by Anya Regelin
The first question that I am usually asked when I say that I am a chef is if I work in restaurants. I always answer this way: no, I work privately, but I worked in restaurants for years. I don’t deny that there is a hierarchy in the cooking world, and I feel like I’m on a constant quest to prove myself. In three and four-star restaurants where I was trained, private chefs are thought of as hacks – those who couldn’t make it with the big, bad, boys.
The second question that I usually am asked is what my specialty is. For the past seven years, I’ve worked as a kosher chef. I make fancy food, food that you would see in any fine dining restaurant, but altered to fit within the laws of the kosher kitchen.
The essence of a good private chef is ability to give your clients exactly what they want. My clients often point to pictures from magazines and Thomas Keller cookbooks and ask me to reproduce dishes in accordance with their strict guidelines. Keeping meat and dairy separate is just the beginning. I quickly learned that you can’t baste a roast with margarine, and that although you can work miracles with non-dairy creamer, most of it tastes plastic and gross. But what causes me the most problems, the most heartache, and the most lost night’s sleep is the weekly pot of chicken soup.
Every Friday night I prepare a Shabbos meal of, at minimum, four courses. The fish might be seared tuna or roasted sea bass and the meat might be baby lamb or duck, but chicken soup is always the anchor of the meal. I can never get it right.
When my clients first hired me, I was not allowed to make the soup. I worked at one end of the very large kitchen shaping perfect chocolate sable shells or pairing artichokes down to their hearts as I watched my boss give directions to her housekeepers. It seemed simple, submerging whole chickens and a few root vegetables in a large pot of water, adding parsley, and peppercorns. But I gasped as they sprinkled the whole pot with yellow powder from a plastic container, turned up the heat, and brought it all to a rolling boil.
As time went on and I became more comfortable with the family, I suggested that perhaps I could take over the soup preparation. I had plans to wow them, and I would do it restaurant style. I slow roasted the bones to enrich the stock and deglazed everything with white wine. It simmered gently for hours, and using a fine mesh cone, I strained a perfectly clear broth. The carrots, parsnips, and celery were cut into rectangular batons, and the chicken was perfectly poached.
Opinions were never given about the complicated fancy food that I prepared each week. But the one thing that everyone felt free to comment on is the soup. It’s too rich, not rich enough, too salty, not enough salt, too much chicken, too many vegetables, not enough carrots, and always, the wrong type of noodles. Each kid, and there are five of them, was encouraged to voice their opinion.
One liked skinny egg noodles, one wide egg noodles, one little tubes of pasta and not egg noodles at all. Only carrots for one. Only leeks for the other. Some want white meat chicken, some dark meat. I spent an hour every Friday making mini matzo balls the size of nickels for a year before I was told that no one actually ate them.
When guests were invited, I orchestrated the serving of the meal, individually plating each course, carefully ladling out steaming bowls of soup.
“What do you think?” I heard one of my clients ask the other, spoons in hand, at one of their larger dinner parties.
When the answer was, “delicious,” full-blown neurosis set in. What did I do? What made this pot so different from all the other pots? How was I going to live up to this proclamation?
I asked my Jewish friends for pointers. I am a Jew, but not a chicken soup Jew; it was an event when my mother made a pot (although she would probably deny this). One friend told me that her sister added beef bones and “different” vegetables to the stock, so one day I added zucchini and mushrooms. My boss peered into the pot where it was cooking and gasped before I quickly fished it all out.
I attended some larger kosher catered events where food was served en mass to upwards of two hundred and found the soup watery and overly salty. I went to every Jewish deli I could think of and left with uninspiring samples. After a year of trial and error, I came up with a recipe for a consistent broth that my clients deemed passable. I separated each vegetable, each type of noodle, and chicken in containers so that the housekeepers could tailor each individual bowl according to preference, a virtual salad bar of soup fixings.
Recently, one of the housekeepers was with me in the kitchen as I was putting the last touches on the Shabbos meal. The pot of broth was warming on a low flame and I was plating the fish course when I happened to notice her dump my carefully separated vegetables, chicken, and four types of noodles into the pot.
“What are you doing?” I yelled.
‘”What do you mean,” she said, “we always do like this.”
“You mix everything together?”
“Yes, this is what she wants. Later, we go fishing.”
I wondered how the big, bad boys of the cooking world would react. Would they yell or throw something or quit in frustration? When I worked in restaurants, my job was clear. But here, I realized the quest would never end.
Anya Regelin is working on her MFA in Creative Writing at The New School in New York City where she is also a free-lance writer, private chef, and the Deputy-Editor of The Inquisitive Eater. The Tasteless Chef is a regular column chronicling her exploits and misadventures in (and around) the kitchen
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