teaching us the fundamentals of both Chinese and Japanese cooking. The
Chinese portion of the class was terrific. When it came time to fill us in
on the tastes of Japan, however, our teacher was more interested in
giving us an extended lecture on the Rape of Nanking. His loathing of
the Japanese was consuming. In between describing the bayoneting of
women, children and babies in World War II, he'd point at a poster of a
sushi/sashimi presentation on the wall, and say in his broken, heavily
accented English, "That a raw a fish. You wanna eat that? Hah! Japanese
shit!" Then he'd go back into his dissertation on forced labor, mass
executions, enslavement, hinting darkly that Japan would pay, sooner or
later, for what it had done to his country.
The joke went that everyone gained 5 pounds in baking class. I could see
what they meant. It was held in 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