Chef and Me
The following piece will appear in this week’s Syracuse City Eagle.
“Never with salt season a stock,” I read aloud from the marker board upon entering class last Tuesday. I’ve been a student at the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan for a little over two weeks, so I’m not yet entirely used to my instructor’s way of speaking. He’s French, see, and with classic French cooking technique, he also brings a thick French accent and a syntax that’s just a little bit off.
In addition to being creative with the English language, Chef is an intense teacher. How so? Well, for one, he likes to spring surprise quizzes on us (he likes even more to watch us squirm when we don’t know the answer). During a recent pop quiz, he handed my classmate a marker and asked him to define the word écumer. The student wrote, in careful red print, “to skim the fat from the top of a stock.” The rest of us shifted our weight and bit our lips nervously. Wrong, he was wrong! That was the definition of dégraisser! We waited.
Chef raised his eyebrows in a curious fashion. “What? What eez that?” He sent him back to the board and told him to fix it. I stole a glance at the offending student and felt a pang of pity. His face was bright red, his forehead dotted with sweat.
The talk in the locker room, from the seasoned students in levels three and four, is that our class got stuck with the hardest, most demanding, most impossible teacher in the program. It’s been said that he even tossed a cell phone in a pot of soup when it rang during class. He reminds us constantly that if we’re unprepared, sending us home “won’t bother him at all.” He often keeps us 15, 20 minutes after class has ended, and his favorite phrase to use during critique is an emphatic “That is not good enough!” And nothing ever is – I made a béchamel sauce last week, and after the third time he tasted it and declared it too bland, I put in yet another hit of nutmeg and salt. When I brought the pot back to him, he ladled some sauce into his mouth and made a horrible face. “Throw that in the garbage! It is no good! You don’t have to go crazy with zee seasoning!” Even his name is daunting – he’s asked we call him simply Chef X.
But I suspect he’s really, secretly, all heart. When the student who’d mussed up écumer crossed out “fat” and wrote “dirtiness,” then raised his hands in an apologetic gesture, Chef tried his hardest not to laugh, his shoulders shaking. The rest of our giggles, though, were too much, and soon we were all roaring.
He surprises us, too, with random moments of almost – dare I say – warmth and tenderness. As he threatened to shave a long-haired boy’s head (“I’m going to geeve you a buzz!”), he caught my eye and winked!
It’s nice to have a teacher that likes to have fun, but none of that really matters when you boil it down. What I like best about Chef is that he wants us to succeed. He’s really rooting for us, and when he scoffs at our taillage or dumps our stock in the trash, it’s only because he wants us to be the absolute best we can. He knows that babying us will do no good, and that if we want to succeed, we’re going to have to be thick-skinned. It’s an eat-or-be-eaten world out there, and I’m glad I’ll be a little better prepared to tackle it. Hey, if nothing else, I can make a great stock.