Under the Table by Katherine Darling

Author:Katherine Darling
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2009-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

HORS D’OEUVRES

While every morning of Level 2 was nothing less than all-out war against the clock and sometimes against the recipes themselves, after the stress of preparing and serving the chefs’ table lunch, or the even more grueling family meal, the afternoons were more relaxed. Instead of preparing for an evening meal, as would be traditional in a real restaurant kitchen, we peons in Level 2 were in charge of preparing hors d’oeuvres for the dinner service. Because the school ran two shifts of students a day—the day shift that ran from around eight-thirty in the morning to three in the afternoon, and then an evening shift of students from five to ten at night—each shift prepared only one meal. Because we had more class time each day than the night students, we were able to learn a bit more of the esoteric tricks and tips from our instructors. One of these things was the hors d’oeuvres course from Chef Pierre.

After serving lunch to the chefs’ table and making certain our workstations were spick-and-span, we were allowed to have lunch. Once our lunch break was over, we reconvened for our afternoon lecture, where the critiques of the dishes we had prepared for the chefs were read aloud and further commented on (read: ridiculed) by our fellow students. After this ritual had been performed, and everyone had had their fair share of embarrassment and praise, we moved on to discussing the art of the bite-size morsels we would be learning to construct for the evening’s dinner patrons in the restaurant. Chef Pierre eulogized what he believed to be a lost art, before launching into a truly passionate discussion about the art and architecture of a proper hors d’oeuvre, or just plain hors as we called them for short.

The concept of hors d’oeuvres was hijacked, like so many other gorgeous French ideas in food, by the nouvelle cuisine movement of the 1980s. While the movement itself was French in origin, Chef Pierre admitted, he faulted the American chefs of the New York restaurant scene and the yuppie clientele they served for the perversion of French ideal concepts. The cocktail parties catered by these same chefs were the true culprits in the death of the proper hors. During the decade of excess, these little bites had grown far too large, far too filling to be anything less than a legitimate course at the dinner table, and it was therefore inappropriate to eat them standing up, with one’s fingers.

In the early nineties, the fashion for overblown hors became a passé habit of the outgoing Republican regime and the parties they threw for their friends. No longer would filet mignon on potato crisps be a staple of political fund-raisers. Beef was so un-PC, as were seared foie gras on figs and braised pig jowls on tiny cheddar biscuits. It was an era of earnestness in both the political sphere and the kitchen, as chefs began to pare down their ideas and their imagination, and served hors only reluctantly and then with a heavy sauce of irony.

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