The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman

without any other movement—and tend this mixture for hours and hours, skimming frequently, and you’ll have a flavorful, brown, nutritious liquid. Degrease it, strain it, degrease it some more. Then it is done.
    You would never want to eat this stuff plain, and it doesn’t smell very good either. Roasted chicken stock tastes moments away from a tasty soup; beef stock tastes like beef. A perfect brown veal stock has what is referred to as a “neutral” flavor. This is a kind way of saying it doesn’t taste like anything you’re used to eating or would want to eat.
    Neutrality, however, is the key to this stock. You can do a million different things with a great veal stock because it has the remarkable quality of taking on other flavors without imposing a flavor of its own. It offers its own richness and body anonymously. When you reduce it, it becomes its own sauce starter. You can add roux to brown veal stock for an eventual demi-glace and with a demi-glace, you can, in about thirty seconds, create any of a hundred distinct sauces in the manner of Escoffier.
    If you are truly insane, take this perfect brown veal stock, this gold, this liquid heaven that you have simmered for hours and hours, and dump it over freshly roasted veal bones, and later add some deeply caramelized mirepoix and browned tomato paste. Simmer it slowly, slowly all over again. If you have made perfect moves throughout, you will have a superlative brown veal stock.
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    T he first day in the kitchen was nearly done. Chef Pardus reviewed the method for making white and brown stocks. When he said the word “pincé” (which is what you’re doing to tomato paste when you cook it till it’s
brown), his gold-rimmed glasses rode up high on the crinkles on the bridge of his nose. Pardus was not even-toned. He italicized words as they left his mouth by making his lips do all sorts of contortions. For instance, when he talked about other stocks and uses for stocks—fumet, court bouillon, bouillon versus broth, essence—and he got to glace, he would say, “Glace is a highly reduced stock. What you do is you take a gallon of brown stock and you reduce it down to a cup, and when it cools it’s hard as a Superball . That’s glace .” He began the word “Superball” with his lips pursed out beyond his nose, and by the time he got to the l sound, his lips had tucked back inside so all you saw was a vague white rim where his lips should have been. This made his consonants really pop. It also made you want to try bouncing some of this glace off one of these stainless-steel tables we’d been chopping mirepoix on all day.
    I departed K-8 alone and strode past the former Jesuit chapel-turned-dining room, down the back steps of Roth Hall, through the empty frigid quad, down more steps, and into the vast parking lot on the edge of the four-lane expanse of Route 9. I was in cooking school. Look at my houndstooth-check trousers, my big black heavy-soled shoes, my knife kit in hand, my leather briefcase over my shoulder—the symbolic combination of school and kitchen. I was going to learn how to make a perfect brown veal stock, the reasons it became perfect, and everything that followed from there.

Routine
    C hef Pardus had been right; by Day Three the routine locked in and the kitchen hummed. We typically arrived between one-thirty and ten of two; the food steward, with help, would haul the huge gray tub of food from the storeroom up a flight of stairs and down the hall to K-8; a member of each table would collect cutting boards for the others, another would grab bowls for the table, enough cheesecloth for everyone’s sachet d’épices. On this day and for the next two weeks, someone putting together a sachet would call out, “Who’s got the thyme?” and Travis would say, “Oooh, about ten after two.” He almost never tired of it and when he did, someone