First You Make a Roux (in two parts)

[Big Beautiful Dreamer]

~~WG, Both, Romance - A relationship develops during cooking school

Author's Note: Props to NemoVolo and Vader7476. It was in a dialogue between them on the Story Readers' Board that I first read of the idea of a culinary student, a long-distance romance, and cooking by proxy as a way to keep the love light shining.

Also, please do read the footnotes at the end. Thank you, and have a pleasant flight.[/I]

First You Make a Roux
by Big Beautiful Dreamer​

PART ONE

The First Year

I stirred flour into the melting butter, silently giving thanks for whoever came up with the idea of Bluetooth earpieces. If I’d tried cradling the phone to my ear and making a roux at the same time, either I would burn something or drop the phone into the bag of flour at my elbow.

“A what? Like a gravy?” Josie’s voice sounded clear as a bell in my ear from Ohio.

“They call it a roux. R-o-u-x. It’s a Cajun word, French. It’s the basis for an awful lot of dishes in the South. I thought since we’re moving into sauces I’d try to practice a little so I don’t make a complete fool of myself on this. Most of my classmates are from the South. I bet they can do this in their sleep.”

“About time they’re giving you something to do,” Josie grumbled. “You didn’t have to move halfway across the country to learn how to chop carrots and break an egg with one hand.”

“Jose. Come on. Charleston is not halfway across the country,” I said for the fiftieth time. The conversation continued with, to be fair, me only half listening, concentrating on the roux. This time it was better, but still not good enough. Although, I reflected as I washed up, if I could do this without help, I wouldn’t be shelling out a pile of money to Johnson & Wales to teach me how to be a chef.

My two sisters had zero interest in the kitchen, but one day when I was not even in kindergarten, I’d been playing trucks in the kitchen while my mother made cookies. She’d asked me to bring her an egg, then invited me to crack it and add it to the batter. Of course, telling a four-year-old boy to hit something was an engraved invitation.

And that’s all it had taken. I’d been a kitchen hound ever since. At fifteen I’d gotten a summer job preparing salads in a coffee shop (iceberg, spoonful of cheese, three cherry tomatoes, onion slice). The following summer had seen me promoted to grill. I continued part-time through the fall, and the summer after that had moved up to a restaurant with cloth napkins. By then, I’d persuaded my parents to let me go to school out of state, and Charleston looked a lot more appealing than Rhode Island.

I’d arrived in South Carolina, settled into a dorm room ... and found myself taking Nutrition and Sensory Analysis, Fundamentals of Food Service Production, Food Safety and Sanitation Management, Intro to Nutrition, and French 1. To be fair, that schedule was also balanced with freshman labs. Over and over and over again, we peeled, chopped, minced, julienned, the sort of kitchen work that you get good at only after peeling a million apples, chopping ten thousand eggs, mincing a mountain of mushrooms and julienning enough potatoes to fill Idaho. When the second semester started up, the day after next, I’d get Essentials of the Dining Room, Intro to Menu Planning and Cost Controls, and more French 1, but also Stocks, Sauces and Soups, and Skills of Meatcutting.

“I really think we’re going to actually be cooking some this semester,” I said, rinsing the measuring cups. “They’ve promised to let us turn on the stoves.”

Josie snorted. She was still put out because when we’d seen each other over Christmas break, I hadn’t learned any dazzling new techniques. I’d made brownies, chess pie tartlets, and four kinds of cookies for my family, my mom being pleased that she didn’t have to bake, but none of it was anything new.

My sisters had teased me a little that I was “getting fat,” but I wasn’t, really. I’d developed a little handful of belly from the constant snitching, tasting, and finger-scooping. We all were. “Wales Waist,” the students called it. Plus, living in the dorm with a bunch of other foodies and would-be chefs meant that unlike other college freshmen, we didn’t routinely survive on pizza and Chinese takeout. Most nights, three or four of us would each choose a portion of the meal and we’d cook and eat together. There was always plenty of food and always a good variety. And since some of the dormies were planning to major in Baking and Pastry Arts, there was always dessert. We’d eat well – too well – snitch fingerfuls while washing up, and then hit the books for the excitement of sanitation management.

Josie and I had been good friends since high school, and in our last year, our friendship had deepened considerably, enough to make me almost have second thoughts about heading South. Josie was at Oberlin now, planning to major in musical performance, her education partly funded by winning the Schoonover Piano Competition that summer. I missed her like an absent tooth and we both spent more time than we should have on the phone to each other. I’d promised to always have classical music on when I was in my room, and she’d promised to cook whatever I cooked in class, in solidarity with me. Of course, that was assuming they ever let us cook anything.

And they did. Finally. The very first day of Stocks, Sauces, and Soups class, we made a roux. I was biting my lip to keep from grinning because I’d had that practice time. What I produced wasn’t great, but didn’t actually burst into flames as some classmates’ efforts did. Over the course of the semester we covered Bearnaise, Bordelaise, Hollandaise, even homemade mayonnaise, gravies (basic and advanced), jellies, confits, bone marrow sauce, buerre blanc, ghee, salsa, reductions, and more. Chicken stock, lobster stock, beef stock, vegetable stock, and the basics of soups and stews. In the dorm through the spring, even as the weather warmed, we were practicing with French Onion Soup that took three days to make, thick lamb stews, beef tenderloin with bone marrow sauce, duck confit, Eggs Benedict, veal medallions with pear jelly, combining our burgeoning expertise in sauces with our newly acquired skills from Meatcutting class. Every day, I’d work my way through a new sauce and every evening I’d walk Josie through it. Out in Ohio, Josie would report on the lumpiness or not of the gravy, the surprisingly delicious zing of her homemade mayonnaise, how tasty freshly made Hollandaise sauce was over asparagus, how even her vegan roommate swooned over her homemade salsa and her peach chutney.

Of course, our expertise wasn’t the only thing burgeoning. The local Goodwill got some of my money, because all the shorts and lighter-weight trousers I’d brought back from Christmas break had to be donated and replaced with more forgiving waistbands. I was eating richly every night and tasting countless samples in class and the little handful of belly I’d picked up in the fall was steadily and visibly thickening along with everyone else’s. The rumor was that the average J&W weight gain was twenty-five the first year and another five to ten per year after that. Assuming you didn’t get one of the coveted final-semester internships in Paris.

I wasn’t the only one pudging up. True to my word, I’d been playing piano concertos around the clock, and true to her word, Josie’d been trying to duplicate my recipes. Of course, I had to talk her through them on the phone each evening, but she was gamely plowing through the same stuff I was, at least as much as she could manage and afford, and then happily savoring the results. I promised that when I made some stuff that could be shipped, I’d start sending her care packages.

“No, don’t,” she said with alarm.

“Why ever not?”

“Because.” Josie’s sigh snorted through the earpiece. “You’re making me fat.”

“Me? I am? How?”

“How do you think, genius. You’re making all this stuff in class – I’m making it here ... where I’m the only one to eat it. Sharon’s a vegan and besides, she eats like nothing but yogurt and wheat germ.”

“Yuck.”

“Anyway.” Josie sniffled. “I’ve had to buy three new black dresses, my old ones don’t fit anymore.”

“Are you wearing one now?” I hinted.

“No, you perv, I’m wearing a bra and sweatpants. And I’ve got a muffin top, thank you.”

“Banana or chocolate chip?”

She snorted. “Both together. Hey...” I could hear her rummaging in the pantry. “Darn you. Now I have to make banana chocolate chip muffins.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

“But when I do,” she said, over the clatter of mixing bowl, “it feels like you’re not so far away. It makes missing you easier.” Clang-slurp. She’d taken a little taste test of chocolate chip.

“So does this you.” I turned up the Pastorale symphony.

Slowly, missing Josie, chopping everything that stood still, stirring and tasting and experimenting, slowly the first year drained away. I returned to Ohio in May, twenty pounds heavier, only to find that Josie was spending the summer ... in Greensboro, North Carolina, at the prestigious Eastern Music Festival. By the time she’d known for sure, I’d already lined up an internship at an upscale hotel in Cleveland as assistant to the garde-manger, or cold-pantry manager.

My family wasted no time in teasing, chiding, and gently counseling me about “watching my weight,” but I kept telling myself I wasn’t fat, not really. Just a little more filled out. Kitchen work involves a lot of heavy lifting, and my pecs, shoulders, and biceps were sturdy and firm. True, there was a noticeably developing paunch swelling the palmetto and crescent moon on my T-shirt, but 190 pounds on a five-eleven frame isn’t fat. Besides, I volunteered to make dinner every night, eager to flaunt my developing skills. After salade composee, pan-seared beef medallions, matchstick vegetables, potatoes dauphinoise and deep-fried poached pears, I didn’t hear much from the peanut gallery. Or rather, the galerie de la cacahuete.

While Josie sweltered on the campus of Guilford College, I managed to keep perspiration to a fair minimum for kitchen work and did the prep work on salads, hors d’oeuvres and charcuterie. As the summer progressed, my supervisor let me help make sculptures for receptions out of ice, butter, and, twice (for bar mitzvahs), chopped liver. Really. By the time Josie returned, I was plating all the desserts, and she’d lost (she said) eight pounds of her thirteen-pound “Wales waist” by proxy.

She waited patiently for me in the lobby until I got off work, then flew into my arms, heedless of the water, salt, lard, salmon, salad dressing, and who knows what flecking my shirt. It felt like a long time before we came up for air. I took her into the dining room and fetched two slices of Black Forest Cake and two cups of coffee.

“You look great,” I said truthfully. Her chestnut hair was short and shining, and her heart-shaped face bore only a hint of fullness. Her chest was on display beneath a Guilford College T-shirt and her tanned calves stretched out long and luscious from the denim skirt. “God, how I’ve missed you.” I leaned over for a kiss, which she returned daintily. Her “we’re in public” kiss.

She pouted sweetly and licked a morsel of chocolate off her lip. “I’m still Miss Pudge.”

“No, I am – look.” I stood and patted my belly. Dishwater and perspiration made my shirt cling, and there was no mistaking the outline of my first-year “Wales Waist.” I knew my face was fuller, and I could feel the second chin developing. My apron strings seemed to be getting shorter, and my knees and elbows were beginning to dimple.

“Yeah – but you’re a chef.” She pushed her plate away.

“Jose, come on, I decorated this myself.” I forked up a bite. She opened her lips a tiny bit. I pushed. She nibbled, then made a production of very sexily licking the fork clean.

The next night, she didn’t say much about her own weight, just silently let me run a hand along her muffin-topped side or grab at her softening backside or nuzzle her growing chin while I made dinner for her parents. They were swoopingly complimentary and took seconds of everything, and ate all their dessert despite protestations of being stuffed.

“I don’t see how chefs stay thin,” Josie’s mom said, grunting a little as she loaded the dishwasher.

“Well, Josh seems to be managing okay,” her dad said, licking a spoon. He glanced over at me.

“Put on a little weight,” I said sheepishly.

“Oh, you look fine. Here, have some more coffee,” Josie’s mom chided.

“I’m the one putting on weight,” Josie grumbled, bringing over the last handful of silverware for the dishwasher. She pinched the modest muffin top pooching over her jeans. “Since Josh started at J&W, I’ve put on five pounds. That is, I put on thirteen pounds, then managed to lose eight over the summer.”

“You were too thin anyway,” Josie’s mom said, patting Josie’s backside. “Little birdie, that’s what you are.”

“Mom!” Josie yelped, blushing. “I don’t want to get fat,” she added. I tried to suck in my gut, but I was much too full and nothing moved; my stuffed stomach remained protruding firmly past my overworked waistband. If anyone in the room was fat, it was me, but I was learning to pick my times to discuss that particular topic with my sweetheart.

The Second Year

Josie and I spent as much time as we could before I had to head back to Charleston. That fall, she continued to tie her fingers in knots at the keyboard while I plunged headlong into Intro to Baking and Pastry along with the excitement of Principles of Beverage Service, Traditional European Cuisine, Purchasing and Product Identification, and more labs. The second year was traditionally the least food-oriented and the one where you got the boring requirements out of the way. I thoroughly enjoyed Baking and Pastry, though, and thought about taking a few electives along those lines whenever I came up for air.

“When do you get done with Baking and Pastry?” Josie asked me in October. I could hear the soft whoosh of her tossing apples through cinnamon, flour, and nutmeg.

“December, silly, why?” I didn’t tell her that I was hoping for a little Pies and Tarts or Plated Desserts down the road.

“I gained back those eight pounds ... and eight more plus the five I’d already put on. Josh, since you started down there, I’ve gone from one-twenty to one-forty-one. Those new dresses are already snug!”

I bit my lip, melting chocolate as we talked. It wouldn’t have been productive to mention that since I’d “started down there,” I’d gone from one-seventy to two-oh-five. My second chin was now fully developed and my strong pecs now sat under a layer of suet. My developing paunch was beginning to turn into a stack of spare tires and the only aprons with strings long enough were ones that hung almost to my ankles.

“Look, Jose,” I finally said. “It was your idea to make everything I made. You’ve been faithful from that first roux to salsa and lobster stock and all the way through ganache, okay?”

“But,” she gulped, “I miss you less when I make this stuff. I eat it in my little apartment in Oberlin and pretend you’re in the kitchen a few feet away.”

“And I love it,” I said truthfully. “I love that while I’m far away, I’m listening to these CDs and pretending they’re the latest from Josie Kirchenoff, and knowing that back in Ohio, my favorite pianist is licking her fork.”

A choked laugh. “That’s exactly what I was doing just that second.”

“See?” I teased. “Oh crap, my chocolate, gotta go, bye.”

Christmas break was much more fun that year. I made a buche de noel to go with a rack of lamb, the potatoes dauphinoise my sister liked, the creamed peas my father requested, homemade mint jelly (Mom’s favorite), along with hand-sauced cranberries, mince pie, lemon-almond Brussels sprouts, and a Christmas punch with only a little kick to it. Plus, Josie gave me three new custom-made aprons with longer ties and my name embroidered on each one.

And when the semester started up, I was able to breeze through the courses in Garde0-Manger and Advanced Dining Room Procedures thanks to my hotel job. Advanced Composition and Communication and French 2 were easy enough, and my suitemate Brian Ramello, an aspiring Cake Boss, helped me through the mathematics survey course.

“I swear, I know everyone gets Wales Waist,” Brian grumbled one evening. We were taking a break and noshing on homemade tortilla chips and some of my peach salsa. “But I’ve got it worse than anyone.”

“Ha, take a number.” I elbowed him in his well-padded ribs. Brian was about my height and I’d seen him pack on at least twenty pounds, but he’d probably started J&W at the two-ten or so I was hauling now. That would put him over two-thirty, so in truth, he might have been one of the heavier students, but a classmate a year ahead of us, a Baking and Pastry major with blond hair down to her bountiful backside, was probably close to three hundred, and there was a senior who was said to be pushing three-fifty, all dark hair and enormous arms and the ability to make a plateful of charcuterie in about thirty seconds. Rumor had it that he’d already been offered a job as garde-manger at the venerable Invergordon Resort on Pawley’s Island.

“My fiancee’s yapping at me that she’s gaining weight,” Brian added.

“Is she?” I asked, curious.

“A little. Ten or fifteen pounds, maybe, is what it looks like. She won’t tell me what the scale says.” Brian’s fiancee managed a medical-billing office. She came to our dorm dinners once a week or so, a tall woman with luscious curves.

“Josie too.” I told Brian how she was trying to share vicariously by making and eating some of what I was learning.

“Aw, that’s sweet,” Brian said, through a mouthful of chip and salsa.

The conversation stayed in my mind for a while, then melted under the second semester. I wearied of Garde-Manger and wondered how long, once college was over, I would have to work in the entry-level position before moving closer to the stoves. One could only fold-and-fan so many million pounds of thinly sliced ham and turkey, after all. Of course, for every pound sliced, some of the shreds wound up going down our throats, along with minced egg, olive, toast points, salads thick with dressings, countless stray spoonfuls of fondant and icing sugar, the odd sugared violet, the endless varieties of dips we tried out with our fruit and vegetable plates.

I tipped past two-fifteen on the scales sometime in March of that second year, meaning I’d clock in at the higher end of the average student weight gain. Aside from the occasional routine griping, none of my classmates seemed to mind. And when Josie talked about weight gain, she talked about hers, which was steadily marching toward the one-fifty mark.

Truth be told, I liked her with a little more to her. At one-twenty, she’d been too tiny for my taste, with a birdlike waist and arms and hands that looked too fragile for the demanding keyboard work she produced. I almost felt as though I could cup her in one hand. I was impatient for the semester to end so that I could cradle her in my arms again. I wanted to run my hands along her thickening waist and cup her bounteously softening backside, and I wanted to feel her warm against my steadily thickening midsection and leaning into my increasingly padded chest, my warm and protective arms curved around her softening frame.

Much as I liked it, though, I kept having to expend energy on reassuring Josie bout how much I liked it. Via phone calls and e-mails, she groused about how she was getting fat, how she was outgrowing her clothes, how her tummy stuck out even first thing in the morning, how (via one long and impassioned phone call) it had begun to actually fold. We were far apart and I could reassure her only with words. I longed to take her in my arms and cradle her from behind, nuzzling into her developing second chin, planting kisses along the crease in her neck, fondling her rosy and softening tummy right where it folded, hunting for that elusive navel of hers.

Summer couldn’t come soon enough.

That summer, I stayed in Charleston, working garde-manger (ugh) at one of the city’s many upscale restaurants, and Josie came South, where she’d been offered a staff position with Piccolo Spoleto. I moved into the tiny provided apartment and took over the kitchenette. The weeks flew by all too quickly. I made Eggs Benedict, pecan waffles, homemade sausages, turkey medallions, red-wine reductions, lemon jelly and drop biscuits, herbed toasted cheese sandwiches with homemade tomato soup from a chicken stock. It was a blast to cook whatever I wanted without a teacher hovering, without the sense of competition that wafted through the kitchens, to watch my girlfriend right in front of me moaning at how delicious everything was and filling the tiny flat with piano music every spare minute.

Somehow, once we were together her complaints tapered off. I supposed she was reassured when I didn’t gasp at the sight of her looking rather rounder than previously but instead grabbed her into a long and impassioned embrace, doing all the things I’d longed for that I could do in public. When I’d slid my hand up under her skirt as we drove toward the apartment, she’d said:

“Josh, don’t.”

“Why ever not?”

“I’m fat. Look at me!”

“I’ve been looking,” I said, a little too loudly. “You are beautiful. You’re gorgeous and womanly and rosy and full of life and I love every inch of you and I can’t wait to get you into bed.”

I patted her knee, and cut a glance at the infamous folded tummy beneath a too-snug T-shirt.

She sniffled.

“Besides,” I said with false cheer, “I’m getting to be a pretty big guy myself.” I slapped my round gut as hard as I could stand it, and it obligingly jiggled.

A small giggle. Then a poke. Then a hand laid in my lap.

I captured it, and said:

“You are the most beautiful and talented woman in the history of the world, Josie Kirchenoff. So there.”

As the summer progressed I delighted in seeing her clothing begin to cling even more, so that her skirts sweetly outlined a broadening heart of backside, dimpling thighs and roundly curving calves; her shirts grabbed at love handles and buttons tugged across a thickening tummy and clung to swelling breasts. I bought her a confection of a frock for the closing-night gala, thick velvet shoulder straps of crimson and a silver-sequined layer over a thin crimson swing dress that stopped just above the knees. I felt myself warm with arousal as I watched her in bra and panties holding the dress up to herself in front of the mirror. That sweet double curve of tummy padding, those bountiful hips! She floated it over her head and twirled into my arms.

I wore a new cream linen-blend suit, which, because it was new, actually fitted. If I do say so myself, I looked elegant, the jacket and shirt draping my broad, padded chest and my visibly rounded gut, skimming my paunch and minimizing my love handles. The trousers fit my thickening waistline and spreading backside. Together we looked rosy, prosperous, in love.

 

[Big Beautiful Dreamer]

 

[Vader7476]

 

[Big Beautiful Dreamer]

 

[NemoVolo]

 

[BriarChubNJ]