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By Root 613 0

the morning, when everyone was starving, and after a few hours of hard labor, hefting heavy sacks of flour, balling and kneading dough, loading giant deck and windmill ovens with cinammon buns, croissants, breads and rolls for the various school-operated dining rooms, the room would fill with the smell. When the finished product started coming out of the ovens, the students would fall on it, slathering the still-hot bread and buns with gobs of butter, tearing it apart and shoveling it in their faces. Brownies, pecan diamonds, cookies, profiteroles - around 10 percent of the stuff disappeared into our faces and our knife rolls before it was loaded into proof racks and packed off to its final destinations. It was not a pretty sight, all these pale, gangly, pimpled youths, in a frenzy of hunger and sexual frustration, shredding bread. It was like Night of the Living Dead, everyone seemed always to be chewing.

If there was an Ultimate Terror, a man who fit all of our ideas of a Real Chef, a monstrous, despotic, iron-fisted Frenchman who ruled his kitchen like President for Life Idi Amin, it was Chef Bernard. The final class before graduation was the dreaded yet yearned-for 'E Room', the Escoffier Room, an open-to-the-public, three-star restaurant operated for profit by the school. Diners, it was said, made reservations years in advance. Here, classic French food was served a la carte, finished and served off gueridons by amusingly inept students. Our skipper, the mighty septuagenarian Chef Bernard, had, it was rumored, actually worked with Escoffier himself. His name was mentioned only in whispers; students were aware of his unseen presence for months before entering his kitchen.

'Wait till "E Room",' went the ominous refrain, 'Bernard's gonna have your ass for breakfast.'

Needless to say, the pressure, the fear and the anticipation in the weeks before Escoffier Room were palpable.

It was an open kitchen. A large window allowed customers to watch the fearsome chef as he lined up his charges for inspection, assigned the day's work stations, reviewed the crimes and horrors and disappointments of the previous night's efforts. This was a terrifying moment, as we all dreaded the souffle station, the one station where one was assured of drawing the full weight of Chef Bernard's wrath and displeasure. The likelihood of a screw up was highest here, too. It was certain that at least one of your a la minute souffles would, under real working conditions, fail to rise, rise unevenly, collapse in on itself - in some way fail to meet our leader's exacting standards. Students would actually tremble with fear before line-up and work assignments, praying, 'Not me, Lord. Not today . . . please, not the souffle station.'

If you screwed up, you'd get what was called the 'ten minutes'. In full view of the gawking public and quavering comrades, the offending souffle cook would be called forward to stand at attention while the intimidating old French master would look down his Gallic shnozz and unload the most withering barrage of scorn any of us had ever experienced.

'You are a shit chef!' he would bellow. 'I make two cook like you in the toilette each morning! You are deezgusting! A shoe-maker! You have destroyed my life!. . . You will never be a chef! You are a disgracel Look! Look at this merde . . . merde . . . merde!' At this point, Bernard would stick his fingers into the offending object and fling bits of it on the floor. 'You dare call this cuisine! This . . . this is grotesque! An abomination! You . . . you should kill yourself from shame!'

I had to hand it to the old bastard, though, he was fair. Everyone got ten minutes. Even the girls, who would, sad to say, invariably burst into tears thirty seconds into the chef's tirade. He did not let their tears or sobs deter him. They stood there, shaking and heaving for the full time while he ranted and raved and cursed heaven and earth and their ancestors and their future progeny, breaking them down like everybody else, until all that remained was a trembling little bundle of nerves with