Under the Table by Katherine Darling Page A

her know that I was using them at last.
    Once all the dough had been rolled out and placed, more or less successfully, into the tart rings, and after another long stint in the lowboy refrigerators, we were ready to assemble the tarts and bake them. First, in went the simple, rustic apple filling we made, now cool to the touch. Next came the thin apple slices on top for garniture.
    For Americans, cleanliness may be next to godliness, but for the French, garniture is God. We carefully peeled, halved, and cored two more apples each, and then set each half on the cutting board, on its side. Using our chef ’s knives, and all of our remaining patience, we made paper-thin apple slices, hundreds of them. Very few of them were actually any good, but by the time I had worked through my second apple, they were looking a bit more even. The apple slices were then fanned out over the filling in two concentric rings, the first, larger ring running clockwise, and the next, smaller ring running counterclockwise. Because there is some small, deeply ingrained part of me that seems dyslexic, I made my rings counterclockwise first, and then clockwise. A small mistake, but one immediately obvious to Chef, who made me pick all the apple slices off and start over again, going in the correct direction.
    â€œSee? Much more beautiful,” he said, when I had replaced the slices, now all marching in neat circles, the right way. I couldn’t see the difference, but reminded myself that the French have a mania for both the intricacies of bureaucracy and rigidly formal gardening inaddition to a stranglehold on the world’s best desserts. Perhaps it all went hand in hand. After arranging the two overlapping rings of apple slices, there was still a bit of the filling showing in the middle of the tart. The remaining apple slices were arranged in a tight, overlapping concentric circle, cored sides touching the apple filling, winding ever tighter until the remaining surface of the filling was covered with a rose made of apple slices. A few tiny circles of apple were stamped out of a stray apple slice to provide the proper degree of botanical verisimilitude to the rose, everything was washed gently with clarified butter, dusted lightly with a bit more sugar, and slipped into the waiting oven. Since the apple filling is already cooked, the tart is finished when the dough is fully cooked through and golden, and the apple slices have caramelized and are glowing brown, like a sunbather in a secluded cove of St. Tropez (Chef ’s words, not mine).
    I spent the forty-some minutes waiting for my tart to come out of the oven kvetching with Angelo, whose dough had been the unlucky recipient of Chef Jean’s object lesson. Nominally, we were making another pâte crust for the afternoon’s recipe, quiche Lorraine, but while Chef was in conference with Cyndee about the progress we were making as a class, Angelo slouched over to Tucker and me to vent his feelings. Angelo’s station was on the other side of the classroom from us, but we had quickly become friends—he was very talented and driven, but he also liked to have a good time, slurping down beers and shots with us a few afternoons a week at Toad before catching his PATH train back to Jersey.
    â€œAsshole!” Angelo huffed, his Jersey boy muscles bulging with emotion. “Why pick on me?”
    â€œYour pretty face,” I replied. It was so much fun to tease Angelo, to see his blue eyes widen in laughter before he delivered an always witty, and usually dirty, rejoinder.
    â€œSeriously, Angelo, today was just your day. We all have them,” Tucker added.
    And it was true, we all did. While Chef was never deliberately malicious or mean-spirited in his critiques of us, there usually was one person who felt the sting from the sharp side of Chef ’s tongue a bit more than everyone else. I had been the unlucky student once, and while I was grateful for the lessons I had