The Pot Thief Who Studied Escoffier Read Online Free PDF Page A

looked at the people in the kitchen, it made perfect sense.
    No one spoke. The only movement was the narrowing of Ms. Mure’s eyes and the reddening of her face.
    “Everyone back to the dining room,” Kuchen barked.

9

    I waited until the first few had filed through the door and tried to blend into the crowd. Once in the dining room, I blended out and went to the private dining room where I began to arrange my knives and tools on the shelves.
    At one point I picked up a loop tool, sat down at the wheel and pretended to take a bit of excess clay off the rim of an imaginary pot. My effort lacked the grandeur of the kitchen parade I had just witnessed, but at least no one was going to yell at me.
    When the glazing chemicals showed up, I checked the contents against my order slip. There was calcium carbonate, flint, titanium dioxide, barium carbonate, potash, borax, and black iron oxide.
    Just after I put the chemicals on the shelf, Scruggs came to tell me lunch was ready. Maybe he should have said food was ready – I don’t think Salzburger Nockerln qualifies as a lunch. Of course I didn’t know what it was when Machlin Masoot announced it. I did know who Masoot was because I remembered Kuchen saying “I have a pâtissier, Machlin Masoot, who knows well the Viennoiseries.” I figured Salzburger Nockerln was one of the Viennoiseries. Which told me nothing.
    When the wispy-haired Mansfield had announced we were having Gebratener Leberkäse for breakfast, he said nothing else. That and the way he cowed under Kuchen’s rebuke made me suspect he was diffident. Masoot, by comparison, was quite voluble. A rotund fellow with a floppy white toque and a black Van Dyck beard, he seemed to relish being on stage.
    “We serve today Salzburger Nockerln. The preparation requires eight steps but fewer stations because some stations are used more than once. The steps are measuring and mixing the dry ingredients, separating eggs, whipping the whites, preparing the butter and jam, combining dry and wet, baking and plating. Everyone moved against the clock in an orderly fashion.”
    He paused for effect and smiled. “Of course in this case we had real ingredients to work with.”
    There was a bit of nervous laughter. Kuchen looked pleased and proud.
    Scruggs, who I now grudgingly considered my guide, said to me sotto voce, “it’s a raisin soufflé.”
    He was basically correct. I looked it up later in Escoffier’s Ma Cuisine. Salzburger Nockerln is made by combining butter and currant jelly in a soufflé dish. Egg whites, vanilla, sugar, and lemon zest are combined and beaten to a froth. Egg yolks are folded into the whites mixture along with a little flour, and the dish is baked to a light gold.
    “How do you know all these Austrian dishes?” I asked Scuggs.
    “You think cause I’m black, I don’t know nothing?”
    I was getting a little irritated by his constant scolding. “No, I don’t think that. I’m white, and I never heard of this dish.”
    “You know any black people?”
    I smiled. “I know you.”
    “You don’t know me well enough to count me.”
    “I dated a black woman named Sharice,” I said. That was stretching the truth. Sharice and I flirt with each other, and we did have lunch together once, but calling it a date was a reach.
    “You think that makes you a great white liberal?”
    “You asked me if I knew any black people. Sharice is one I know.”
    “The only one, I reckon.”
    “So?”
    He stared at me menacingly for a few seconds. Then he said, “I know what’s in them dishes because I see it and smell it when I washes them.”

10

    The clay showed up that afternoon. I told the trucker to drive to the back and I’d open the delivery door for him. It was already open when I got there.
    As I approached the opening, I heard voices out on the dock. Something about the tones sounded serious, so I waited inside figuring it was better for the arrival of the truck to break up the conversation than for