Lerach - Fried: surviving two centuries in restaurants

Whetting the appetite without jading the palate

A course that sets the course

New flavors in old forms

Things begin to get fishy

Right in the middle of things

We toss a few more things in

Some cheesy pleasures

The sweet, but also the bitter

Settling the stomach, splitting the check

Every night that youre open, you have to make a twenty-four-egg hollandaise. What that means is that every night you need a heavy stainless-steel bowl, a whisk, melted butter, a couple of lemons, cayenne pepper, and two dozen eggs. Its nice if the eggs are room temperature, the scum has been skimmed from the top of the butter, and there is a gently bubbling bain-marie for cooking the sauce. Ideal circumstances seldom occur in a restaurant kitchen. Youre working a breakneck speed to get ready for the first rush after dealing with late deliveries, physically or mentally absent employees, and inept management that has once again overbooked the dining room for the evenings business. Your hollandaise sauce is just one more piece of the puzzle, and of course, it must be perfect.

You begin cracking your cold eggs into your hand, one at a time. Your fingers are spread just wide enough to allow the white of the egg to drip through while your palm gently cradles the fragile yolk, closing a couple of fingers only enough to pinch off the unfortunate embryo. You toss the globular yolk into the stainless-steel bowl. Repeat twenty-four times. Then shoot a couple ounces of tap water into the bowl and take it over to the stove. Turn a burner onto the lowest setting it can manage, hold the bowl down on the puny flame with one towel-insulated hand, and whip the hell out of the yolk-water mixture with the other. Stir and stir and wait for the mixture to thicken and turn pale, pale yellow. Watch carefully for any lumps forming around the edges, indicating that, even with this pathetic little flame, youre overcooking the sauce and making a bowl of worthless scrambled eggs.

When your yolks form a decent ribbon off the whisk, take them off the fire, throw your towel down on the steel table, and nestle the bowl in the towel. Grab the ladle in the melted butter and simultaneously drizzle a few drops of liquid butter into the eggs while you once again crank with the whisk. If you splash too much butter in now or if the butter is too hot, the mixture will curdle. If you dont stir fast enough, the molten butter will puddle and will not be incorporated into the nascent hollandaise. So you ever-so-slowly introduce the butter, just a few drops at a time, and make sure that every drop is diligently whisked into the whole. Gradually, the added butter triples the volume of the mixture, and youre ready to incorporate the juice of two lemons and your own unique seasoning. If you do everything just right and if the humidity in the kitchen isnt too high and if nobody distracts you during the process and if theres not a trace of any foreign matter on the whisk, the bowl, or your fingers, A MIRACLE OCCURS. The egg yolks and water absorb the butterfat. This mixture in turn absorbs the citric acid and spices and, perhaps, a little sweat from your forehead. Voil! Youve created a hollandaise worthy of your asparagus, your blue-fish, and the arteries of your customers.

It shouldnt work, but it does. Someone with a modicum of skill combines all sorts of disparate elements. Oil doesnt mix with water; egg yolks should coagulate when touched by direct heat; and the intrusive acid should send all the other elements flying apart. Yet somehow, under intense pressure, all these unique ingredients are tossed together, tossed together and transformed.

There is always the smell. I still catch it sometimes while walking by an alleyway on a warm night. The garbage produced by a busy restaurant has a distinctive, unforgettable aroma, and my first experience on my first day on the job was to walk to the back door past a great gaggle of barrels of that garbage, right through that smell. The pungency comes from its many component parts: smoky bacon grease, acrid burnt bread, cigarette butts, coagulating blood, the mellow bite of coffee grounds, and the quick decay of fish parts, all carried directly to the nose on sweet vapors of spilled liquor and stale beer. Naturally, air temperature determines the intensity of the stench, and of course, July 12, 1966, was my first day at the Ambassador.

Unaware of what I was in for, I walked into the kitchen and reported to the harried steward, who had made me fill out a perfunctory application and told me when to show up. He looked at his watch. I was fifteen minutes early. Go work with Simon until the head dishwasher shows up, he ordered me. Simon is the potwasher. When the steward saw me looking around in total confusion, he added, in the potroom, slowly enough so that even a sixteen-year-old kid from the suburbs could understand, and pointed toward an alcove off the main kitchen. From the potroom I could hear clanging, scraping, and not a little cursing.

When I got to the doorway, I saw the back of a small man wearing suspenders and bending over one of the three compartment sinks. His hair was gray and curly, and suds and grease were smeared up his knotted forearms. He was swearing in a soft southern voice, cursing the cooks, the furrin chef, and white people in general. Simon? I interrupted. He turned to face me. Oh my God! Simon was black. And old. Really old. And I had never talked to a black man before.

My sole view of any minority group member had come through the rear window of my familys station wagon as we lit out for the suburbs. Cheap GI mortgages and the fear of people of color had driven a whole generation of young, white World War II vets and their families out of the cities. They headed for the subdivided potato fields and filled-in swamps of suburbiaEisenhower as Moses leading the Chosen into the desert along a path of interstate concrete.