Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [20]
In no time, we were able to leave our regular jobs at the Dreadnaught and Mario's, lording it over our old co-workers in brand-new Tony Lama boots, and brandishing shiny new Wusthoff knives when we dropped by for a quick visit and a gloat.
Our customers were restaurateurs, coke dealers, guys who ran fast boats out to mother ships off Hyannis and Barn staple to offload bales of marijuana. We catered weddings, parties, private dinners for pizza magnates, successful leather and scrimshaw merchants. All the while, I filled Dimitri's head with the idea that what we were doing here, we could do back in New York - only bigger and better.
Ah, those heady days of happy delusion, spirited argument, grandiose dreams of glory and riches. We did not aspire to be the new Bocuses. No, that wasn't enough. Jacked up on coke and vodka, we wanted nothing less than to be like Carême, whose enormous pièces montées married the concepts of architecture and food. Our work would literally tower over the work of our contemporaries: Space Needles, Towers of Babel, Parthenons of forcemeat-stuffed pastry, carefully constructed New Babylons of barquettes, vol-au-vents, croquembouches . . . the very words excited and challenged us to reach higher and higher.
We had some successes - and some failures.
A steamship round (a whole roast leg of beef on the bone) sounded like a good idea; it was, after all, big. Until we overcooked it. An all-Chinese meal we did was so overloaded with dried Szechuan peppers that we could hear the muffled wails of pain from the next room. And I recall with horror a blue wedding cake, layers of turquoise-colored butter cream and sponge cake, decorated with fruit that looked more like Siegfried and Roy's beach house than anything Careme ever did. But we did have some notable successes as well. Provincetown's first Crown Roast of Veal with Mushroom Duxelle Stuffing and Black Truffle-Studded Madeira Sauce for one - and our mighty Coliseum of Seafood Blanquette.
The client was a restaurant owner, and we oversold ourselves somewhat. Committed to our pastry terror dome, we soon found that there wasn't a mold quite large enough for this ambitious effort. What we wanted was a tasty yet structurally sound 'coliseum' of pastry crust into which we could pour about 5 gallons of seafood stew. And we wanted the whole thing to be covered by a titanic pastry dome, perhaps with a tiny pastry figure from antiquity, like Ajax or Mercury, perched on top.
We didn't know if the thing could be done. Other than old engravings from Larousse we'd never even seen anything like what we were attempting. There was no suitable spring-form mold, something we could line with foil and fill with beans and then blind-bake. We couldn't cook it together with the blanquette; it would never hold. The bubbling velouté suspending our medley of fish and shellfish and wild mushrooms would make the walls too soft. And the dough: what crust could support the weight of 5 gallons of molten stew?
As game time approached, we were getting worried. We set up our operations center in our client's restaurant kitchen and promptly bivouacked to a bar for some serious strategizing.
In the end - as it so often does - it came down to Julia. Julia Child's recipes have little snob appeal, but they also tend to work. We took a recipe for dough from her book on French cooking, and after rubbing the outside of a large lobster steamer with shortening, stretched and patched our dough around and over it. It was exactly the opposite of the prevailing wisdom; fortunately, we didn't know that at the time. For our dome, we used the top of the pot, and the same principle, laying our dough over the outside of the round