The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman Page B

worked in advertising for several years (her husband was still in advertising) before deciding to give culinary school a shot. She had waitressed here and there during school, but she needed more than that to comply with entrance requirements, and she wangled an apprenticeship, or stage , at New York’s Chanterelle.
    On Day Three, my three-by-five prep card read:

    Ovens/pans
SMEP (batonnet, sm dc carrot)
Brown Stock
Onion Soup

    I had written the first item to remind myself to turn the ovens on first thing and get the pans hot and ready for the veal bones as soon as the students in Meat Fabrication made their daily delivery. You could lose a good half hour if no one turned on the ovens. Each table was assigned one of the three stocks, and the fourth table would set up the chef’s demo—today, setting out onion, retrieving sauce and sauté pans, measuring out forty ounces of white stock, filling a white paper cup with a couple of ounces of Blair’s Apple Jack so that everything was ready to go when the chef shouted, “Demo in five minutes!” During demo, the entire class would stand around Chef Pardus at the burners by Table Two next to the reach-in coolers. He would talk and perform and we would listen and watch. There would seem little complexity in the subject of onion soup, but it was fun to be cooking anything at all.
    Chef Pardus had told us yesterday during lecture that he did not want us to use cheese or crouton. “I’m interested in seeing if you can make a good onion soup.” He had gone over the criteria for evaluating the quality of the soup: color, body, temperature (“I want it hot ; I want it served in a hot bowl; I don’t want it boiling in the bowl”), aroma, and, of course, flavor.
    And Day Three he demoed everything, beginning with the sliced onions: uniform; short enough to fit on a spoon. You didn’t want a long strand of onion hanging off some lady’s spoon, ready to drop onto her four-hundred-dollar dress, the chef said. “Notice how I’m holding my hands,” Chef
Pardus said, slicing the onion on the big maple cutting board. He stopped to speak. “My fingertips are curled . My thumb’s in back . I’m not gonna lose anything. I’m not going down to the nurse . I’m not going to the hospital . I got other things to do .”
    He turned to the stove, put a sauté pan on the flame, and said, “This is where you play with your flame. The French guys call this your piano. And they say you tune your piano, you want to tune it to make beautiful music. It’s up to you. You’re the maestro.” He lowered the flame to cook the onions slowly.
    Pardus regarded the jiggly white beef stock, set out for him in a half-gallon measuring pitcher. “You want to heat a little bit of your stock up and taste it before you spend all the time and effort to waste good soup,” he said. “I’m pretty sure this is good. We made it ourselves last night.”
    â€œThat was the one we used the liquid from the previous day,” said Ben Grossman, erstwhile accountant. “Could that be why it’s so gelatinous?”
    â€œIt could be,” Pardus answered. “But also it went for an awful long time. We started it at about three o’clock and it probably went until about—aaw dammit.”
    We were in darkness. Everyone in the class followed Pardus: “Aaw.”
    After about thirty seconds the lights came back on. “Go ahead,” Chef Pardus said, “turn off all the ovens. Do you have fire over there?” Greg checked, said no. “Turn off all the ovens,” Pardus continued. “The pilots went out. It’s … winter in New York!” When the power at the Culinary goes out, all the gas lines close off and must be manually turned on again. When this happens, the maintenance crew spreads out through the old Jesuit monastery with blowtorches in hand to relight one