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couple of cooking classes around the city: a knife skills class at the Institute of Culinary Education and a sauce-making class at the New School. Each one lasted for just a few hours, and both were great. But they didn’t even begin to approach being comprehensive. Still, I left the knife class knowing how to hold a knife properly and how to dice an onion, and the sauce class with a basic understanding of how to make a pan sauce.
    I went to the Strand, the used and discount bookstore on Broadway, and bought more cookbooks: Thomas Keller’s
The French Laundry Cookbook
and
Bouchon
, Marcus Samuelsson’s
Aquavit, Larousse Gastronomique, The Union Square Cafe Cookbook
. I studied the recipes, trying to distill things down to their basics and essentials; beneath all the opulence of a French Laundry dish, what was Thomas Keller really doing? Braising? Okay, then what was he telling me about braising? Nelly gave me a present of
The Babbo Cookbook
by Mario Batali. For my parents’ sixtieth birthdays, I made the braised short ribs from
Babbo
and they still reminisce about it years later. Anytime I did well at the stove, it stoked the enthusiasm up a few degrees. Anytime I didn’t, it felt like a crisis, like the weather of my twenties was coming back.
    Through a friend of a friend, I went to a restaurant in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn and met with the owner, Paris Smeraldo. The restaurant, a bistro-type place that had gotten a nice write-up in the
New York Times
, was called Northeast Kingdom. Paris offered to let me do a
stage
—an unpaid stint working in the kitchen to learn—and I took him up on it. The chef was a twenty-six-year-old from London, Andy Gilbert, blond, reed thin, and well over six feet tall, and on my first day, no one had told him I’d be coming. After an awkward explanation, he led me back to the kitchen, gave me a knife, a cutting board, and an apron, and had me slice mushrooms. Then onions. Then carrots. The menu’s big sellers were macaroni and cheese, a Berkshire pork chop with an herbed cream sauce, and chicken pot pies. Most of it was assembled ahead of dinner service and fired on order. “This is rustic food,” Andy said. “You don’t need to try and be exact—a rough chop is fine.” The kitchen was a tiny box and had three worktables, a convectionoven, and two convection burners. Felipe, the sous-chef, was the only other employee in there. Several days a week, after I finished work at Interboro, I’d arrive at 2:00 in the afternoon to turn big vegetables into little vegetables for several hours. I’d watch the first hour of dinner service. When things got busy, I was in the way and I’d get sent out. After a week or so, I was making the oven fries, and, on Saturdays, when I’d get there at 10:00, I’d spend my first hour making crepes.
    Both Paris and Andy held cooking school in some measure of derision. Whatever you needed to know, they’d say, could be picked up by doing it. But after a point, there wasn’t much more for me to be shown, something Andy recognized. “You know,” he said to me as I cut up pieces of chicken thigh for the pot pies, “there are a lot of other restaurants out there where you could learn. I mean, there are places out there that have actual gas stoves.”
    I wanted to stay. I was feeling good about what I was doing—no one was correcting me when I chopped onions, so I must have been doing it right. And I thought that if I could do some of the service cooking, I’d get a few of the basics down: timing, speed, multitasking. I kept pressing Andy to let me man the oven and two burners for dinner and he kept refusing. But then Andy’s wife started bugging him about being at the restaurant six days a week, and he asked if I wanted to try cooking brunch. Yes, I told him. Yes, I did.
    The following weekend, I was there at 9:00; brunch began at eleven. I made my crepes, got the potatoes in the oven, cooked bacon, had eggs at the ready. I divided quiche