Four weeks. How did that happen? Four weeks that seem to have passed in both a heartbeat and a lifetime. They have flown by, yet what came before seems so distant and far removed that I wonder if any of it ever happened. By the time Friday night came spluttering to the rescue and I had loaded up on the Cake I was feeling pretty drained. I was planning to man up and get on it in the Blackbird, but fate kindly intervened. A stolen hour or two in the Middleton Garda Station waiting for my friend’s passport to be stamped came at just the right time to stop me from getting too hammered.
As I was driving out of the hotel around 7.30pm on Friday I saw one of the chefs coming back from the glasshouse armed with a giant cauliflower. I wound the window down for a quick chat. By the time I wound the window back up, I had offered my services at 10am to help prepare canapés for a 130 strong wedding party on Saturday afternoon. How did that happen, you might ask? I knew it was going to happen. I wanted it to happen. I know I need the rest, and a lie in, and last week I lost half of my weekend doing the same thing, but I don’t care. It’s as though I am desensitising myself. I already know how to sleep. I am here to learn to cook. So the Middleton Garda distraction is not the end of the world, because when the alarm goes off at 9am on Saturday morning, I actually feel alive and well and not like some angry shovel-wielding adversary has caved my head in.
The last few times I have been in the hotel kitchen I have made a point of wearing a clean uniform. This time I am on my way over when I notice I have donned the flour encrusted apron I have been wearing all week. I don’t bother changing it. It’s not that important. Canapés are being served from 2.30pm and I am going to help out by making tomato tartlets. Naturally, most of the hard work has been done for me. I have to make two batches since we only have trays to hold 90 at a time. I make a caramel that is stopped with sherry vinegar. Luckily I made caramel yesterday, so this is not too daunting. Then, I had a recipe to follow for the ratio of sugar to water. Here there is no recipe: take as much sugar as you need, and wet it. You have the right ratio, and it is a lot quicker. I drip a tiny quantity of the caramel into each of the 90 cases in the tray. On top of each goes half of an oven roasted cherry tomato, cut side down. Once that is done, I get the pre cut puff pastry circles from the fridge. They go over each tomato, quickly, and the rest returned to the fridge. With floured hands I then press each one around the tomato, and the whole tray goes in the fridge for a couple of hours. Once they are cooked, I will make the next batch straight off.
Between all this I help a fellow student fill small tins with scallop mousse for the second course and slice red onions on the mandolin to go in the smoked salmon pancake canapés. We also fill piping bags with duck liver pate to be piped onto croutons and dusted with ground pistachio. Meanwhile I mix the herbs into the stuffing for the main course of guinea fowl, and spend twenty minutes ramming handfuls of it into seventy of the little buggers' cavities.
Removing the cooked tomato tartlets from their trays is not easy. The bottoms are basically molten caramel at this stage, so plenty of them stick and have to be prised away with the fingertips. This is fucking painful, but has to be done. The head chef explains how over time the nerve endings on your fingers just get burnt off, pushing the pain threshold higher and higher. Once they reach a certain point, he says, it just becomes mind over matter. If you think about the pain, you will feel it. If you don't, you won't. Something to look forward to, I guess. By the end of the second tray I am getting used to it, and you know what? The pain is worth it: they look and taste great. I finish up around half past three, with enough of the day left to make the most of. It has been another great experience: fast, pressured and for once I had more than one thing to think about at a time. I walk across the courtyard to the cottage, crack open a Boags and promptly fall asleep.
Today has been nice and relaxed, despite the relentless drizzle. After a healthy lie in, three of us headed out to Kinsale, about an hour away, south west of Cork. We wandered about the little streets, in and out of shops and cafes, taking things pretty easy. Lunch of just about passable fish and chips was dragged down to new levels of gastronomic woe by the most repulsive ‘mushy peas’ I am yet to encounter. I refuse to comment further upon them in fear that their stench may return to the banks of my memory.
Right now I am sipping on a beer and indulging in my weekly reflections. I feel a bit stupid saying it, but it hasn’t been the most exciting week’s cooking. It was only really the bread and the Cake that made it special. In between these I cooked up cabbage soup, a bacon chop, curly kale, sponge cake and leftover Mexican chicken with Doritos. It’s not that exciting is it? I know it is arrogant and conceited and stupid, since I can’t even cook cabbage soup, but I want to learn the impossible. This week is looking a bit more interesting - fish filleting, choux pastry and a butchery demo on Wednesday that should have the squeamish ones reaching for the exit.
At times in the last couple of weeks I have touched upon rumblings of dissent among some of the students. Now we are four weeks in this all comes into slightly sharper focus. We need to know what is coming next, how the following weeks will develop, so we can identify the gaps. What are they not proposing to teach us? From my first day in the kitchen and the teaspoon incident, through the over use of butter, cream and salt, we have known that there is their way of cooking, and our way. We have paid €10,000 each for the privilege to learn their way, so that is what we are learning. But we want more. I want more. I want to learn the shortcuts. I want to learn how to make syrup without weighing the sugar. I want to learn how to be a chef. But I can’t. No one can teach me that - there’s really only one way, and it will involve scalding the flesh from my fingertips over a period of very many years. And mind over matter. A lot of mind, over a lot of matter.
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