Free Yes, Chef by Marcus Samuelsson Page B

another sign of care and respect. There may have been clear lines of status in the hierarchy of the kitchen, but we had a common goal, and everyone understood that his contributions mattered.
    Bengt, one of Tidbloms’ cooks, lived near my parents in Sävedalen and gave me a ride home whenever we worked the same shifts. He was only a couple of years older than me, but he drove his ten-year-old Volvo like a fogey, slow and cautious, both hands on the wheel. As we puttered along the E20 highway, we talked about our plans to conquer the cooking world.
    “My next step,” he announced one night, “will be to work for Leif and Crister.” Leif Mannerström and Crister Svantesson often worked as a team and were currently helming La Scala, Göteborg’s most upscale eatery. Leif had an eye for opportunities: He was well connected to politicians and businessmen, and typically served in more of a management role. Crister was a creative type, with a reckless flair in everything he did, but no one would dispute that a talent for cooking was in his DNA. Despite the name, the menu at La Scala was French, with the finest wine list in town, and its location near the city’s concert hall ensured a steady flow of well-heeled guests.
    I had a little trouble swallowing Bengt’s confident pronouncement and let him know. He was competent, but I didn’t think he was that much better than me. I really believed I could get there.
    “Listen,” he said, ignoring my lack of enthusiasm, “if you do well at Tidbloms, if you impress them, I’ll see what I can do about getting you into La Scala down the line, too.” He didn’t even have his own job yet, but he was promising to bring
me
along? I would soon learn that this was the way among chefs and their tribes: You follow a great chef anywhere he might go.
    I learned something with every shift. My first week, I learned how a proper fish stock was made. Where my grandmother threw a mishmash of bones into a pot with water and chopped red onions, mixing salmon and haddock and letting it cook at a furious boil, Tidbloms used only finer, more delicate fish, like turbot and sole. They added fresh thyme and parsley, peppercorns, white wine, and the white part of the leek, cooking it slowly, barely simmering, coaxing out flavors rather than bludgeoning them. I learned how to fillet fish faster and without wasting any flesh. I learned how to slice just under the tough, pearly silver skin when cleaning a tenderloin of beef so that I could pull it away from the bone more easily, and how much simpler it was to fillet a tenderloin than a rack of lamb. Most of all, I learned what it meant to never gear down, to work with a constant sense of purpose. In school, we’d do only one thing at a time: Today, we’re going to make whipped cream. Today, we’re going to make veal stock. At Tidbloms, everyone had five things on his plate, and all of them needed to be done right then.
    After four weeks, when my time with Tidbloms was just about up, I couldn’t bear the thought of going back to Mosesson full-time. I went to see Jorgen between lunch and dinner services. He had no office, so any clean stretch of counter could become his desk. That day, I found him at the salad station, writing out a menu for the next week. I waited for him to notice me, but his head remained bent over his task. I cleared my throat, and he looked up.
    “Hey, Marcus. What’s going on?” Jorgen asked.
    I was so afraid of him saying no that the plan I’d hatched came tumbling out in one nonstop flood: “Chef, I can’t go back to that rinky-dink school restaurant when I could be here working with you. I have to do a certain number of hands-on cooking hours for school, and if I did all my cooking hours for free here at Tidbloms, do you think you’d be able to sign for them so I can get school credit? You’d have to let my cooking teacher know it’s OK with you and then sign off on my hours at the end of each reporting period. I can