Free Have Blade Will Travel: The adventures of a traveling chef by David Paul Larousse

the meantime, Billy Byrd and I continued to bond. One afternoon I watched him cut double pork chops from a loin of pork.  After all the chops were cut, there remained another six-to-eight inches of the butt end of the loin.  From this he trimmed four-to-five-ounce slices of meat, then pounded them into scaloppines, about one-quarter-of-an-inch thick.  He then put them through “standard breading procedure” – seasoned flour, salt, pepper and paprika; then beaten eggs; and finally into dry bread crumbs seasoned aggressively with dried oregano and basil, salt and pepper. 
     “I hope that’s not what I think it is,” I blurted out. 
    “What’s that?” he asked, looking up.
    “Veal Parmigiana?”
    He laughed, “Yes, young man, indeed it is.  At least in this elite establishment.” 
    “I thought that was against the law?” 
    “What, serving pork in place of veal?  As in `truth in advertising’?”
    “I’m referring to honesty in restaurant operations, and standards of culinary excellence.  This is incorrect.” 
    “You’re right, of course, but I am only the Sous-chef here.  If Dave (Chef Jacobs) tells me to use pork for the Veal Parmigiana, then I use pork for the Veal Parmigiana.  And you know where that directive comes down from.”
    I was stunned.  “But what if someone is allergic to pork, or prohibited from eating it because of religious beliefs?”
    “No one has complained so far.”
    Billy was a great source of information and lore, and most everything he lectured about was as fascinating to me as it was to him.  About 5:30 each afternoon, kitchen work would come to a halt.  Some of the crew would use the break to eat, while others would step outside to smoke a cigarette.  Byrd was very punctual and unvarying in his eating habits.  He’d make himself a fine salad to accompany a pork chop or piece of fish he had thrown onto the broiler grill.  His salad always consisted of cut and washed lettuce greens topped with fresh fruit and vegetables, the fruit sprinkled with salt.  I’d never seen that before, and asked him why he did it.
    “Well, for one thing, we lose a lot of salt in a twelve-hour shift.  Salt tablets are rough on the stomach and difficult for the body to absorb in such concentration.  It’s better to get it in food.”  He was right about that.  There wasn’t a night that summer when I hadn’t ended up completely drenched in perspiration.
    Byrd continued: “Unripened fruit is sour because its sugar content is in the form of starch.  As it ripens, the starch converts into sugar, while the acid content declines.  Yet sweetness, as our taste buds perceive it, is not produced solely by the presence of sugar, but by sugar in combination with amino acids and ionic compounds.  So, the absence of acid has a direct negative correlation to our ability to detect sweetness.  That’s why adding salt, an acid compound, actually enhances the perception of the sweetness of the fruit.  That’s in addition to replenishing the salt we lose in this harsh industrial environment we call a production kitchen.”  
    “Oh.  I see.”  I watched him munch away at his salad for a few moments, then went outside for some air. 
    Late one afternoon, after the crew was well-prepped for the evening’s production, we had some time to kill, and pretty much do whatever we wanted.  Malcolm was in a frisky mood, and flipped a lemon to me.  I caught it, as he stepped back towards the steam kettle.  He picked up the four-foot-long wooden paddle that was used to stir huge quantities of sauce and soups assembled in the sixty-gallon kettle, and he lifted it paddle up to his shoulder.  He was hunched over slightly, with knees bent, and motioned to me to pitch.  I accepted the invitation, and lobbed an easy one, which Mal slapped into a fast grounder to my left.  I ran for it, picked it up, spun 180-degrees, and threw that poor lemon just about as hard as I could.  To this day, I