Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef Page 8
She could not guess what was moldering away inside each pint container, but she knew, when tossing the shit out, that the event had been at the botanical gardens, the American Museum of Natural History, or the New York Public Library.
The food we produced in these kitchens was often bad but not as bad as what had to be done to it to get it from the warehouse kitchen on the West Side Highway to the botanical gardens, the museum, or finally into the mouths of the wedding guests in Amagansett. Catering, in that era, was not cooking. It was factory work in a refrigerated truck or cargo van or even the four-car garage of an oceanfront property in the Hamptons, if that’s where the event was and if that was the only viable place to set up our makeshift kitchen with Sterno ovens and propane burners and coolers filled with evaporating dry ice to keep the molded ice-cream flowers frozen.
The smoked salmon and cream cheese pinwheel—that steadfast staple of all catering kitchens throughout all of time—had been touched by four or five people by the time the guest ate it: the guy who opened the salmon and laid it out on sheets of plastic wrap, the guy who spread whipped cream cheese on it and rolled it up, the guy who later unwrapped and sliced it, the guy who garnished it with chopped chives and arranged it in careful circles on a sixteen-inch round silver or fourteen-inch square black-laquered tray, and probably even the waiter on his way out to the cocktail reception bearing that tray and in his other hand a small stack of artfully fanned out cocktail napkins.
The bruschetta under the three different toppings—tomato-basil concassé, Tuscan white bean, and Sicilian tuna salata—which was to sit at the Italian station, was nothing more than sliced baguette that had been laid out on sheet pans and blitzed in the double-decker convection oven, then sprayed with cheap blended olive oil, using the kind of spray bottle commonly used for Windex and houseplants. I had seen those toast rounds sit out on a rolling rack in the warehouse kitchen all week.
At some point in the catering world of the late ’80s and early ’90s, someone thought of putting food into a shot glass, and thus the hors d’oeuvre shooter was born. And so, all season long, I portioned mucusy preshucked tub oysters with lemongrass mignonette, or minted pea soup, or vodka-spiked gazpacho into two-ounce shot glasses. We set the filled shooters back into their slotted dish racks—one per person of each menu item multiplied times three hundred guests is nine hundred shot glasses—and stacked the interlocking dish racks in a neat, sturdy tower in the walk-in refrigerator, where they sat for hours and hours. At the load-out, someone wrapped the whole tower in commercial plastic wrap, shimmied it onto a hand truck, and wheeled it to the refrigerated truck to make the journey to the Hamptons. This can look just like a dockworker with a pallet at a warehouse and nothing like a white-jacketed chef artfully coaxing the best flavor from your food. Apollo, meanwhile, whose smile was sunshine itself in an otherwise weatherless world, diced and smashed limes with sugar in coffee cups, filled them with ice and cachaça and introduced us, decades before it was wildfire, to the caipirinha, the national drink of his home country, Brazil. We arrived at our parties a little lit.
Once at the party, the cook working the cold appetizers station—an eight-foot rectangular table with a cloth thrown over it—simply pulled out a rack at a time from the back of the truck and set the glasses by the dozen on a silver round tray, and they were whisked away by the waiter, a tuxedoed guy wearing shockingly blue contact lenses, who then had to stand in front of the wedding guest explaining its contents.
“Chilled pea soup! Yes! You drink it! Just like a shooter!”
After the shot glass came the Chinese soup dumpling spoon.
The edible sugarcane skewer.
The espresso cup.
We used all of these gimmicks for portioning the hors d’oeuvres and serving them to the guests on a garnished silver tray.
Self-contained items that required no skewer, toast round, or shot glass—like pigs-in-blankets, curried beef mini-empanadas, and sushi, which we always contracted out to a commercial producer in Queens—the one that supplies grocery stores and delis with those little to-go boxes of “assorted sushi”—sailed out of the back of the truck, got reheated in the garage if necessary, and were sent out on a heavily garnished bamboo-weave tray right into the bride and groom’s tummies.
When the intended couple had agreed on this menu, back in January, after a private tasting in the little nicely dressed and furnished showroom of the catering company, it had been prepared for them by the chef of the company, in just enough quantity for the tasting—not more than four portions of each thing—and each ingredient had been hand-selected by the chef and prepared the same day as it was eaten. In fact, it went from stove to table during the tasting and it, indeed, looked and tasted very good. I had been assigned to execute dozens of those tastings over the years and felt genuine pride in what we produced.
But by the time the bride and groom, now betrothed, and their three hundred guests were enjoying this same meal on a beautiful June evening, we were now on a very different scale of production. A whole crew of mixed talent and fluctuating demeanor—catering cooks—had been booked in for the week to produce it. To be sure, this couple was not the only one to have decided on June fifteenth as their ideal wedding date, and not the only one to have been nudged by the party planner toward the “grilled salmon filet on a bed of leek compote with preserved lemon relish” as their entree. We were producing six to ten jobs at the same time, every day, at the peak of the season. Food for thousands of wedding guests and college graduates and US Open attendees—all the accounts the full-time party planners up in the front offices had spent all year cultivating—was being cranked out of those warehouse kitchens on the West Side all at once, by slightly crazy people. The party planners, to a one, had mono and shingles by the end of every June.
On the kitchen crew there was always a Patty—the chemically cheerful girl who could work a twenty-two-day stretch of doubles without blinking. She would chirp, “Sure,” with her eyes unnaturally wide open when asked, on day thirteen of her doubling marathon, if she could run the hors d’oeuvres for one thousand at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, then get up the following morning and set up the brunch in Banquet Room C at the midtown Marriott, where the International Planned Parenthood Chapter Heads would be having back-to-back conferences. She would agree to come in at five a.m. and bake off all the mini-muffins, mini-scones, and mini-quiches and to roll up the mini-black-bean roll-ups without even checking her book or calling her boyfriend. She would go out and drink White Russians all night but still work every hour she committed to. Her paychecks were knockout.
There was also always a steady lethargic prep cook like Nancy, and usually several of her friends and cousins, who sat around an island of stainless steel prep tables all day, like factory workers, assembling goat cheese in phyllo dough purses by the thousand. She refused to work parties, and so had arranged her schedule to end at five o’clock every day. Humming a little calypso tune as she smiled and waved kisses good night to us all at the end of her shift, she would walk out with gallons of bleach and dish soap that she’d stolen from the unlocked cage downstairs near the changing room, and sell it on Eastern Parkway to her West Indian neighbors.
There was also always a Rich, the guy who used to walk quickly and purposefully from one room to another, giving us all the impression that he was banging out a job, a prep list, a pack sheet, a van load-out, or an equipment pull. When in fact that was just his strategy for earning his $17.50 an hour to prep while accomplishing little. He was always the one dicking with the boom box in the kitchen, incessantly popping in CDs he was so psyched to “turn us on to,” as if he were our unsolicited mentor. Rich had that characteristic compulsion I frequently encountered in catering cooks, that incessant and pressing need to declare his credentials as a real cook.
“Yeah, man, I’m just doing this shit for a short stretch, until I find the right place to jump back into restaurants. It’s gotta be the right place with my kind of quality.�
�� He’d blow that same hot air for years, while taking a cigarette break on the back loading dock. “I mean, look, I tried to show ’em aioli, but I just gave up, man.…” It was not only impossible for him to accept his complicity in the crap we were producing, but he was also driven to inflate his own credentials to such dimensions that it made us all squirm, stomp out our cigarettes, and rush, for relief, back to our cutting boards inside.
“I invented aioli, man.…”
The wedding meal itself, a sit-down dinner for three hundred that followed the butlered hors d’oevres hour, had sat in the warehouse kitchen refrigerator, some components of it for days, and then in the back of the cargo van in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the LIE. On the long ride out to Amagansett, three cater waiters assigned to ride with us, so they can help us unload cases of Sterno and staff cola and seltzer at the destination, sat on their garment bags containing their waiter tuxedos and sang show tunes. In the way, way back of the cargo van—perched on a five-gallon bucket of leek compote amid stacks and stacks of disposable aluminum hotel pans packed with salmon filets portioned at four ounces and already partially blasted in the convection ovens back at the warehouse—sat Andrea, the freelance chef assigned to run the party.
He, dear bride and groom, was the bitter and viciously funny guy chain-smoking Marlboros, about to oversee your very expensive love meal. For the eighty-three-mile ride from our loading dock to your spread on Mill Pond Road, he bitched all the way about how shitty this company is and wondered aloud the whole way to the Hamptons why he should give a shit if “they” don’t give a shit, all the while doing a caustic and exquisite interpretive dance on those five-gallon buckets. And the rented hackers? The freelance kitchen assistants assigned to assist him, to shove shot glasses onto trays and to reheat salmon in five side-by-side Sterno-fueled proofing cabinets that we’ve dubbed “the wall of fire”? They think he’s fucking hysterical. Me, too. He’s very funny. The death of your party but what a van ride!
That swarm of truly mediocre cooks, after constant repeated handling of this bride’s food in preparation for her Hamptons wedding, clock out at the warehouse thirteen hours later, leaving their old dirty shoes and Saran Wrap belts all over the locker room floors, and the next day they head uptown two blocks to the next company and their next four days of booked work. Or in my case, to the Berkshires to cook for little kids at two months of sleepaway camp.
And I had just seen seventeen wild turkeys!
Not that hiring for camp was a piece of cake. We advertised both locally—in the Berkshire Gazette and the Northampton Star—but also in New York City in the back of the Village Voice. I spent a few nervous days culling out the few unsavories who had applied for the job, wondering if I was going to have a crew at all. You have to ask yourself what’s wrong with the local townie guy who submits his application for a summer cook position at a remote children’s camp, thirty miles from any nearby town—especially when he turns out to be thirty-five years old and arrives on a girl’s 3-speed bicycle for the interview. I was disinclined to hire some guy with a driver’s license revoked for DUI, needless to say, on a campus with a hundred plump nubile boys and girls sleeping soundly in their unlocked smelly-sock bunks. I also nixed the applications of grown-up former campers who had always thought it “looked fun” to work in the kitchen, and although they’d had zero experience working in any kitchen, anywhere, really wanted to “check it out.” Everyone thinks cooking is “fun.” Everyone who doesn’t do it professionally thinks it’s fun. And it is fun, but not for the same reasons they think it will be. They think it’s the same as trying out a new recipe for brownies like you do at home, with the radio on.
In the end I was able to cobble together a pretty wholesome crew. Finishing up for the day, I put salt in all the salt shakers with grains of rice to absorb the humidity, filled all the soap dispensers, and fried myself three eggs for dinner, which I ate on the back stoop of the barn, looking out over the empty horse paddock and the surrounding fields. Ending my long last day of preparing the kitchen, I turned out the lights and went back up to my cottage and got ready to greet all the counselors and the kitchen crew as they made their way to camp the following day.
At midday, bleary-eyed and not a little spooked by the enormous and powerful force of nature itself engulfing him, Shaun arrived by bus from New York City.
“I need to get back to the Bronx,” he joked when I came out from the barn to greet him where he was standing in the fresh air and sunshine with his neat duffel held close to his body. Shaun was a Jamaican guy with the most delicious jerk marinade I’ve ever encountered, which I still use frequently in the summer. It has about twenty-five ingredients in it, including stout, honey, and scotch bonnet peppers.
Shaun spent the long hours after the kitchen was clean and shut down each night—while I was making lists and ordering and sipping bourbon and cokes in my cottage—making fruit carvings. He was afraid to return to his room where there might be bugs. I think he slept with the sheet pulled taut over his head, like a body in a morgue, the entire summer. In the morning I would come down and find elaborate apple swans and watermelon dragons in the walk-in.
And from just a few miles down the road came Debbie, a local mom. She enrolled her girls for free at the camp while she worked in the kitchen each day. It was always a happy and strong hug between us when we reunited each summer. She was that classic rural woman who, with her husband, does every job she knows to meet their bills and keep their three daughters in clean clothes and neatly combed pigtails. Between them they plowed roads, drove the school bus, baked specialty cakes in the shape of a baseball diamond with a Red Sox logo, had a public notary license, and worked in the school cafeteria during the year. I loved her.
She knew just the nearby farm to go to when we had a shortage of milk and needed dozens of gallons immediately. Much of the stress of the job with children was in figuring out the pars—how much of each item, like milk for example, would a campful of kids go through each day, each week. A lot, it turns out. And so I bought it by the five-gallon plastic sack, ten sacks at a time, once I understood how they’d suck it down.
Running out of milk in the middle of the dark woods with no town nearby and a hundred kids far away from home—some of them for the first time—rattled me but left Debbie calm and even-keeled.
“But what the fuck am I going to give them to fucking drink?” I asked, discovering that the milk “cow” in the dining room, that refrigerated stainless box with the two heavy levers that spout milk when you lift them and stanch its flow when you lower them—had run dry. Two swear words in one sentence had become as effortless a part of me as my own saliva.
“Kool-Aid!” Debbie replied cheerfully. She was used to opening big number-ten cans of corn and beans and mashed potatoes that they served at school lunch, and I didn’t know anything about this, and I knew even less about kids. I naively didn’t understand that they would prefer Kool-Aid to milk. Debbie grew her own tomatoes and zucchini in her garden at home but was no foe of processed foods. I loved that she gave her kids homegrown vegetables and big glasses of sugary processed Kool-Aid right alongside. That is my favorite kind of integrated person. Some of each thing and not too much of any one.
These two rocks, Shaun and Debbie, I could totally rely on. The other four helpers were the only former campers, now turning eighteen and nineteen years old, who had not written “fun” on the application. And here they all were.
By four o’clock in the afternoon, all the counselors had arrived, having filtered in slowly throughout the day, some on the morning bus, and the rest in their parents’ hand-me-down Camrys and Saabs. They passed through the kitchen area of the barn on their way to and from setting up their bunks, carrying sleeping bags and hackey sacks and hiking boots, and all stopped to say hello. The girls kept their hair long and loose, all the way down their backs, and they wore pajama-bottom pants all the day long, not just for sleeping. Most of them had been campers themselves and so knew each ot
her since childhood. I’d heard of this kind of enduring bond but had nothing to relate it to in my own experience. I was firmly in the out-of-sight-out-of-mind camp, and had cogent, unflinchingly honest declarations I frequently made about losing a shared context, and sentimentalism, and the general faintheartedness of most people—but I knew there were people in the world who remained friends, for life, with bunk mates from sleepaway camp, and this was that group of people.
Among them, there was so much deep hugging and excited shrieking to be seeing each other again, I often stopped in the middle of my food prep to marvel at the show.
I made a nice big meal with lentils and lamb leg and fennel salad and roasted cherry tomatoes with bread crumbs. I’d been told ahead of time that almost all the counselors were vegetarian. The girls, at least. The guys seemed happy to see the meat. And dinner with all twelve or fifteen of them gathered around three picnic tables pulled together to make one lasted a couple of hours. A long dinner then turned into an even longer evening of fireside guitar and deep serious conversations that were constantly punctuated by more deep hugging between them all. I had not seen such a thing since I myself was nineteen and working two simultaneous hits of Ecstasy.
Shaun and I cleaned up the kitchen and made our plans for the next week, while the guitar player strummed away in the next room. Until now, it had just been me and the turkeys and the camp director, who spent the last of her free days painting abstract paintings in her A-frame before the onslaught of campers and their parents arrived.
This was the last meal I could prepare that still had adult appeal to it, because the next morning, the four-foot-tall “nothing green, nothing spicy, nothing healthy, nothing dark, nothing but nuggets” crumb snatchers arrived and for the rest of the summer we cooked little more than plain spaghetti and plain chicken.