"If your Spanish Sauce don't taste right, there's only two things can be wrong with it." - Sourdough Bob
Closing time at Sourdough Bob's. I sit at the counter mopping up the remains of a hot beef sandwich. The inside lights have been dimmed. In the window the neon sign keeps flashing: SOURDOUGH BOB'S / SOURDOUGH BOB'S
"Bobby," I say, "I hate to admit it, but if this gravy was any better we'd have to throw it out."
Bobby's a big man, an old timer with a face like the front end of a Mack truck that's been wrecked a couple times. Tattoos from his merchant marine days show on both arms:
MARY * DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR!
He waves his big paws in the air and says, "Yeah, well, sometimes I get lucky. Nobody wants to take the time to make good gravy anymore. Cooks nowadays, all they wanta do is throw a handful of gravy mix in a pot of water and boil it up. You can't make it like that. Good gravy takes time."
"Well," I say, "maybe people who eat in restaurants don't know the difference."
"Oh, yes, they do. Now, you take these country boys who come in here. You think they don't know good gravy? You bet your life they do; they was raised on it. And I see the plates when they come back mopped up clean with my sourdough bread.
Sourdough Bob clears his throat importantly. "Suppose I was to get rid of this joint and take a job as second cook in a first class joint, huh? And the chef comes up to me on my first day and says to me, "Mr. Bob" -a sign of respect, ya see, one professional to another-'Mr. Bob, please fix me one big pot of brown gravy.'
"I know what he means. Like most cooks and chefs he calls it brown gravy, but what that means in a first class house is an espagnole sauce, or brown sauce. They're all names used to describe the same thing.
A KITCHEN THAT'S RUN RIGHT
“But anyway, if the kitchen was run right, and there was a good stock pot on the stove with some beef bones and roast turkey carcasses in it and a bunch of vegetables and tomatoes, you know, that had been simmering overnight, I'd just strain out a couple gallons of liquid, add some good beef base, toss in some garlic and thyme and then thicken it up with roux.”
ASK A STUPID QUESTION
I hold up a finger, "You cook the roux, right?"
He raises pleading eyes to the ceiling where a fan slowly rotates in the gloom. "What am I dealin' with here, some kind of lunatic? "Course I cook the roux! Otherwise it won"t have that good nutty taste us cooks like."
OK," I say. "I just wanted to hear you race your motor."
"Sheesh! Where was I? Oh yeah, and when I finished all that I think the chef would say, "Okay, Mr. Bob, very good."
“My first day, see? Otherwise he would not insult me by commenting on my brown sauce. I already know whether it's good or not. He don't have to tell me.
“Then if he asked me to make some bordelaise sauce for a special dinner party of hotshot politicos, all I'd have to do is take maybe a quart of the brown gravy, and add to it some chopped mushrooms, garlic and thyme and red wine, maybe some beef marrow if I had it and, boom, there would be your bordelaise sauce."
SOURDOUGH'S FAMOUS COOKBOOK!
"Sounds good to me," I say. "By the way, how about that cookbook you told me you were working on? How far have you gotten on it?"
"Aw, I wish I could write down all the stuff I know how to do. All I got written so far is a list of twenty secrets. Well, actually, I wrote down the numbers from 1 to 20, but I only wrote down two secrets."
"Well, that's a start. Go get it and let's have a look." Sourdough goes into the back kitchen and returns with a long, yellow legal pad. On the first page he has written:
20 SECRETS FROM MY LIFETIME AS A BOOMER COOK
- Never name anything until after you've cooked it.
- Amateur cooks always use pots that are too small.
I say, "That's all you've got so far?"
"Well, yeah, see, I've got the whole thing in my head. All I gotta do is get it down on paper. But I don't want to put down all the obvious stuff, you know, like how you make bearnaise sauce out of hollandaise by just adding tarragon vinegar and chopped parsley and green onions."
