11 Garde Manger

Friday, April 1, 2005

Chef Alfred Shilling’s Introduction to Garde Manger class was what everyone dreamed about when they first thought about attending cooking school. After three weeks of frigid butchery where the foul stench of purge permeated our nostrils and dried blood caked under our fingernails, we were back in a warm kitchen where we got to play with caviar, pâte à choux, and foie gras.

Situated just next door to the Butchery, no two classes could have ever been more different. Instead of the frigid wind of the Butchery fans, we had the warmth of ovens roasting beef, rabbit, and duck. Instead of the martinet standards of cleanliness and order held forth by Chef Jude, we had the benign reign of a French chef who’d cooked for American Presidents, English Royalty, and the Rolling Stones. And instead of lengthy lectures filled with copious amounts of note-taking, we had busy days of production where we prepared giant mirrors filled with sushi, cheeses, salads, meats, and fruit, and, most importantly, canapés – each bite-sized piece meticulously designed to be both beautiful and delicious.

Chef Alfred seemed distant and intimidating at first. No taller than 5’8”, his well-tanned and otherwise bald head sported an upside-down exclamation point of white hair under his bottom lip and his dark eyes danced with what we soon learned was an impish sense of humor. After introducing himself to us with a thick French accent (“I was voted Best Chef in France in 1982”), he left most of the first day’s orientation lecture to Chef Damon, the assistant assigned to the class. As we soon found out, this was because Chef Alfred was not to be bothered with the mundane details of running the kitchen – clean up, locating product, fixing equipment, etc. “Do not ask me tose types of questions – is a waste of my time. Ask me how to smoke salmon or prepare a pâte à choux. Tose are te questions for me.”

After we broke up into groups, Chef Alfred again took over the class, this time to instruct us on the canapés that we would be making during our first week. Rather than giving us specific recipes, he concentrated more on the main ingredients that he wanted us to use and the construction of each piece (“One leetle brunoise of bell pepper ‘ere, one rosette of date purée, and one petit spreeg of pairsley on top – is pairfect!”). Although he offered suggestions for seasonings to use in purees, tartars, and mousses, it would be up to us to make sure that our final products tasted good. This was a big step for the class – in Basic Skills we had always worked off of a master recipe, with measurements given for most ingredients. Now we would have to rely on our own sense of taste to season our food -- we would be learning to cook for ourselves without the crutch of a recipe.

Class was always a bustle of activity, every day featuring some new technique or demo. One day Chef Alfred showed us how to debone a salmon from the back, leaving the beautiful skin and head intact for presentation. Another day we watched as he carved a watermelon into a beautiful peacock basket – the main focal point of a large fruit mirror that would be in the Carême Room buffet the next day. He showed us how to prepare duck confit, salmon gravlox, savory mousses and terrines of foie gras and aspic. As we soon learned, he put liquor in everything – salmon tartare got a little cognac, dried cherries were marinated in vermouth, and dried apricots were marinated in vodka. He expanded our view of what it meant to season something – salt, pepper and lemon were not the only ingredients we had at our disposal: brandy, port, vodka, and other liquors were also acceptable as ways of bringing up flavor, as well as shallots, herbs, spices, olive oil, vinegars, honey, and so on.

Although each group was responsible for over a hundred canapés, at least two prepared salads, and platters of roasted meats, grilled vegetables, fruit, cheese, or sushi, Chef Alfred still found additional projects for individuals to work on. Sometimes, during the middle of my evening’s work, he would beckon over to me, “I need you to do some tings wit me – you have time?” Regardless of how busy I happened to be, I always tried to drop what I was doing to help him, since those lessons were the best part of being in the class.

One night he showed me a couple of rabbits in the walk-in, “Tees will go bad if we do not cook tem tonight. You like rabbit, yes?” When I responded that I had never had it before, his eyes twinkled. “Just you wait until you taste tees – tey will be absolutely delicious.” We cracked the rabbits open so that they would lie flat on a racked sheet pan and then rubbed generous amounts of olive oil, salt and pepper over both sides. We then placed sprigs of thyme underneath each rabbit cavity, with half a lemon. “Roast tees in a 350 oven to 150 and ten let me know,” he told me. “You will never have anyting so delicious in your life.” He was right – the meat was tender, juicy, and tinged with hints of the lemon and thyme.

Another night, I had just put the finishing touches on a roasted beet salad when Chef Alfred came over to see my work. I had lined a salad bowl with greens and then arranged four piles of diced gold and red beets into alternating squares in the bowl. The beets had been tossed with a mint-hazelnut vinaigrette, and toasted hazelnuts and dollops of creamy goat cheese were scattered organically on top.

“Deed you do tis beet salad?” he asked me. At my nod he said, “Tis is very plain, very ordinary. Tomorrow we will do tis beet salad togetter in te front. It will be very nice. You remember, okay?”

Though crushed that he hadn’t thought much of my salad, I reminded myself that if I’d already known how to make everything perfectly then there would be no reason to go to school. The next day in the front of the room he guided me as I prepared a new beet salad. First we edged a platter with alternating circles of gold and red beet slices brushed with vinaigrette for shine. After dicing the rest of the yellow beets, we tossed them with apple cider vinegar, walnut oil, tarragon leaves, honey, cinnamon, salt, and pepper, and mounded them in the middle of the platter with green pistachios and more tarragon scattered on top. The beet slices around the border gave the platter a much more elegant presentation than my salad had had the day before, and the pairing of tarragon with honey and cinnamon in the vinaigrette gave the salad wonderful flavor.

Chef Alfred demanded perfection, artistry, and good flavor in everything we did, though he kept us laughing while he did it. When discussing some of the simpler canapés that were made in earlier garde manger classes he remarked, “You want to take a cracker and pipe some mayonnaise? On my cadavre <French for corpse>. We don’t just do food -- we have to do tings tat are absolutely delicious.” When discussing how to design a cheese platter he coached, “Make it sexy, like a french poodle.” When showing us how to debone a chicken for a galantine, he urged, “Brutality and chicken don’t go well together.” And when watching Jeff, the grandson of a famous San Francisco baker, whip cream, he chided, “I’m going to have to call your grandfather and tell him you don’t know what you’re doing.”

One evening, Marty and Jeff prepared a Pacific Rim Salad – an Asian-style chopped salad with snow peas, carrots, scallions, almonds, bean sprouts, water chestnuts and roasted beef slices in an Asian vinaigrette. When Chef Alfred finally saw it, it had just come back from the Careme Room buffet downstairs. He exploded.

“I would have expected tis from two imbecile children ratter tan te two of you! Where did you come from tat you make someting like tis?! Tis ees sheet – sheet, sheet sheet!! If it comes out of tis room like tis again, it goes straight into te trash!”

Taking a breath, he continued, “Next time do like the Asians do – very precise, like ‘nip nip nip…’” – at this, he raised the pitch of his voice and mimicked precise cutting with both hands. Thoroughly cowed, Jeff and Marty were careful to make smaller, more precise cuts for the next day’s salad. Their encounter with Chef Alfred became the stuff of legend in our class.

Though strict about his quality expectations, when someone succeeded at preparing something especially beautiful or delicious, Chef Alfred was always the first to call it to the attention of the class. His praise was more valuable to us than that of anyone else, since it only came if you’d met his high standards.

One night Lindsay was in charge of preparing a platter of grilled vegetables – a set of sliced fennel, squash, zucchini, onions and asparagus that can often look limp and unappetizing if not done properly. Her platter of vegetables was arranged in concentric circles, with each piece folded over to give it height and character. It was a stunning presentation with contrasting colors, textures, and height. As soon as it was finished, Chef Alfred had the whole class stop what they were doing to look at her work. “Everyone, look at what Lindsay has done wit her grilled vegetables tonight. It is marvelous, beautiful, fantastic. Everyone clap for Lindsay and what she has done.”

Likewise, when Jeff carved a watermelon into a beautiful phoenix fruit basket with plumage made of raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries, Chef Alfred stopped the class to show off his work. “You see – all of you can make tese fantastic, beautiful tings. Well done.”

Chef Alfred also took the time to get to know us as individuals. One night while I was preparing a simple celery crudite with gorgonzola-cream-cheese filling and finely chopped toasted walnuts, he asked me what my plans were for the future. When I told him about my hope to cook in a fine dining restaurant for a few years and then write about my experiences, he looked pleased. “So many of tese fools don’t know what tey want to do,” he said, indicating everyone working busily in class. “‘I dunno,’ they say. It makes me just want to wring der nex. You have to know what you want and go and get it. I’m not teaching here for te money. Trust me, if I wanted money, tere’s a lot of otter tings I would be doing instead. I teach because I love it -- I love food, I love tis.”

Chef Alfred’s passion for food and fine cuisine is what made this class so wonderful. His love of flavor and his appreciation for artistry just oozed throughout every canapé he designed and every smoked salmon mousse he prepared. It’s what made us excited to come to his class every night, and what made us sorry to leave it on the last day.

Even now, months later, when my class talks about Garde Manger we can’t help but smile when we recall the things Chef Alfred said or did. He inspired each of us to produce the best, most beautiful food that we could, and he didn’t let us settle for mediocrity. He’s the best role-model we’ve met thus far at the CCA.

Last: 10 Butchery

Because canapes are served cold and don't produce any enticing aromas, they must look so exquisitely beautiful that you can't help but want to pop one in your mouth.