Engage

…with the food in the pan: the sizzle of heat and time, and the art of not doing too much.

Terry and I sat at a small table beside a kitchenette, planning a series of cooking classes. It was the early seventies. The house was on Walker Street in Cambridge — a small A-frame, painted fuschia, with an amazing rose garden in a sea of grey subdued houses. It belonged to the teacher of a Gurdjieff group we both belonged to.

On the right side of the front room, looking in from the door, the living room faced the yard where the teacher — or really, his students — kept more than a hundred rose bushes. On a pedestal in front of the bay windows, there was also a Japanese rooster. A pet, kept because the breed was said to grow a spectacular tail like in the old paintings. The teacher had gotten the wrong kind. The bird was pretty enough. What he was actually good at was waking the house, and the neighbors, before sunrise.

I was renting a room there, working six days a week, twelve hours a day. That is a cook’s life. I didn’t get to the group’s meetings as often as I’d have liked, but I was in it, and so was Terry.

Terry was a baker. I cooked. We had the idea to put together some classes for the other members — he would do the baking, I would do the cooking. We thought maybe we could sell the classes outside the group too, to make a little money, if they took off. That afternoon we were at the table, working out what we’d teach and in what order.

Terry worked at Maison Robert with Chef Jacky Robert. Jacky had trained at Maxim’s in Paris. I asked Terry directly what it had been like, what he had learned from working with someone who had come through that kitchen. Terry was a straightforward guy, Irish, with a small lilt in the way he talked. He didn’t make a production of it.

Jacky, he said, had told him this: The thing I really learned cooking at Maxim’s was to be in the pan, as it were, with the food, while it was cooking. I had been making thirty omelets a day at Ferdinand’s in Harvard Square for the better part of two years. Trying to master them — and something in those words fit what that practice had been building in my hands without ever giving it a name. Not the mechanics. I understood the mechanics. Something else. The quality of attention the thing required. The way, after enough repetitions, you stop making the omelet and start being with it. That’s its own story. But the recognition was instant. Though, of course, being young, driven and insecure as I was, I felt like I was starting from scratch every time I made one.

The full depth of what he meant took longer. Teaching brought it closer. When you have to put what you know into someone else’s hands — actually show them, not just say it — you find out what you genuinely know and what you only thought you did.

The things you can demonstrate turn out to be different from the things you can describe. Over the years that followed, Jacky Robert’s sentence kept returning,each time showing more of itself.

The last piece came in California. I had left the Ritz and moved west — there were fresh herbs growing twelve months of the year in California, and for a cook that was reason enough. I was working at a restaurant in Berkeley whose name I no longer remember. I’d been working through something Escoffier had written about not agitating the meat too much in the pan, and I needed to understand it in practice, not on the page. I stood at that stove and worked through piece after piece, watching what happened when I left it alone. At some point — not dramatically, just a thing that happened — I was no longer thinking about the meat. I was with it. Tracking the sound the moment it hit the fat. The way the color moved in from the edges. The change in the surface as the crust formed and the piece stopped bristling in the pan.

You are always striving for a knack, a touch as close to perfect — and the food and every other variable will never be the same twice. It is a target you can come close to, before it recedes. That is what keeps you there, paying attention, every time.

Jacky Robert said he learned to be in the pan with the food while it was cooking. Not watching it from a safe distance. Not consulting a clock. In it. The pan is talking the whole time. Whether you are listening is the only question

The pan really is talking — in sound, in the fat, in the way a piece of meat grips and then lets go. In the following Kitchen Notes is the translation.

It covers what being in the pan actually looks like: how to read the fat so you know the pan is ready before the food goes in, the three things that have to be true or the sear fails before it starts, the one moment — droplets gathering at the edges — that tells you exactly when to turn without guessing, and why a timer measures time but only a cook can read the food.

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