Beaten, Seared, and Sauced by Jonathan Dixon Read Free Book Online Page A

will you now need to buy?
    And if this recipe calls for 1 tablespoon of vinegar, and you are doing 6.2 times the recipe, how many milliliters of oil will you need?
    It was basic stuff. It took very little to recall the required math from high school. Plus, we were given worksheets with all the equations and conversions we could possibly need to aid in the calculations. When asked to do an equation, it took me just a few seconds; Stephen was even quicker. I hadn’t asked him his age, but I guessed he was around twenty-five or twenty-six. He’d been a business major at Georgia Tech and could probably do these numbers reflexively.
    Sometimes I’d look around the room, though, and see that some of the kids sat breathing through their mouths and looking blankly at the board.
    The instructor, Michael Nothnagel, loved math. He was tall, thin,with thick glasses and nearly black hair. He had almost certainly been called a nerd more than once in his life, and he was instantly likable, bouncing around the room, drunk on numbers, trying to make his enthusiasm infectious. It didn’t take. Around noon, when the class ended, the sun came through the windows and fell on the deep green carpeting. The fluorescent lights buzzed. And most of the room’s eyes followed the track of the second hand as it spun around and around toward 12:00.
    On other days, we attended the Food Safety class. We learned the rudiments of sanitation and proper temperatures—and exactly what happens to you when you get food poisoning or eat contaminated fish. Most reef fish, for example, weighing more than five pounds, are likely to harbor ciguatoxin, which leads to ciguatera. Ciguatera will keep you sick for years. At the onset you will vomit uncontrollably, and your gastrointestinal system will betray you. Your fingers and toes will tingle. Later, and for a long, long time, your nervous system will reverse the sensations of hot and cold.
    We also learned at exactly what temperatures and under what conditions bacteria will multiply. We discovered that all sorts of toxins, viruses, and bacteria lurked on or around our food. Listeria can cause miscarriages and death. E. coli can make you dead. If you stuff a turkey at Thanksgiving, and the temperature of the stuffing does not hit 165 degrees, you are creating a place where salmonella can thrive and be fruitful. At the onset of anaphylactic shock, when a person allergic to nuts accidentally eats, say, a filbert, they will experience light-headedness and swelling of the face, hands, and feet. They will begin wheezing, be stricken with cramps. Their throat will close and their blood pressure will drop. They will lose consciousness and then die. We came to understand, in essence, that food can hurt you.
    Gastronomy class was polarizing. It was devoted to the theory and aesthetics of dining, and the reading assignments were sometimes dense tracts full of postmodern jargon and references to Foucault and Lacan. We were introduced to some of the great culinarians: Antonin Carême, the father of haute cuisine; the godlike Auguste Escoffier,who codified the essence and details of French fine dining in his book
Le Guide Culinaire
, upon which the entire curriculum of the CIA is based. A lot of the students were bored out of their minds, unable to get their heads around the idea they were required to learn so much that had absolutely no connection to actual, physical cooking. They’d perk up at the mention of someone contemporary—Keller, Grant Achatz, Ferran Adrià—but an invocation of Fernand Point or Paul Bocuse or Joël Robuchon—people I found fascinating, worthy of awe—left eyes glazed over.
    One day in Gastronomy, we were called to the front of the room for each of us to pick up a paper plate with a selection of light and dark chocolates. The first and last chocolates were pitch dark, with a dozen chocolates in between, moving in a color continuum from light to increasingly brown. The instructor asked us to eat