Raw Talent

Let me take a moment to comment on a genetic gift from my father's side. We Arons' are blessed (or, in certain situations, cursed) with highly acute senses of smell, I'm talking police dog olfactory systems, attuned to the barest sprinkling of aromatic particles in the atmosphere. The corollary is that I have one keen-ass set of taste buds and, as a result, have been detecting hidden flavors all over the Cochon kitchen: a savoriness in the apple pie crust (lard); a musty taste in the andouille sausage (file powder, made from sassafras leaves and used as a spice and thickening agent in gumbo); molasses in the fig sherbet (the fruit is cooked in Steen's cane syrup); a hint of blue cheese in the honey custard. This last flavor struck me as odd. I called Bill over to have a taste, but the moldy overtones were lost on his tongue. Suspecting that years of nicotine abuse may have compromised his sense of taste, I sought a third opinion and, sure enough, the creole cream cheese in the custard was spoiled. What a disappointment that my DNA codes for a talent so expert and yet so utterly unmarketable--that I may be doomed to stand in walk-in coolers sniffing honey chocolate cakes for spoilage while Michael Phelps' webbed feet and endless torso take him straight to the stars.

Big Apple vs. Big Easy

I've been thinking quite a bit about the differences between New York and New Orleans food cultures, and I'd like to share my thoughts. The two cities are so different in so many ways that this might be a bit of an apples/oranges comparison, but I think it's an interesting one nonetheless and one that helps to explain Cochon's success and popularity as a restaurant.
New York food, like New York City itself, is defined less by a particular regional tradition than by the elaborate patchwork of ethnic enclaves that exists within the city. In the week before I left for New Orleans alone, I enjoyed Szechuan food in Flushing, Vietnamese sandwiches in Sunset Park, El Salvadoran food in Yonkers, smoked fish on the Upper West Side, and tacos tacos tacos anywhere I could find them. This access to authentic food from virtually anywhere on the globe is one of the great luxuries of living in a city as diverse as New York. Then, alongside the vast range of ethnic food, there is the ever-growing focus on farmer's market-driven cooking, where restaurants partner with local farms to source high-quality and in-season raw ingredients for their menus. This attention to the source and quality of ingredients seems to be becoming the norm among high-end restaurants in New York, and I realize now that I've left that I was beginning to take such practices for granted. These two aspects of New York's food culture--the range of types and the quality of ingredients--are what I love most about eating out in New York, and they are often quite separate from each other (I don't go to most taquerias hoping to dine on pasture-raised carnitas), but I think sometimes the real magic happens at the intersection of the two. Chefs like Michael Psilakis or, especially, David Chang, whose menus have distinct ethnic identities but also heed the local/sustainable movement's emphasis on high-quality ingredients, have captured the current zeitgeist of New York food with particular success and have enjoyed plenty of critical acclaim as a result.
In New Orleans, something very different is going on. The food culture here centers almost entirely upon a particular set of regional cooking traditions: the Creole cuisine from within New Orleans itself, and the Cajun cuisine of surrounding Acadian Louisiana. Creole food is fascinating because it blends together the culinary styles of the various groups who settled in New Orleans during Louisiana's colonial and post-colonial period. Predominant among these is the French influence, evident in techniques like using a roux (mixture of butter and flour) to thicken soups and gumbos, in foods of French origin like beignets and remoulade, and in French names for dishes like etouffee ("smothered," in French). Also significant are the Spanish influence of rice and beans, seen in dishes like Jambalaya and dirty rice; West Indian ingredients like cayenne and hot peppers, brought to New Orleans by Haitian immigrants of the early 19th century; African okra, introduced to the Americas by slaves; American southern staples like cornbread, grits, greens and country ham; and the abundance of shrimp, crawfish, oysters and other seafood due to New Orleans' position at the mouth of the Mississippi River. This complex blend makes New Orleans perhaps the only region of the US with a truly unique regional culinary tradition.
But Creole food has in many ways fallen victim to the larger American phenomenon of commercially processed food products, and to the economic rules of a globalized food system. When I sifted through a stack of Creole cookbooks from a collection at Tulane University, I was struck by the number of recipe ingredients that would fall into Michael Pollan's category of "edible food-like substances": canned mushroom soup in a shrimp dish, instant coffee powder for a cake, Sure Jell to thicken jams and jellies, ketchup all over the place. Also, many of the ingredients listed were brand-specific, like Knox gelatin or Lea & Perrins worchestershire sauce or Philadelphia cream cheese, reinforcing the supermarket shelf mentality. Meanwhile, many New Orleans restaurants are forced by high local prices to buy crawfish from China, eroding the ties between Creole cooking and the unique geographic location that helped define it in the first place. The result of these factors, and probably others as well, is that many New Orleans restaurants are cooking mediocre food, Creole in practice but drained of the indigenous ingredients and methods that make Creole cuisine an authentic regional specialty.
I think part of the reason Cochon has gained so much national recognition is that it is reconnecting Louisiana recipes with the local ingredients and methods upon which those recipes were founded. The restaurant uses Louisiana grits and "popcorn" rice (smells like basmati to me), local shrimp, oysters and crawfish, and places a large emphasis on home-made foods, from pickles to bacon to mustard to moonshine. Cochon has thus struck that magical culinary sweet spot, having both a well-formed ethnic identity and a self-consciously ingredient-driven philosophy that elevates Cajun food without making it fancy, and I think that, as much as its devotion to pork, is why Cochon warrants Frank Bruni's comparison to Momofuku. Certainly, it places Cochon in a league far above the vast majority of Creole and Cajun restaurants in New Orleans.
In my opinion, though, Cochon could go even further. I would love to see the restaurant pay more attention to the quality of its produce. Meat definitely takes the center-stage on Cochon's menu, but vegetable accents like the tomato slice in an oyster bacon sandwich or the arugula in an andouille salad have the ability to really enhance a dish when they are delicious in their own right. For whatever reason--perhaps because partnering with small farms is hard to do in Louisiana, perhaps because keeping food costs low is a priority--Cochon is not following its commitment to top-notch local ingredients through to the vegetable corners of its menu. I wonder if it could get away with such slackness among the demandingly locavorous diners of New York...

Making Head Cheese at Midnight

My week reads like a calendar of meat handling events.
On Friday, the restaurant braised 300 pounds of beef cheeks for an off-site event, and I spent most of the evening removing the cheeks from their braising liquid. On Saturday, I carved seven enormous briskets (a whole brisket is actually made up of two separate pectoral muscles which are separated by slicing through the fatty layer that runs between them. In the supermarket you would usually buy the leaner and more attractive of these two muscles, the "first cut", but Cochon doesn't discriminate). On Monday, I sliced a substantial amount of bacon. Using the fancy commercial slicing machine, I had a Jewish New Yorker fantasy that I was working at Katz's Delicatessan, carving pastrami by hand. On a less Jewish note, during this fantasy I indulged in a piece of raw bacon. This brought back a childhood memory of catching Ella Sternberg's parents eating bacon straight from the package on Fire Island, an act that seemed to me at the time almost cannibalistic in its flesh-eating grotequeness (I think I ran home terrified). But this house-cured and house-smoked bacon was so beautifully red and marbled that I felt compelled to taste it fresh off the slicer and, hey, the Sternberg's may have been on to something--it had the delicateness of prosciutto, a sweetness from the brown sugar in the cure, and a deep smokiness common to all meat that spends time in Cochon's smoker.
These meaty toils reached a climax on Tuesday, when my final task of the evening was to assist Bill, Cochon's main meat man (he does the majority of the restaurant's butchering, curing, smoking and sausage-making), at making head cheese. Bill brought me a tray pan packed with several roasted pig heads and instructed me to tease them apart, discarding the bones and saving the meat and most of the skin. I must admit feeling a bit squeamish at first; there was something unsettling about the process of dismantling heads into their subparts, prying jaw bones full of teeth from their tongues, tearing chunks of meat from cheek cavities, separating ears from skulls and removing piggy snouts (to be chopped up and used in their entirety!). When the heads were broken down I was left with a pile of face, still vaguely reminiscent of a pig, in a Picassoesque sense. Joe, another cook, came by and hacked off a piece of tongue to munch on, so I girded my loins and followed suit and, WOW, pig tongue is delicious! Who knew. The meat has a unique softness and richness of flavor and, if you remove the outer membrane containing the taste buds, you would never guess it used to be a tongue.
As the head cheese story indicates, Cochon never fails to incorporate every last bit of the pig into its menu. Yesterday, to make use of an extra pork butt, Steven devised an impromptu menu special: slices of roasted pork with a mizuna salad, a fried yard egg (provided by a friend who has laying hens in his backyard) and a satsuma chili hollandaise sauce--a Cajun riff on eggs benedict?--which, in a moment of something approaching mentorship, Steven asked me to assist him in making. In lieu of the usual lemon juice base, we used a combination of vermouth, cider vinegar, and satsuma juice that gave the hollandaise a slightly sweet and citrusy flavor.
There is something deeply satisfying about the process of rendering an animal part, sometimes quite anatomically distinct at the outset, into an elegant menu item. To the mess of chopped up head meat Bill and I added scallion, parsley and seasonings, then poured the mixture into pans with a gelatin broth and chilled it into loaves of head cheese, served on the menu in delicate slices beneath a salad of mustard greens and garnished with crispy curls of fried pig ears. I heard a rumor that there used to be a pork tongue salad on the menu, too, and I'd like to find out the recipe and replicate it at some point in the future.

First day on the job

In recent days I've undergone something of a transformation to the extent that I may now be unrecognizable to my friends and family up North. I live in a rundown shotgun-style house for $340/month, wear an oversized black cook's uniform with the nickname "Rhino" printed on the front (borrowed from a former Cochon employee until my set of "Rachel" shirts arrives), carry a machete-like Japanese chef's knife, and ride a blue moped from the '80s.

Saturday was my first official day as a cook at Cochon and a real crash-course on the madness and excitement of working in a professional kitchen. I went in at 3:00pm to set up and do prep work and finished 9 1/2 hours later at 12:30am, the restaurant having done 250 covers in approximately five hours of dinner service. Whew.

Cochon has an open kitchen with a wood-burning oven, a big set of stoves and a deep frier up front where the customers can peer in; this is the front line, where all the appetizers and hot food get prepared and plated. In the back is the back line, invisible to the public, where the prep work and dessert plating gets done and, behind that, the dishwashing area and the walk-in cooler where a huge quantity of raw ingredients and prepared foods occupy a relatively small space.

The prep hours before dinner time have a certain frenetic quality as cooks scramble to set up their stations before the first dinner reservations start trickling in at 5:30pm. For me on that first Saturday, those hours were more of a battle to maintain five fingers on my left hand while I diced thirty pounds of onions. I might have been more optimistic about my chances for success except that the Honduran guys who make up the rank-and-file of the kitchen staff were dropping like flies around me. First Francisco, a fellow onion dicer, cut his finger, then Didier cut his, and then Marvin, a dishwasher, had a sudden allergic reaction that left his face and neck swollen like a latino Elephant Man. I also had a bit of a quality control problem on my hands because my knife skills are weak at best and I hadn't yet bought my own chef's knife so I was using an old dull one from the kitchen stash. Steven, the restaurant owner, a large and softspoken man with a baby face who nonetheless looks like he might kick some ass at any moment, came by and fingered through my pile of ragged and uneven onion chunks, which I'm convinced became more ragged and uneven under his gaze. He then demonstrated on a fresh onion how the pros do it: halve the onion, deft slices in three directions and, bam, perfect dice. If I master just that one skill during my time as a prep cook I will be satisfied.

After onions, it was potatoes, a whole fuckin' lot of them, to be peeled and diced for potato salad. I prepared an enormous pot full and, determined to prove myself as competent as any of the more masculine cooks (I am the only female in the kitchen during the dinner shift), hauled it up front towards the stove where Steven warned me not to hurt myself and then added, somberly, "There really are no heroes." I'd like to attribute this comment as much to Steven's military background as to my own shameless quest for approval but still, it stung, and I sulked unheroically back to my prep station with a slipped disk and a bruised ego.

At 5:30 the guests started trickling in and the kitchen activity began a slow crescendo that would climax around 8:30 when every table in the restaurant was full. Somewhere after 6 o'clock the first dessert orders began to roll in, one of the cooks up front yelled "postre" and handed me a ticket, and I began my routine dance back and forth between the walk-in cooler, the freezer, and the dessert table where I performed the necessary slicing, scooping, and garnishing. On an individual level, dessert plating is a rather quaint task; pop the pineapple upside down cake in the toaster, an artful drizzle of caramel sauce on the plate, a scoop of coconut sherbet on one side, warmed cake on the other, garnish of diced pineapple e voila. When the orders come in rapid succession and each one includes multiple dishes, however, it is a total shit show. Pop the pineapple cake in the toaster, grab the honey chocolate cake and lemon meringue pie and a glass of parfait from the cooler, pull three plates off the pile and get the caramel sauce down, cut slices of the cakes and plate them, get the pear sauce and a drizzle of honey onto the chocolate cake, a slice of lemon onto the pie plate, a dollop of malt cream and a maraschino cherry and a shortbread cookie onto the parfait, pull the coconut sorbet and the ice cream du jour (banana brown butter) and a frozen ice cream bowl from the freezer, get the hot pineapple cake onto the plate, scoop the sorbet and the ice cream, which is so hard it gives me a hernia, garnish of effin' diced pineapple and then I yell "I need a dessert runner please!" and members of the waitstaff come and whisk the desserts into the dining room just as I hear the word "postre" and another ticket lands on my table.

But this postre business is nothing compared to the madness that goes down up front on the line during peak dinner hours, a type of work that requires a level of coordination, focus, and physical stamina not unlike a high impact team sport. Up there, one cook acts as an "expediter", calling orders off the tickets--"fire", as in "fire brisket", means cook and plate right away whereas "on deck" means start the dish but wait to plate--which the cooks then echo back ("fire brisket, rabbit, two catfish, two roasts") in a call-and-response that seems to require a remarkable degree of short-term memory, which then begs the question, Are all cooks geniuses? The cooks fire dishes and plate them and slide them onto the wide counter at the front of the kitchen where the waitstaff runs them to their respective tables. This counter is, to me, a particularly beautiful sight to behold, the plates glistening under the heat lamps in all their porky, deep-fried glory (Cochon's trifecta is the pork product, the deep fry, and the mayonnaise or other unapologetically emulsified sauce).

The night whizzed by in a frenzy of prep work (for example, doing a flour/buttermilk/ breadcrumbs number on an enormous bowl of sliced pigs' ears) and dessert plating, punctuated by some serious eating. Throughout the evening, bits of food kept miraculously making their way back to my station: an incredible appetizer of fried alligator in a remoulade sauce--a reptilian version of the rock shrimp tempura appetizer served at some Japanese restaurants; a chunk of soft-shell crab soaked in a chili butter that tasted like a mild and more nuanced version of buffalo sauce; a plateful of duck cracklin'; an appetizer of grilled shrimp with a pickled tomato relish; a single wood oven-roasted oyster in an anchovy butter sauce; a taste of beef jerky here, a boudin ball there, and on and on, with a plate of crunchy pickled cucumbers providing the only respite from the relentlessly lipidic dishes. I thought surely this omakase special I was enjoying was part of my initial training, a way for me to acquaint myself with the menu before the real work began. But, in fact, I have since been instructed to never eat before work, always arrive starving and it seems as though I am free to order food whenever I please. I fear this nifty arrangement might eventually do the impossible and exhaust my appetite for pork but, for the moment, I am knee-deep in cochon and loving it.

At the end of every night so far a moment has come, almost abruptly, when the madness dies down and the mood in the kitchen relaxes and Steven changes out of his chef's uniform and comes around and passes out cans of PBR. On Saturday, this moment was accompanied by the other cooks discussing their (ambitious, I thought) plans to wake up early and start pounding beers in preparation for the Saints game, a conversation that highlighted my position, being neither a Saints fan nor an early morning beer pounder, as a cultural minority in the Cochon kitchen. For the next hour, we scrub tables and wrap up food and drink our beers and accost the dishwashers with bowls and trays and silverware. Once the doors of the restaurant are locked up for the night, waiters and bartenders congregate on stools at the bar up front and smoke cigarettes and joke loudly. Witnessing this scene feels a little like going backstage at a play and catching the cast out of costume, and it is during these after-hours moments when I am most aware that I have become part of a strange and wonderful restaurant kitchen subculture.