Free The Pot Thief Who Studied Escoffier by J. Michael Orenduff Page B

promoting Maria Salazar to chef de partie. She’s currently the saucier. An appropriate title for the little tart. I’ll admit she knows her job, but this promotion will be earned in the bedroom, not the kitchen.”
    For someone who didn’t have time to talk to me, Helen had a great deal to say.
    When lunch was served, Kuchen invited Mure to comment on the dish, but she said she preferred to wait until after the meal.
    When the top was lifted from the elaborate tureen, I knew immediately where the chopped bacon had gone – into the Speckknödel.
    “It’s a bacon dumpling,” whispered Scruggs who had again insinuated himself next to me.
    He was right, but the term ‘bacon dumpling’ cannot do justice to the dish Mure had prepared. Because of my interest in food, I looked up almost every item served even though most of them did not get copied into my personal cookbook. This one did, but I wondered whether I could ever duplicate what Mure had done.
    It seems so simple. Stale bread, onion, bacon, warm milk, eggs, parsley, salt, pepper, nutmeg, chives, and chicken broth.
    Start with canned chicken broth or chicken bullion cubes, and you might as well not bother. You already know the bacon has to be cut precisely, but you also have to figure the ration of lean to fat. The fat strips are not chopped because as you sauté the bacon you want to be able to spot them easily and pull them out when you have exactly enough fat. If the temperature is allowed to climb too high, the bacon will darken too much, imparting too strong a flavor and too much crunch. Let the temperature go to low, and you’ll have a fatty taste and rubbery texture.
    And sautéing the bacon is just the beginning. Even small things like the parsley must be attended to with care. Chop it too soon and the oils escape. Chop it immediately before dropping it in the broth and it can add bitterness.
    When I sipped the first spoonful of broth around the dumplings, I knew what Helen meant by gahm. It was not merely a liquid with great flavor. It was a spoonful of pure flavor. The chicken, bacon, onions, and other flavors had coalesced into a new and wonderful thing.
    When Helen stood up, there was spontaneous applause.
    She bowed and sat down without saying a word.
    I thought about the breakfast casserole Miss Gladys had brought me on Sunday. It, too, started with stale bread. I pictured Ms. Helen Mure and Miss Gladys Claiborne going head-to-head at the Pillsbury Bake-off and chuckled. Then I wondered if Helen Mure had gone head-to-head with Barry Stiles. They were both hot-tempered.  Not much to go on, but enough to put her on my suspect list.

22

    I called Rafael Pacheco after lunch and told him about Barry’s death. I urged him to come up and meet Molinero and Kuchen because they needed to make an emergency hire before the Grand Opening on Monday. He promised to be there at nine the next morning.
    For dinner that night, Kuchen announced Buergenlandische Gaenseleber prepared by Alain Billot with a special sauce by Maria Salazar. I turned to Scruggs. “Goose liver and onions,” he said. I left the table.
    Two hours later Maria entered my work area.
    “Slaving over a hot kiln?”
    She didn’t look like someone who would seduce Kuchen to get promoted. She was pretty enough to seduce anyone, but she looked too fresh and wholesome to do so. Like one of the Von Trapp daughters all grown up, but that was probably just because I had been working on edelweiss designs. Or is the plural edelweissen? Edelweißes?
    “I’ll get you a chair,” I offered.
    “Don’t bother,” she said and plopped down on the floor. She crossed her ankles in front of her, holding them in her hands, knees sticking out to the side like a little girl. She blew a few strands of hair off her face. She smiled at me. “Why did you skip dinner?”
    “I don’t like liver.”
    “It was goose liver. Have you ever tasted it?”
    “No.”
    “Well, don’t think of the awful liver and onions