piece of poultry or whatever.”
“So, don’t brown the rabbit?” he asked.
“No. Yes. Brown the rabbit, yes, I’m just saying take care not to over-brown it or to use too high a heat. It can make the meat have a stringy, tough quality even after the braise.”
“Okay, I got it,” he said, with a little unsettling tone that makes me, on the platform in Poughkeepsie, feel useless and not confident in Table 7’s experience with the rabbit later this evening.
“Okay, and then, Carlos?”
“Yes, Boss?”
“It’s not fatty, you know, and the bones are quite small. You can’t just leave it to braise and forget about it. It can only braise about twenty-five minutes and then it’s done. So, when the joints are loose but not falling apart. It’s finished.”
“What joints?” he asks.
Now I’m pacing on the platform, dodging the few people who have exited the train and are filing toward the station.
“The joint between the thigh and the leg. It’s got to have give and motion but if it separates, you’ve gone too far. If it’s too underdone, it won’t recover in the pickup. It has to be braised properly in the prep, otherwise it’s just hot but not adequately cooked through when they pick it up at service.” As I’m trying to explain this, the platform has completely emptied and I am the last one standing on it. A train employee with a rolling garbage can enters the empty train to collect discarded newspapers, coffee cups, and breakfast wrappers.
“Okay, boss, I got it. Have fun up there. See you tomorrow!”
I took a taxi from the train station to the campus and stood for a moment where the driver dumped me at the bottom of the circular drive. I felt like I was at an Ivy League college in New England that I would have been rejected from had I applied. There were big brick buildings and sweeping views of the surrounding valley. Students were flocking across campus in every direction, in a hurry, but instead of low-cut jeans and cashmere sweaters and backpacks, all were dressed in checks and whites and carrying their knife rolls. Ivy-covered brick buildings in which to learn the five mother sauces!
In the lobby of the building I met up with the other women chefs who were also just arriving, and Cat Cora came in behind me, looking so fresh and excited and pretty. I immediately got caught up in her good energy and natural kindness, and the dangerous mood that had started to take hold of me on the train quickly evaporated. I shook hands with the few panelists I had never met, and I warmly hugged the women I already knew. It’s not that uncommon, after a very short while, to feel like you know all of the other women in your industry, as the pool gets small fast. If there’s an event for women, we are all trotted out sooner or later, and we meet each other with some frequency.
That should have made me think, then, while greeting my co-panelists, that maybe there was some validity to the conference after all. If there were so few of us visible in the industry that we kept seeing each other at so many events, there must still be a problem with employing female chefs. I suddenly recalled running into a male colleague on the street in New York one summer. He’s not a chef, but he owns some restaurants and has an excellent female chef at the helm of his places. He was walking down the sunny street with his tall, elegant mother, who was visiting from San Diego. “Hey!” we exclaimed to each other. “Hello there!” He introduced me to his mother as one of the top, one of the best female chefs in New York City.
I laughed. “Well, there are only four of us in New York, so I don’t know about that.”
We all laughed. And then, without even thinking about it, I said, “Now, if we could just get that word ‘female’ out of the sentence.” And suddenly, this dead cheerlessness came over the sidewalk, and all of us felt awkward, taking that moment to reimagine the same sentence without the qualifying word female. “Mom, this is one of the top, one of the best chefs in New York.” I wished I hadn’t mentioned it. But on this morning in Hyde Park, I was fixed on dismissing the validity of the conference. Even though I can’t understand for one second what the difference