I was silent, which was unlike me.
“You can try it and if you don’t like it, you can go back to savory, I’ll make you a sous chef.” I could hear him thinking, If you’d just do me this one solid.
Indecision numbed my tongue. I knew what this job would take and I honestly didn’t know if I was prepared to pull it off. And ironically, the very minute that Shea had trusted me, I wasn’t sure I wanted it. I reluctantly agreed to take the job—but only temporarily, until he could find a permanent replacement.
Somehow, without a single day of pastry experience, without a stash of tried-and-true recipes, working from morning until night with a skeleton staff—most of the pastry crew had abdicated with the former chef—I managed to serve five desserts to the Cru customers in search of a sweet conclusion to their multicourse meal. My approach to pastry was indeed savory and redolent of memories of home: I ordered some wood-parched wild rice from my local Minnesota parcher on White Earth Reservation, fried it until it popped like popcorn, and steeped it in cream and maple syrup for panna cotta. I pressed slices of kabocha squash and sugared Meyer lemon into confited blocks of terrine to serve with the cheese course. I poached apricots overnight in a bath of spice-scented duck fat. Remembering the flavor of the anise hyssop that grew wild at our house in the woods, I made a syrup from its purple flower tufts and drizzled it over translucent slices of plum carpaccio.
My first night on the pastry line, my ice cream quenelles looked ragged, unsure of themselves. After they got better and I got rolling, I was happy with the individual flavors, but the composed desserts themselves were still in sketch mode—not working as harmonically as I had envisioned them—and it pained me to send them out the door. Devastated, my ego took the blows and kept on going, wobbling forward like a smashed car in a demolition derby.
When the first hothouse rhubarb arrived, I went back to what I knew, the thing that had gotten me the job in the first place: pie. As was the current fashion, I deconstructed it: rhubarb confit, marinated diced rhubarb in raspberry syrup, a crisp lid of pastry, a milky-green sweet-celery ice cream. I added more butter to the pie dough than I had to the twenty-five Thanksgiving pies and reversed the method; I creamed the butter and flour first like it was a French sable. It wasn’t the fragile crust of my Midwestern childhood, but it was more tender. I balanced the pastry disk on top of the rhubarb confit. I was hopeful.
When Shea came back to the pastry department to taste it, he shot it down immediately.
“I think you should bake this crust until it’s almost burned, dunk it in milk, infuse it, and turn it into a cream or an ice cream,” Shea snapped, crumbs falling out of his mouth. “It’s way too fucking dry.”
“Without crust, it wouldn’t be a pie then, would it?” I volleyed.
“Exactly. The texture is distracting. People want, you know, mum-mum.” He gummed his lips together dramatically. “Think toothless. They need to end on something soft.” He widened his eyes at me and walked away, shooting me the very same disappointed expression that Mario had given the pastry sous chef who gave him the dumpf plum dumpling to taste years before at Danube. I wanted to defend the primacy of American-style piecrust, but maybe he was right. Divorced from its pie and its function as the sling vessel for a sluicy middle, pie pastry was a touch dry.
I crumbled up the pastry, threw it into a quart cup of milk, and tossed it on the walk-in shelf. I went back to the mixer and whipped up a Madeira-infused olive oil cake as plush as moss for a rhubarb upside-down cake, which eventually made it onto the menu.
After three months of running the pastry kitchen, of sampling cakes and custards and syrups over and over again, a sickly taste of defeat came to settle semipermanently in the back of my mouth, and I realized something: working pastry made me very hungry. And a little nauseous. I scavenged what I could to fill my hollow—stray meat from the walk-in, cheese trim from the cheese plate, bread from the basket—but eating didn’t ferry it away. It was a strange, seeking, serrated kind of hunger, one that no amount of stolen duck meatballs shoved into stolen crusty rolls could fill.
—
Although my deftness in pastry was still up for debate, by this time I considered myself a full card-carrying member of the haute cuisine workforce, my self-transformation from civilian to professional complete. I knew how to break down any fish; how to make meat submit to full tenderness; how to confit anything—fruit, or vegetable, or protein—by gently coaxing out its natural juice, concentrating it, and encouraging it to flow back inside its bulging skin. The way I minced garlic illustrated how full circle I’d come. Back before I cooked on the line I took the word mince very literally and meticulously diced the garlic into tiny cubes with my dull, doltish knife. Later, in the subterranean Danube prep kitchen, when faced with an entire pint of garlic, I smashed the cloves against my board and ravaged them to bits with my sharp knife, as my fellow line cooks had taught me to do. By the time I reached Cru, my knife skills had caught up to my original nearsighted devotion, and I went back to slicing each ivory clove into thin pleats before dicing them into minuscule cubes, as you would an onion—but three times as quickly as before—so as not to get any of that sticky, bruised garlic juice on my board or in my sauté pan, where I knew that its old-tasting funk would flower in the hot fat. That was how picky, how fastidious, I had become.
So I don’t know if it was the relentless parade of swirls, dots, and quenelles that ran like ticker tape behind my eyes, or the steady pressure from Aaron to go back home to Minnesota, or just basic fatigue, but one night, while I was staring into the blurry mirrored surface of the stainless-steel prep sink, digging out crud from its drain, the moment arrived when I knew that my tour of duty was over. My professional cooking tenure measured nine years, if I counted the Schwarzwald Inn. I was thirty years old. Possibly too old to remain just a line cook. Possibly too old to fight against Aaron’s insistence on our original plan, our seasonal flight pattern between New York and home.
That night after service I blew into the office and gave Shea my two weeks’ notice.
“This just isn’t working for me,” I wailed in distress. “I’ve spent years mastering savory. I’m just not skilled enough in pastry to keep putting out desserts that are ‘good enough.’ It’s making me crazy.”