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preparing sheep intestines for seventy-five people and the quantities of flour, eggs, and goat cheese needed to make 1,500 pieces of tortelloni—not without use, I reflected, if I found myself crossing the Atlantic on the
Queen Mary,
say, and the whole kitchen staff suddenly died and word went round that a guy on board had mastered two recipes from the Babbo kitchen bible (a blue notebook containing instructions for every dish in the history of the restaurant, kept on a shelf between a juicer and a machine that pulverizes beef cheeks into a muddy-looking goo), and hundreds of passengers, fearful of going hungry, huddled together and urged me into the ship’s galley, where, after searching through the cupboards and a small walk-in, I found a sufficient quantity of sheep’s intestines to put my knowledge to a practical purpose.
    Elisa was routinely greeting chefs-in-training at seven in the morning and telling them how her kitchen worked. Every three months or so, that’s what she did. They needed her, to complete their studies, and she, I was starting to learn, needed them to complete all the things she had to do in a day. The difference between them and me was obvious and accounted for my continuing testing time. She kept thinking of me as someone who should know what he was doing. One morning, she instructed me to run to the basement for twenty-five oranges and fifty lemons. “Use your apron,” she said, and then, noting my confused look, sighed and gathered the two corners of hers like a hammock, by way of illustration. When I returned, she held up a zester. It’s the thing you use to peel a citrus fruit. “You
do
know how to use a zester?” she asked with such poorly disguised irritation that I understood her to be saying, “Don’t tell me you’re so ignorant you don’t know what this is.” I then became very reluctant to admit that the zester she gave me wasn’t zesting—it was so dull it was mauling the fruit—until my cutting board was a sticky battlefield of maimed oranges and lemons, and I hesitantly suggested that maybe this zester wasn’t one of the kitchen’s better zesters.
    The trickiness of my role was confirmed one Friday, always a long, stressful day because you’re preparing food for not only that evening but the whole weekend. I was in the walk-in, trying to find a place for a tray of morel mushrooms. There was no place. Elisa was on the floor, transferring chicken stock from a twenty-quart container into a twelve-quart container, because she needed a twenty-quart container and none was to be found. (Chicken stock was the only acceptable meat stock—one made from anything else would be too French—and every morning a pot was filled with the feet and water and boiled for hours. Chicken feet are a vivid sight—like human hands without a thumb, curled up and knuckly—and the first time I saw them, bobbing in their giant vat, they looked as though they were attached to the arms of so many people, clawing at the churning water, trying to climb out, the bubbling pot a portal from Hell, there in the back of the kitchen, against the wall, the hottest place.)
    Andy was in the walk-in as well, devising what he called a “walk-in special,” a feature of the weekends, to clear out an ingredient that wasn’t selling before it went off. “Crispy branzino” was a walk-in special, because “we’ve bought enough branzino for twenty a night but have been doing only nine, and it’s nearly Sunday, so we’ve got to move it or toss it, and there’s some porcini, which hasn’t been moving either, I don’t know why, and there’s always pancetta, so let’s reinvent our fish dish with porcini and crunchy pancetta on top and sell the hell out of it.”
    Gina DePalma was in the walk-in, too, and she was the problem. Gina was the pastry chef—an executive role, like Elisa’s—and the two women ran the morning kitchen. Elisa arrived at six and started on a long list of foods that needed preparing