Beaten, Seared, and Sauced by Jonathan Dixon

the pros and cons of farm-raised fish. Each day we’d have a tasting of different varieties of the same species: cod, salmon, clams, and on the last lecture day, we’d taste different caviars.
    We all took notes, of course. And I found myself filling page after page after page, in an almost incomprehensible scrawl, trying to keep up with what Viverito was saying. I was in awe; the guy seemed to know everything. He could go off on long, long tangents about the history of fish farming in Hawaii, countless ways of preparing catfish or crab, the disgusting conditions of shrimp beds in Vietnamese rivers.
    There was also a daily game of
Jeopardy!
He’d move alphabetically through the roster and we’d pick a question in a given category from the overhead slide projected on the screen behind Viverito’s desk. If you got it wrong, he went to the next name. You lost your daily quiz points. There were three slides’ worth of this stuff and it could be endless if people kept missing the answers. He’d go on until he proved his point or got bored. He sounded bored pretty frequently. Not with the subject matter. But bored with us as a group and the flubbed answers and the hacked-up fish. His eyes were always red, but if he fixed them on you, you knew you had done something particularly stupid.
    The first two days were dense with spoken and silent recriminations. But fragments of the guy’s personality began to leak out. One of the class members, Dylan, didn’t show up after the first day. Viverito asked where he was.
    Alyssa spoke up. “Dylan really wants to be here, but he isn’t the most ambitious student. He just … he needs to be more motivated.”
    “So
why
exactly isn’t he here?”
    Alyssa was a pretty seventeen-year-old, with a soft face. She looked distinctly uncomfortable right now. “It’s too early for him. He said he needed to switch into a later class.”
    His eyes narrowed, and he shook his head side to side almost imperceptibly. He didn’t say anything for a minute until he began that day’s
Jeopardy!
    Everyone was fucking the answers up—me, Adam, Brookshire, Lombardi, all the kids.
    Finally, Viverito just couldn’t contain himself. “I have students that are really proud that they’ve never been into the library. They say it has nothing to do with cooking. My advice to you, and not just to succeedin this class, is this: figure out where that library is. It isn’t just the building you went to on your orientation. If one day you think that you haven’t really learned anything that day, pick up a cookbook and teach yourself something. Otherwise it’s been a waste of twenty-four hours.
    “Take a calendar and block off class time. Then block off studying time. Then go to a vineyard and learn how a grape grows, learn how it’s picked, learn how it’s crushed. How it ferments, how it’s bottled. Go on all kinds of mini field trips. And relate them to what you learn. When I went to culinary school, I always said ‘God, I wish I knew more about
this.
’
    “Go learn so you have a basis of knowledge. We’re in the Hudson Valley—we’re at a great advantage. It breaks my heart when I hear a student say, ‘I’m so bored. This place is boring. There’s nothing to do here.’ It breaks my heart.”
    Obviously, I knew exactly where the library was, but I stayed there later that afternoon and going forward. My homework answers were exceptionally detailed and elaborate. I spent even more time studying. It wasn’t for Viverito’s benefit, however, and not because I was scared of him. The more hours I spent around the guy, I found it harder and harder to stomach the idea of being the person who took the shortcut.
    I WATCHED MY BLOOD trickle bright and red under the heavy fluorescence of the CIA fish room. The gills of a fish—a sea bass, in this case—are heavy, crude syringes, livid with bacteria. There’s nothing on them you want introduced under the skin. I’d been scaling the fish; I’d been