Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  “Well, it’s a little more complicated,” he said. “Everyone comes from Puebla. Most of the Mexicans in New York are from Puebla.” La migra, Jesus called it. The migration. Puebla is poor and overcrowded, and New York is a destination city on an immigrant trail simply because someone from Puebla succeeded in making the journey and others followed. “In Puebla, we don’t know fast food. We know only the food we cook. There is a McDonald’s, but I never ate there. I couldn’t afford it. For us, it was a three-star restaurant. A hamburger was a week’s pay. We all cook our food.”

  Jesus said that when he returns to Mexico—he hadn’t been back in eight years—his grandmother will celebrate by slaughtering a goat. She’ll rub it with avocado leaves—” the oil from the leaves hides the strong goat smell”—cover it with a paste made from pumpkin seeds, peanuts, chocolate, and cloves, and bury it in a hole of hot coals. “We cook a sheep’s head the same way. A lot of Babbo’s preparations, which are quite rustic, are familiar to us. The skirt steak—that’s a Mexican preparation. Or the grill station—la barbacoa, we call it—that’s how we cook our meat. Or braising: that’s how we deal with big cuts. Or a bain marie: we call it baño maría, which we use to prepare tamales. We have much to learn when we work in a kitchen like Babbo, but we know many things already.” He described a wedding he’d attend that weekend in Queens. “Everyone will bring food—a pig, a turkey, a chicken.” It was the same at Christmas. “The day is spent cooking and being together.” Elisa remembered conversations with Miguel. “He often talked about food he made at home. Cesar is like that as well. They have a capacity to look at a whole kitchen and understand how it works. They both always know what’s in the walk-in and what needs reordering. They know more than most kids coming out of cooking school.”

  When Miguel arrived in New York, Jesus looked after him. They lived together, an extended family of cousins, siblings, and friends, in a three-bedroom apartment in the Bronx: three guys in a room, nine guys in all. After Miguel found work at Babbo, he began taking English lessons in a class taught by a Puerto Rican named Mirabella, and the two of them began seeing each other.

  Elisa remembers her. “They had problems, and she was always phoning. She was older, and you could hear the age in her voice, but I didn’t know how much older until I saw her at the funeral. Miguel was twenty-two. She was forty-two. Why would a forty-two-year-old woman go out with a twenty-two-year-old?”

  Around Christmas last year, Miguel came to Jesus for advice. The relationship had been openly tempestuous, but, according to Miguel, they had sorted out their difficulties. Mirabella wanted Miguel to move in. She had an apartment in Brooklyn. They planned to marry in June.

  “I’d never met her,” Jesus told me. “Miguel had never brought her to the house. This puzzled me. There were other things. She always needed money. She had a heart problem and had to see a specialist. Miguel didn’t have much money. He didn’t have enough to be giving it to an older woman with a heart problem. Miguel asked me for my advice. I said he shouldn’t move in.” Miguel asked the others in the apartment. They said he shouldn’t move in.

  In the new year, Miguel moved in.

  The fights continued. Mirabella was now calling the kitchen every day. There was an insistence in the woman’s tone, Elisa felt, an imperiousness. “The others in the kitchen told me she dealt in some sort of I.D. thing—she bought and sold identities.” At the time, the going rate for a Social Security number was sixty-five dollars. A green card was a little more. A passport varied: a good one could cost several hundred dollars. “None of these kids have papers,” Elisa said. “Sometimes I’ve wondered if she gave Miguel a fright about his immigration status. And he feared that if he got in trouble the whole family would be in trouble.”

  The relationship didn’t work out, Jesus said. “But because Miguel had asked for our advice and we’d told him not to marry this woman, he felt he couldn’t come back to us. He was embarrassed. He had no place to go.”

  On May 18th, Miguel’s last day in the kitchen, he finished an enormous amount of work, Elisa recalls. He did the prep for the entire week. “Then he put his fish knives in a plastic container and gave them to me. I didn’t know what he was doing. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘These are very nice.’” That night he hanged himself from a shower fixture in the Brooklyn apartment. Jesus rushed over on getting the news. It was his first time in the apartment. The police wouldn’t let him see the body.

  Jesus was thirty-three but looked older. He has thick black hair, which is stiff like tarred straw, a strong angular nose, and a heavy, scarred face. He has a serious air and an appealing toughness. He phoned his uncle, Miguel’s father. “His grief was unbelievable. Nothing I said made sense to him.”

  Jesus paused. The two of us were still sitting on the park bench, surrounded by his cousins and brother, in no apparent hurry, watching us patiently. Jesus was staring fixedly, avoiding me. It seemed he didn’t want me to see the tears welling up like a heavy oil along the rim of his eyes. He took a breath. After a church service, Jesus continued, he arranged for the body to be returned to Mexico. Andy wrote a letter, describing “what a hero Miguel was, because the parents don’t understand what has happened. We didn’t understand. We still don’t.”

  Jesus stood up. His household stood up. “We are now very close,” he said, gesturing to the others. “We don’t want this to happen again. We talk. We make sure no one is alone.” He walked off in the direction of the subway, the gang following behind, subdued, everyone with sad, sloping shoulders.

  I phoned the police. Jesus carried the name and number of a detective who had been in charge, a Detective Lamposone. I got one of his colleagues.

  “Oh, yeah, I remember that night. Mexican kid. Very ugly. Was drinking with his friends and started playing the game with a pistol. He lost. Messy.”

  I was horrified: was this why Jesus hadn’t been allowed to see the body? “Oh, no,” I blurted out, startled. “No one said anything about Russian roulette.”

  The detective was taken aback. “You know, you’d better speak to Lamposone. I might have the case confused with another one.”

  Detective Lamposone had been transferred to another precinct, in Bay Ridge. He had no recollection of the incident. I told him the details, the name, the date. Nothing. “I’m sorry. That one’s gone.”

  One morning, about ten months later, I was working in the prep kitchen. I was making pasta with Alejandro, Marcello’s successor. (Alejandro had been the dishwasher on my first day at Babbo.) Alejandro had grown up on a farm, just outside Puebla, and had left when he was sixteen. He had been in New York four years. He was a kid. (One afternoon, when the members of the entire prep kitchen were in the basement, changing back into street clothes—the routine was that everyone stripped down in a space about half the size of a very small closet—Alejandro noticed that Elisa was staring at his belly. For someone so young, the belly was remarkably soft and round. “Mexican men,” he said cheerfully, slapping it with vigor. “Macho potbellies.”)

  I had a little Spanish. I wanted to know how Alejandro’s family farm worked—what animals were raised, the vegetables, what was eaten at the family table. Alejandro, while perfectly happy to answer my questions, didn’t have that “capacity to look at the whole kitchen.” This was a job. He wasn’t interested in talking about food, although he was a perfectly good cook. He was interested in meeting American girls. He proposed helping me with my Spanish and, yes, if I insisted, talking about farm vegetables, provided I’d take him to some clubs. Just then Marcello walked in. His wife was outside, in a car. Marcello wanted to show the kitchen his new baby, a bundle of pink miniature girl cradled in his arms, a few weeks old, conceived, I realized, not long after his interview with Mario: in the confidence conferred on Marcello by his new position, he began a family.

  People who don’t live in New York don’t appreciate how much the city has once again become fashioned by immigrants and is where you come to become the next thing you’ll be
. In 1892, four out of every ten New Yorkers were born abroad. Since 1998, that has been the case again, owing to the arrival, legal or illegal, of immigrants from Latin America, Russia, the Asian subcontinent, Albania, the Baltic states. Both of Joe’s parents are immigrants, ethnic Italians who were living in Istria when it was incorporated into Yugoslavia by Tito: the Italians, long resented since the war (most had been Fascists), were told to assimilate or get out. Joe’s father hopped on a ship and arrived in New York illegally. He was fifteen. Lidia had a marginally more conventional passage and was granted political asylum. “Restaurant work,” Joe observed, “is the lifeline of immigrants in this city.” His father’s first job was in a restaurant; his first home was above a bakery (run by an immigrant). Thirty-five years later, their son, now a co-owner of his own venture, was providing a lifeline for another generation. He employed Marcello, an émigré from Argentina (and not, for all his pasta-making gifts, from Puebla). And now Marcello was secure enough in his new country to begin a family. Someone had died; someone was born.

  I ONCE ASKED Mario what I could expect to learn in his kitchen.

  “The difference between the home cook and the professional,” he said. “You’ll learn the reality of the restaurant kitchen. As a home cook, you can prepare anything any way anytime. It doesn’t matter if your lamb is rare for your friends on Saturday and not so rare when they come back next year. Here people want exactly what they had last time. Consistency under pressure. And that’s the reality: a lot of pressure.”

  He thought for a moment. “You also develop an expanded kitchen awareness. You’ll discover how to use your senses. You’ll find you no longer rely on what your watch says. You’ll hear when something is cooked. You’ll smell degrees of doneness.”

  Once, in the kitchen, Frankie used the same phrase, “kitchen awareness,” as though it were a thing you could take classes to learn. And I thought I might have seen evidence of it, in how people on the line were cued by a smell and turned to deal with what they were cooking, or in how they seemed to hear something in a sauté pan and then flipped the food. Even so, it seemed an unlikely prospect that this was something I could master; the kitchen remained so stubbornly incomprehensible. From the start of the day to the end, the place was frenzied. In fact, without my fully realizing it, there was an education in the frenzy, because in the frenzy there was always repetition. Over and over again, I’d pick up a smell, as a task was being completed, until finally I came to identify not only what the food was but where it was in its preparation. The next day, it would be the same. (By then, I was somehow managing to put in extra days in the prep kitchen, even though I was technically employed elsewhere.) I was reminded of something Andy had told me. “You don’t learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions, and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you’re not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.” One day I was given a hundred and fifty lamb tongues. I had never held a lamb’s tongue, which I found greasy and unnervingly humanlike. But after cooking, trimming, peeling, and slicing a hundred and fifty lamb tongues, I was an expert.

  One morning, Elisa went out to deal with a delivery, and I picked up a change in the way the lamb shanks smelled. They were browning in a large pan about ten feet away, and I walked over, trance-like, turned them, and resumed my task. My nose had told me that they were sufficiently browned and would be ruined in a minute. By the time Elisa returned, I’d removed the shanks and thrown in another batch. She looked at me, slightly startled.

  It was a modest breakthrough, and I was allowed to cook. The first item, appropriately enough, was lamb shanks. They were followed by beef cheeks, both basically cooked in the same way: browned and braised in a wine-based liquid until they fell apart. Then duck thighs, rabbit ragù, beef tongue, and guinea-hen legs. Once, cooking beef cheeks, I smelled that they were cooked, even though they were meant to remain in the oven for another hour. But I didn’t pull them out right away, which was a mistake and they were nearly burned, but I’d learned I could trust my senses.

  8

  I FOUND myself needing to understand short ribs, probably because I really didn’t know what they were, even though I was now helping Elisa prepare them every week and even though I recognized their overwhelming ubiquity: just about every New York restaurant of a certain pretension seemed to have them on the menu—and, in fact, has had them on the menu for fifteen years. In this is a rarely recognized thing, that cities have their restaurant dishes, some ingredient or preparation that mysteriously self-replicates (and yet rarely emigrates—until recently, you wouldn’t have found short ribs in Boston or Chicago) through the easy, professional promiscuity of chefs, always hopping from one place to another, never staying long, especially in Manhattan, which was also why Mario refused to give a job reference to anyone who left after working for him for less than a year. (“Why should I? So they can steal ideas it took me a lifetime to learn?”) The short rib lends itself to being appropriated because, in each appearance, it can be so effortlessly and thematically reinterpreted. It becomes Gallic when it shows up at a four-star French establishment (the short ribs, cooked in veal stock, are served with braised celery); vaguely fusion at a fancy four-star Euro-Asian place (on white rice, with bok choy and water chestnuts); a comfort food at the down-home but two-star Americana restaurant (with mashed potatoes and gravy); a piece of exotica at the cash-only Vietnamese spot (plastered on a stick of lemongrass and served with plum sauce); and bearing an Italian signifier—polenta, invariably—when Italian. At Babbo, it was also topped with a mound of parsley, lemon zest, and horseradish (because horseradish and beef are a traditional coupling, and because horseradish also provides the requisite heat, and lemon the citrus kick, required of a Batali dish). The dish also had an Italian name, Brasato al Barolo, which means “braised in Barolo,” Barolo being a hearty red wine from Piemonte in northern Italy.

  A braised dish, a variation of the pot roast, is one in which meat is cooked with the lid on very slowly in liquid—wine or broth, or both—until it starts to fall apart. The meat is usually a tough cut like a leg or a shoulder, one of those gnarly, complex pieces that are chewable only if they’ve been hammered for several hours. In Italy, braising has long been a winter preparation, associated with house-heating wood stoves and subdued root vegetable flavors. (Braised meats, for instance, feature in the peninsula’s oldest cookbook, De re coquinaria, written in Latin around the time of Christ by Marcus Gavius Apicius, who also recommends the same obliterating approach for wild ducks and desiccated, tough, otherwise inedible game birds.) The thing about Babbo’s Piemonte version is that you’d have a hard time finding a brasato made from short ribs, with or without Barolo, anywhere in Piemonte, and Mario, when pressed, concedes that there might be a little invention in the dish’s name. Like me, he didn’t have a clue what a short rib was until he ate one on a wintry night in 1993 at a restaurant called Alison on Dominick Street, where, as it happens, it was prepared in the North African style, with couscous. In a sign of our jaded how-can-I-give-you-my-heart-when-it’s-already-been-broken era, the candlelit Alison on Dominick Street—which, as recently as Valentine’s Day 2002, was regarded as New York’s most romantic restaurant—has closed, but I tracked down one of its former chefs, Tom Valenti. At the end of the eighties, Valenti had scored big making a dish with lamb shanks, same principle: a cheap, worked muscle (the shin) was cooked in wine and broth until the meat fell apart when tapped with your tongs, and the result was so popular, and so imitated, that Valenti found himself looking around for another meat to prepare in the same way. “I wanted to do something with beef but never liked beef stew. I found it dry and chewy. So I did some homework and came across old recipes using short ribs. I liked short ribs much more than any other beef cut: they are rich and marbled and full of so much fatty flavor that they never dry out.” When he put the dish on the menu, in 1990, it was accompanied by a small fillet—” technically, a beef dish d
one two ways, which I did so people would have a choice in case they hated the short rib.” Valenti now runs his own restaurants, and short ribs are a regular feature—except for a brief six-month period when he took them off the menu and “got lots of shit from customers.” In 1990, short ribs were forty-five cents a pound; now, thanks to Valenti, they are more than five dollars.

  But what is a short rib, and where do you find it on a cow? Elisa didn’t know, and she’d been preparing them for four years. Even Valenti wasn’t sure; his short ribs, like Babbo’s, were prepared by the meat guy and arrived as a shrink-wrapped unit of three or four. So I went to my local butcher, Benny, at Florence Meat Market in the West Village, and he explained. There are thirteen bones on each rib cage, he said. Six of them—the longest and the meatiest—are prime rib: these would be your standing rib roast. (This is probably what Tom Jones was eating when seduced by Mrs. Waters—a great chunk of meat on a bone you can hold with two hands.) But three or four bones at the bottom of the rib cage and another three or four at the top, near the shoulder, are shorter. These are short ribs. And this is why they’re delivered by the butcher in units of three or four: three or four from the bottom and three or four from the top, although the ribs at the top are often too fatty to use.

  For all that, the ribs aren’t all that short—they’re about a foot long. They’re also surprisingly meaty, akin to pork spare ribs, but with a lot more to eat.

  You start by browning them. You remove them “from the top of the packaging,” Elisa reminded me after I’d already slid them out from the side, “so you don’t get blood all over the front of you”—because, of course, by then, I had blood all over the front of me—and then separate them, one by one, by slicing down through the meat between each rib. “Carefully,” Elisa said, “please.” You set your ribs out on a hotel pan and season them with salt and pepper abundantly on both sides: they look freckled when you’re done. (A hotel pan, I understood finally, is not actually a pan but a tray, and gets its name from being one of the largest trays that can fit on an oven shelf, the kind of very large tray that a hotel would need.)