Molly Birnbaum - Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way

season
to
taste

HOW I LOST MY SENSE OF SMELL
AND FOUND MY WAY

molly birnbaum

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint from Sonnet in Search of an Author by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume II, 19391962, copyright 1962 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Carcanet Press Ltd.

SEASON TO TASTE. Copyright 2011 by Molly Birnbaum.

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FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-0-06-191531-4

ePub Edition July 2011 ISBN: 978-0-06-208150-6

11 12 13 14 15 OV / RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

IN WHICH I ENTER THE KITCHEN

INSTEAD OF WRITING A COLLEGE THESIS, I read cookbooks in bed. I flipped through culinary magazines and food memoirs, burying my head in the biographies of iconic chefs until the early hours of the morning. After obsessively researching recipes online, I kneaded bread dough on my kitchen counter and assembled fat cakes layered with fruit and cream. I cooked intricate Middle Eastern tagines and watched chocolate souffls rise slowly in the oven. I was studying for my bachelors degree in art history, but in my final years of college I thought of little but the stove. I knew what I wanted: to be a chef.

Once I baked a different apple pie each week for months, feeding an ever-changing group of friends with plastic forks and knives in a cloud of cinnamon and butter, until I perfected the recipe. As a result, I won a small scholarship to the Culinary Institute of America, the finest school for aspiring chefs in the country. I wanted to escape term papers and deadlines, Michelangelo and Gauguin. I wanted to master the formal technique of boning a duck, chopping a carrot, and curing a cut of pork. The only thing standing between me and my starting date at culinary school was the required experience in a professional kitchen.

Upon graduation, I returned to my hometown and moved in with my mother and her boyfriend, Charley. After days scouring the Internet for job listings, I picked one of the best restaurants in the city. The Craigie Street Bistrot, a pint-sized establishment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was housed on the ground floor of a large apartment complex on a residential street near Harvard Square. I walked down a set of stairs to the dark-paneled entrance, opened the door, and poked my head inside. The dining room was light and airy. The scent of roasted chicken, which I had noticed as soon as I stepped out of my car in the parking lot, filled the room. A young woman was arranging flowers in vases.

Hi, I said. Im here to apply for a job.

She smiled, but didnt look up from the bouquet of lilacs. As a server? she asked.

No, I said, closing the door behind me. In the kitchen.

She glanced at me, taking in my white button-down shirt and heels. In a manila folder under my arm, I had my rsum and cover letter, which outlined volunteer work in Africa and cashier positions at late-night undergraduate eateries but held nothing close to the scramble of a line cook over the stove. She said she would get the chef, gesturing to a table in the empty dining room, which looked naked without people or plates. I sat.

Tony Maws, the executive chef and owner, emerged from the kitchen a few minutes later. He wore a stained chefs coat and fat black clogs; a long and frizzy ponytail snaked down his back. His nostrils pointed upward in his sharp-edged nose, highlighting a set of deep brown eyes. Known for sourcing his ingredients from local farms and a rabid enthusiasm for nose to tail cooking, or the use of every part of a whole beast, including the unsavory offal bits like the thymus gland or stomach, Maws had just been named a Best New Chef by Food & Wine magazine, one of the greatest honors for a rising chef in America. I stood and we shook hands. He glanced at my rsum and raised his eyebrows.

You have no experience?

I shook my head.

And you went to Brown? He looked skeptical.

I remained silent.

How serious are you? he asked.

Incredibly, I said in a voice that surprised me with its volume. He stared at me. I didnt blink.

Okay, he said. But youll start from the bottom.

He meant as a dishwasher. Maws promised that if I could handle the dishes, in all their oily, stinking glory, then he would teach me to cookand not in the casual, dinner-party, Gourmet -magazine style. He would teach me how to handle a knife, wrestle a vat of chicken stock larger than my torso, and clean pounds of wild mushrooms in buckets of water, removing dirt from their knobby contours, bathing in their scent of liquid earth. I could never abandon the sink and the dishes, but in our ephemeral free moments I could learn How To Cook.

ON MY FIRST DAY OF WORK, I paused inside the walk-in refrigerator. The heavy metal door thumped shut behind me and I inhaled the sharp scents of garlic and onions, vinegar and salt, fillets of tuna and grouper. A lamb carcass hung from the ceiling, sinuous and pink. A vat of chicken stock cooled on the floor. Four bins of fresh specialty herbs were perched on a corner shelf waiting to be plucked, their exotic labelslemon thyme, anise-hyssop, Moroccan mintreminding me how far I stood from my mothers suburban garden. I longed to touch the produce.

It had only been two weeks since Id donned a cap and gown to receive my undergraduate degree. At the restaurant, wearing the uniform white-buttoned shirt and a bandanna tied tightly around my curly hair, I was surprised to find myself in a world that didnt involve laptops or cell phones, one where I couldnt sleep when I liked or lose myself in the silent recesses of the library hour after hour. It didnt involve much thought or speech, only movement and speed. It was a world filled with boxes of foraged forest mushrooms, stacks of chocolate bars from Venezuela, and plates of quail so carefully assembled that they arrived in the dining room looking like works of art. There were knives so sharp I didnt feel the slice on my finger until blood began to run down my hand. There were saut pans so old that they no longer dented when the volatile head chef slammed them against the counter. There were eleven-hour shifts and sweat soaking every inch of cloth on my body.

I started with the herbs. The restaurant had dozens of organic herbs delivered to the kitchen each morning. There were familiar ones like basil, rosemary, and thyme; and then there were the exotic ones, ranging from pineapple mint to Syrian oregano. They were delivered from a local specialty farm, tied in tiny bundles and labeled by hand. It was my job to clean and pluck the jumble of leaves and stems and have them ready for dinner service. I bent over the tiny metal table in the back corner of my workspacea crowded hallway in the shadows of a staircaseand pinched my thumb and index fingers over the rough branches to release as many leaves as possible. Each herb left its scent printed on the tips of my fingers. There was the calm, woodsy odor of rosemary and the cool tang to mint. They blended into a mash of forest green that reminded me of trips to the plant nursery with my father when I was young.