This One's For the Foodies

As I return to my occasional indulgence in shows like "Hell's Kichen" and "Worst Kitchen Nightmares" in the wake of the Beijing games, it occurs to me that cooking deserves a standardized, internationally recognized scoring system, like so many other skill-based activities which lack the fundamental metric of goals, touchdowns, and the like. It is easy to tell who wins a basketball game or a soccer match, but how about a platform-diving or balance beam competition? Scoring in those cases hinges on parameters which are agreed on ahead of time: The more difficult the attempted feat, the higher the potential score.



Cooking, in short, needs a standardized scale of difficulty. Although I could digress for pages on the technique involved in perfectly scrambled eggs, it is plainly obvious that scrambling eggs is easier than turning them into Hollandaise sauce, while Hollandaise sauce is still far easier than turning the same handful of eggs into a souffle.



So, for those of you who cook with any kind of frequency, dig deep and ask yourself the following: what are the big kahunas? What are the triple-axels of the culinary world? Which dishes present the highest degree of difficulty to attempt, and the greatest collective intake of breath when successfully landed?



The souffle, of course, is a given. Consommes, with their crystalline transparency and overwhelming purity of flavor, are akin to a black art in their execution. Any dish that involves a warm and a cold element paired on the same plate, as simple as a scoop of ice cream on a slice of apple pie or as intricate as a delicate herb salad garnishing grilled fish presents a challenge. And without question, anything wrapped in pastry -- beef Wellingtons, foie gras en brioche, squab wrapped in phyllo dough. Wrapping an item in dough deprives cooks of our ability to prod and probe the finished product; we must rely instead on pure instinct, trickery, and a flawless sense of timing to walk the balance beam between burned pastry and raw meat.




With this preface, imagine a dinner for 350 people commencing with a lobster consomme en croute, resplendent beneath a glistening golden dome of puff-pastry, followed by a salad course of delicate arugula sprouts garnished with warm mushroom and brie croquettes, and concluding (after a relatively simple entree of tenderloin and white asparagus) with raspberry souffles baked al la minute and delivered to the guests three at a time by a phalanx of nearly breathless waiters.




There goes another Saturday night in the Big Machine.

A dinner like this doesn't just happen, of course. It begins with a tasting weeks in advance, when the dishes are sampled, tweaaked, massaged, and photographed before presentation to the prospective client. Prep begins five or six days out, with the hundred pounds of lobster bodies crushed in an 80-quart Hobart mixer, to be cooked down with six or eight bottles of brandy and a host of other aromatics to form the foundation of the soup. There are thousands of tiny pearl vegetables to scoop by hand, prawns to encase in wonton wrappers for garnish, and of course the delicate wrapping of three hundred ceramic soup cups with puff pastry. There are the six casess of massive prawns to be skewered, poached, peeled, and layered with citrus aspic in a terrine mold to be frozen solid, then shaved paper thin on a meat slicer to make an ethereal carpaccio of shellfish beneath the salad. There are hors d'oeuvres by the hundred, there are steaks to sear, fennel to braise, two hundred pounds of potatoes to peel. And somewhere, in an air-traffic-controller's booth above it all, is me.

Don't get me wrong. I have not reached a position so rarified that I no longer pick up a knife, and I can still sling a saute pan with the best of them. More often than not, however, my role resembles that of the chief mate on a supertanker. My boss, the Executive Chef, sets the course: I am the poor schmuck whose job it is to get us there on time and in one piece. When my banquet chef and his lead cook come dangerously close to trading blows at the end of another 14-hour day, I'm the one who has to step in and smooth things over. After all, I need them both intact for the function. When two thousand dollars worth of tenderloin steaks come in cut to the wrong size, I'm the one on the phone with our meat purveyor explaining the meaning of the words "non-negotiable". When my veteran chef garde-manger inexplicably overcooks eight cases of asparagus and tries to pass off the end product as acceptable, I'm the one who has to simultaneously rake her over the coals, find more asparagus, and figure out what to do with the army-green crap she was trying to slide past me. And when push comes to shove and the whole operation is deep in the weeds and my cooks and sous chefs alike are starting to get that ragged look like they might at any further provocation climb to the top of Smith Tower and start shooting, I'm the guy who has to maintain his composure, roll up my sleeves, and rally the troops until the job is done.


When all six convection ovens, pegged at 500 degrees, begin billowing flames from the overflowing Yorkshire puddings cramming every rack, I'm the guy who first rescues the puddings and THEN runs for the baking soda. When my pissed-off grill man hurls a wire basket back into the deep-fryer and I watch the perfect parabolic splashback of hot oil onto the exposed flesh of his forearm, guess who makes the midnight walk to the hospital to help him fill out the L&I paperwork, after the ER nurse peels back the skin from his wrist to his elbow like she is stripping the membrane from a rack of pork ribs.

And when people at parties, or Cub Scout meetings, or on the school playground comment "Oh, you're a chef? I just LOVE to cook" I smile and nod and don't say a damn thing.