The girl thought. “Sew it shut?”
“Exactly. Loosen the skin around the breast and pull it forward across the chest cavity”—she demonstrated, and the girls all stared in awe at her fingers, so quick and precise—“And then lace it shut with needle and twine. It won’t look as elegant, but it’ll taste the same.” She turned to address the room at large. “To keep an economical kitchen, you must learn to be flexible, and salvage your mistakes. If a plan falls through, then change the plan. The stuffing could also be baked on the side, as a dressing—or you might forgo roasting the chicken entirely, and make a stew or a casserole instead. Once you have enough experience and proficiency in the kitchen, decisions such as this will become second nature.”
They nodded as one. Experience and proficiency in the kitchen. At first, these phrases of Miss Levy’s had seemed embarrassingly mannered. Now, the girls relished them.
The lesson ended without further catastrophe, and each chicken was examined and declared a success. Even Miss Rosen’s looked better than expected, with its neat twine stitches. In heady pride the girls washed their hands, hung their hats and jackets on their pegs, and filed into the hallway precisely at the sounding of the bell.
Alone, their teacher washed and dried the knives and cutting-boards and replaced them in the labeled cabinets, then scrubbed the island countertop. At last the scrum in the hallway cleared, and she loaded the trussed birds onto a cart and wheeled them down to the creaking elevator. A quick trip to the first floor—and then the kitchen, where the dining hall cook left off mashing a giant vat of potatoes and took the cart with a brisk and wordless nod. Come supper-time, the Asylum’s monitors would have roast chicken on their plates.
The staff lounge and its cloakroom lay at the very end of the wing. Inside, a number of instructors sat chatting over tea. They looked up at their colleague’s entrance and returned her polite smile with their own, but refrained from drawing her into conversation. They were not a little intimidated by this woman who’d effected so many changes among them, in ways both large and small.
Until recently, the modest aim of the Asylum’s cooking curriculum had been to familiarize the girls with the basics of the kitchen so that, upon graduation, they might cook for themselves with some reasonable amount of success. To that end, the teachers had constructed a haphazard syllabus of Jewish staples—challahs and soups, noodle puddings, chopped liver, the occasional boiled vegetable. Most students sailed through easily, on little more than daydreams and half efforts.
Then, Miss Levy had landed among them.
Now, to her students’ considerable shock, they spent the first week of each semester learning the fundamentals of kitchen sanitation. After that came a working knowledge of food chemistry: the interactions of acids, bases, and fats; the various leaveners and their differing roles. She set them mock household budgets, took them to the market at 125th, taught them to bargain with butchers and greengrocers. At the end of her first year at the Asylum, her classes had worked together to host a cold luncheon for the entire staff, complete with Parker House rolls, sponge cake, and three different varieties of meat salad. More than one attendee declared it the best meal they’d eaten in years.
Miss Levy’s girls adored her universally. She treats us like adults, they said; she knows everything about everything. Somehow she’d requisitioned the funds to buy them all crisp white hats and jackets, which hung upon pegs on the classroom wall. She collected these at the end of each week—praising those students who’d managed to keep theirs near to spotless—and made sure they were washed separately from the rest of the Asylum laundry, to keep them from turning gray. Dressed in their “cook’s whites,” the girls were no longer orphanage inmates of whom little was expected, but scholars of Culinary Science. They stood taller, and spoke more precisely, their words as crisp as their jackets. In the dining hall they examined their supper plates with new interest, noting how the bubbles of grease floated atop the chipped-beef gravy, using words like insoluble and emulsion.
It wasn’t long before the other teachers, inspired or else threatened by Miss Levy’s innovations, strove to match them. Lesson plans that had lain stagnant for years were scrutinized and overhauled. The Telegraphy classes visited the Western Union building, watched as the messages were recorded and distributed. The Dressmaking teacher brought in guest speakers for her advanced class: buyers from Wanamaker’s, a McCall’s pattern-maker, a costumer from a Union Square theater.
Even the Hebrew department had felt the winds of change. Jolted into action, the instructors searched about for some novelty they might add to their curriculum. Their timing was impeccable, for just then a new movement had begun among the more progressive Jewish schools of New York. Called Ivrit b’Ivrit, “Hebrew in Hebrew,” it advocated teaching the language not as a sacred, book-bound tongue, but a living, spoken language.
The idea was so new as to seem scandalous. Yes, many of the Holy Land settlers had learned to speak Hebrew—but those were pioneers and radicals, impractical by nature. Still, the notion had its appeal. Now that the future of the Holy Land colonies hung in doubt, Ivrit b’Ivrit seemed a way to show solidarity, even contribute to the effort. And certainly the Hebrew department couldn’t be accused of letting their curriculum languish, not with Ivrit b’Ivrit in their lesson plans. They debated the merits, and took the plunge.
The girls in the Asylum’s Hebrew classes tended toward the shy and studious, most comfortable hidden behind a book. Now, forced into Hebrew conversation with each other, they surprised themselves by loving it. They mimed tea parties, family dramas, encounters on city streets. The weather is warm today. Pass the sugar, please. Excuse me, how do I get to Central Park? When they encountered a word without a
