with gelée, sleepless after forty-eight hours in the cooler, we lost all perspective, Dimitri at one point obsessing over a tiny red faux mushroom in one corner of a poached salmon, muttering to himself about the distinctive white dots on the hood of the Amanita muscara or psilocybin mushroom, while he applied dust-sized motes of cooked egg white for 'authenticity'. He buried all sorts of horticultural in-jokes in his work - already insanely detailed Gardens of Eden made of leek strips, chives, scallions, paper-thin slices of carrots and peppers. He created jungle tableaux on the sides of hams that he considered, 'reminiscent of Rousseau's better efforts' or 'Gauguin-like'. When I jokingly suggested Moses parting the Red Sea on the side of a striped bass, Dimitri got a faraway look on his face and immediately suggested a plan.
'The Israelites, in the foreground . . . we can use straws to cut the olives and egg whites for their eyes. But the Egyptians pursuing in the background . . . we can cut their eyes with bar straws, you know, the zip-stix! So they're smaller, you see! For perspective!' I had to physically restrain him from attempting this tableau.
We had been under refrigeration for three days straight when we finally collapsed in the Dreadnaught's cocktail lounge at 4 A.M., unshaven, dirty and crazed. We woke up a few hours later, covered with flies attracted by the tasty, protein-rich gelée that covered us from head to toe.
The garden party was, to be modest, a smashing success. No one in dowdy old Provincetown had ever seen anything like it. We became instantly notorious, and we made the most of it, printing up business cards for a planned catering venture called Moonlight Menus. The cards, commissioned from a local artist, depicted us sneering in toques. We proceeded to hand these things out to local businessmen, telling them blithely that not only did we not need, or even want their business, but they couldn't possibly afford us, as we were easily the most expensive and exclusive caterers on the entire Cape! Two highly trained specimens like us had more than enough business, thank you very much.
There was, of course, no business. But the strategy worked. In the coke-soaked final weeks of 1975 P-town, there were plenty of local businessmen eager to impress their friends with an elaborate end-of-season bash. And we were only too happy to encourage them in even grander pretensions, filling their heads with names and dishes we'd culled from my Larousse (few of which we'd actually attempted) and quoting staggering prices. We knew well how much these people were paying for cocaine - and that the more coke cost, the more people wanted it. We applied the same marketing plan to our budding catering operation, along with a similar pricing structure, and business was suddenly very, very good.
In no time, we were able to leave our regular jobs at the Dreadnaught and Mario's, lording it over our old co-workers in brand-new Tony Lama boots, and brandishing shiny new Wusthoff knives when we dropped by for a quick visit and a gloat.
Our customers were restaurateurs, coke dealers, guys who ran fast boats out to mother ships off Hyannis and Barn staple to offload bales of marijuana. We catered weddings, parties, private dinners for pizza magnates, successful leather and scrimshaw merchants. All the while, I filled Dimitri's head with the idea that what we were doing here, we could do back in New York - only bigger and better.
Ah, those heady days of happy delusion, spirited argument, grandiose dreams of glory and riches. We did not aspire to be the new Bocuses. No, that wasn't enough. Jacked up on coke and vodka, we wanted nothing less than to be like Carême, whose enormous pièces montées married the concepts of architecture and food. Our work would literally tower over the work of our contemporaries: Space Needles, Towers of Babel, Parthenons of forcemeat-stuffed pastry, carefully constructed New Babylons of barquettes, vol-au-vents, croquembouches . . . the very words excited and challenged us to reach higher and higher.
We had some successes - and some failures.
A steamship round (a whole roast leg of beef on the bone) sounded like a good idea; it was, after all, big. Until we overcooked it. An all-Chinese meal we did was so overloaded with dried Szechuan peppers that we could hear the muffled wails of pain from the next room. And I recall with horror a blue wedding cake, layers of turquoise-colored butter cream and sponge cake, decorated with fruit that looked more like Siegfried and Roy's beach house than anything Careme ever did. But we did have some notable successes as well. Provincetown's first Crown Roast of Veal with Mushroom Duxelle Stuffing and Black Truffle-Studded Madeira Sauce for one - and our mighty Coliseum of Seafood Blanquette.
The client was a restaurant owner, and we oversold ourselves somewhat. Committed to our pastry terror dome, we soon found that there wasn't a mold quite large enough for this ambitious effort. What we wanted was a tasty yet structurally sound 'coliseum' of pastry crust into which we could pour about 5 gallons of seafood stew. And we wanted the whole thing to be covered by a titanic pastry dome, perhaps with a tiny pastry figure from antiquity, like Ajax or Mercury, perched on top.
We didn't know if the thing could be done. Other than old engravings from Larousse we'd never even seen anything like what we were attempting. There was no suitable spring-form mold, something we could line with foil and fill with beans and then blind-bake. We couldn't cook it together with the blanquette; it would never hold. The bubbling velouté suspending our medley of fish and shellfish and wild mushrooms would make the walls too soft. And the dough: what crust could support the weight of 5 gallons of molten stew?
As game time approached, we were getting worried. We set up our operations center in our client's restaurant kitchen and promptly bivouacked to a bar for some serious strategizing.
In the end - as it so often does - it came down to Julia. Julia Child's recipes have little snob appeal, but they also tend to work. We took a recipe for dough from her book on French cooking, and after rubbing the outside of a large lobster steamer with shortening, stretched and patched our dough around and over it. It was exactly
the opposite of the prevailing wisdom; fortunately, we didn't know that at the time. For our dome, we used the top of the pot, and the same principle, laying our dough over the outside of the round lid and baking it until firm.
When we finally slid the things off - very carefully, I can tell you - Dimitri was characteristically pessimistic. Would it hold? He didn't think so. It was a lot of stew we were planning on pouring into this thing, and Dimitri was convinced it would crumble at the table mid-meal, boiling hot fish and lavalike velouté rushing onto the laps of the terrified guests. There would be terrible burns involved, he guessed, 'scarring . . . lawsuits . . . total disgrace'. Dimitri cheered himself up by suggesting that should the unthinkable happen, we were obliged, like Japanese naval officers, to take our own lives. 'Or like Vatel,' he submitted,'he ran himself on his sword over a late fish delivery. It's the least we could do.' In the end we agreed that should our Coliseum of Seafood Blanquette fall, we'd simply walk quietly out the door and into the bay to drown ourselves.
Party time came and we were ready - we hoped.
First there were hors d'oeuvres: microscopic canapes of smoked salmon, cucumber and caviar; Dimitri's chicken liver mousse with diced aspic; little barquettes of something or other; deviled eggs with fish roe; a lovely pâté en croûte with center garnishes of tongue, ham, pistachio and black truffles, and an accompanying sauce Cumberland I'd lifted right out of my CIA textbook. Our crown roast was no problem. It was the blanquette that filled our hearts with dread and terror.
But God protects fools and drunks, and we were certainly both foolish and drunk much of the time.
Things went brilliantly. Our coliseum's walls held!
The crown roast, decorated with little frilly panties on each gracefully outward-arching rib bone, looked and tasted sensational. We were given a standing ovation by the dazzled guests and grateful client.
When we next showed up at our old kitchens for our weekly gloat, our heads were too big to fit in P-town's doors. We were already planning on hunting bigger game. We had newer, more sophisticated, even richer victims in mind for our learn-as-we-go operation. In New York.
SECONDCOURSE
WHO COOKS?
WHO'S COOKING YOUR FOOD anyway? What strange beasts lurk behind the kitchen doors? You see the chef: he's the guy without the hat, with the clipboard under his arm, maybe his name stitched in Tuscan blue on his starched white chef's coat next to those cotton Chinese buttons. But who's actually cooking your food? Are they young, ambitious culinary school grads, putting in their time on the line until they get their shot at the Big Job? Probably not. If the chef is anything like me, the cooks are a dysfunctional, mercenary lot, fringe-dwellers motivated by money, the peculiar lifestyle of cooking and a grim pride. They're probably not even American.
Line cooking done well is a beautiful thing to watch. It's a high-speed collaboration resembling, at its best, ballet or modern dance. A properly organized, fully loaded line cook, one who works clean, and has 'moves' - meaning economy of movement, nice technique and, most important, speed - can perform his duties with Nijinsky-like grace. The job requires character - and endurance. A good line cook never shows up late, never calls in sick, and works through pain and injury.
What most people don't get about professional-level cooking is that it is not at all about the best recipe, the most innovative presentation, the most creative marriage of ingredients, flavors and textures; that, presumably, was all arranged long before you sat down to dinner. Line cooking - the real business of preparing the food you eat - is more about consistency, about mindless, unvarying repetition, the same series of tasks performed over and over and over again in exactly the same way. The last thing a chef wants in a line cook is an innovator, somebody with ideas of his own who is going to mess around with the chef's recipes and presentations. Chefs require blind, near-fanatical loyalty, a strong back and an automaton-like consistency of execution under battlefield conditions.
A three-star Italian chef pal of mine was recently talking about why he - a proud Tuscan who makes his own pasta and sauces from scratch daily and runs one of the best restaurant kitchens in New York - would never be so foolish as to hire any Italians to cook on his line. He greatly prefers Ecuadorians, as many chefs do: 'The Italian guy? You screaming at him in the rush, "Where's that risotto?! Is that fucking risotto ready yet? Gimme that risotto!" . . . and the Italian . . . he's gonna give it to you . . . An Ecuadorian guy? He's gonna just turn his back . . . and stir the risotto and keep cooking it until it's done the way you showed him. That's what I want.'
I knew just what he meant. Generally speaking, American cooks - meaning, born in the USA, possibly school-trained, culinarily sophisticated types who know before you show them what monter au beurre means and how to make a bearnaise sauce - are a lazy, undisciplined and, worst of all, high-maintenance lot, annoyingly opinionated, possessed of egos requiring constant stroking and tune-ups, and, as members of a privileged and wealthy population, unused to the kind of 'disrespect' a busy chef is inclined to dish out. No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American. The Ecuadorian, Mexican, Dominican and Salvadorian cooks I've worked with over the years make most CIA-educated white boys look like clumsy, sniveling little punks.
In New York City, the days of the downtrodden, underpaid illegal immigrant cook, exploited by his cruel masters, have largely passed - at least where quality line cooks are concerned. Most of the Ecuadorians and Mexicans I hire from a large pool a sort of farm team of associated and often related former dishwashers - are very well-paid professionals, much sought after by other chefs. Chances are they've worked their way up from the bottom rung; they remember well what it was like to empty out grease traps, scrape plates, haul leaking bags of garbage out to the curb at four o' clock in the morning. A guy who's come up through the ranks, who knows every station, every recipe, every corner of the restaurant and who has learned, first and foremost, your system above all others is likely to be more valuable and long-term than some bed-wetting white boy whose mom brought him up thinking the world owed him a living, and who thinks he actually knows a few things.
You want loyalty from your line cooks. Somebody who wakes up with a scratchy throat and slight fever and thinks it's okay to call in sick is not what I'm looking for. While it's necessary for cooks to take pride in their work - it's a good idea to let a good cook stretch a little now and again with the occasional contribution of a special or a soup - this is still the army. Ultimately, I want a salute and a 'Yes, sir!'. If I want an opinion from my line cooks, I'll provide one. Your customers arrive expecting the same dish prepared the same way they had it before; they don't want some budding Wolfgang Puck having fun with kiwis and coriander with a menu item they've come to love.
There are plenty of exceptions, of course. I have a few Americans in my traveling road show, a few key people whom I tend to hire over and over as I move from place to place. The relationship between chef and sous-chef can be a particularly intimate one, for instance, and it's nice to have someone with a similar background and world-view when you're going to spend almost every waking hour together. Women line cooks, however rare they might be in the testosterone-heavy, male-dominated world of restaurant kitchens, are a particular delight. To have a tough-as-nails, foul-mouthed, trash-talking female line cook on your team can be a true joy - and a civilizing factor in a unit where conversation tends to center around who's got the bigger balls and who takes it in the ass.
I've been fortunate enough to work with some really studly women line cooks - no weak reeds these. One woman, Sharon, managed to hold down a busy saute station while seven months pregnant - and still find time to provide advice and comfort to a romantically unhappy broiler man. A long-time associate, Beth, who likes to refer to herself as the 'Grill Bitch', excelled at putting loudmouths and fools into their proper place. She refused to behave any differently than her male co-workers: she'd change in the same lo
cker area, dropping her pants right alongside them. She was as sexually aggressive, and as vocal about it, as her fellow cooks, but unlikely to suffer behavior she found demeaning. One sorry Moroccan cook who pinched her ass found himself suddenly bent over a cutting board with Beth dry-humping him from behind, saying, 'How do you like it, bitch?' The guy almost died of shame - and never repeated that mistake again.
Another female line cook I had the pleasure of working with arrived at work one morning to find that an Ecuadorian pasta cook had decorated her station with some particularly ugly hard-core pornography of pimply-assed women getting penetrated in every orifice by pot-bellied guys with prison tattoos and back hair. She didn't react at all, but a little later, while passing through the pasta man's station, casually remarked. 'Jose, I see you brought in some photos of the family. Mom looks good for her age.'
Mise-en-place is the religion of all good line cooks. Do not fuck with a line cook's 'meez' - meaning their set-up, their carefully arranged supplies of sea salt, rough-cracked pepper, softened butter, cooking oil, wine, back-ups and so on. As a cook, your station, and its condition, its state of readiness, is an extension of your nervous system - and it is profoundly upsetting if another cook or, God forbid, a waiter - disturbs your precisely and carefully laid-out system. The universe is in order when your station is set up the way you like it: you know where to find everything with your eyes closed, everything you need during the course of the shift is at the ready at arm's reach, your defenses are deployed. If you let your mise-en-place run down, get dirty and disorganized, you'll quickly find yourself spinning in place and calling for back-up. I worked with a chef who used to step behind the line to a dirty cook's station in the middle of the rush to explain why the offending cook was falling behind. He'd press his palm down on the cutting board, which was littered with peppercorns, spattered sauce, bits of parsley, breadcrumbs and the usual flotsam and jetsam that accumulates quickly on a station if not constantly wiped away with a moist side-towel. 'You see this?' he'd inquire, raising his palm so that the cook could see the bits of dirt and scraps sticking to his chef's palm, 'That's what the inside of your head looks like now. Work clean!