Dispatch from a Former Pastry Chef

(by Pien Huang)

The ship's kitchen, the galley, has a giant convection oven which cooks anything in half the time. This oven belongs to Dax, suited in a white coat, brass buttons, with shorts; and his assistant chef Ding. They form an odd pair: Dax, clean-shaven with a tattooed leg, towering over Ding, a retired, trash-talking Filipino in flannel whose Anglicized name is Paul. He's bitter about that. He joined the Navy at a time when Filipinos could only enlist as cooks. He's bitter about a lot, but it passes quickly. "I lost $120 at the Casino tonight," he said, in port. "Then I figured it was time to go to sleep."

I imagine Dax's tattoo to be relics of a former self; nowadays, off-ship, Dax is settling. "I have a dog," he says. "It's like a baby." He keeps a photo of it on his desktop, a toy poodle garnished in pink ribbons. He dabbles in real estate and cooks for a living, but would like to swap those priorities. He's started home remodeling in Seattle, and he really misses the dog. Her name is Lambchop, and he tells me this on an evening they're serving lamb.

The lamb is marinated, stewed, decadent. Every night they exceed themselves; last night was steak. The dinner before that was blue-lipped mussels. But the clincher is the dessert, and for this he enlists my help. I am more of a taste-testing mascot than a chef - Honeybear, Sugarpea, he calls me - but I graduate to using a wire whisk. On Monday, I stir melted chocolate with heated cream for garnache, a topping for chocolate mousse pie. I sidestep Ding, at the flounder-frying station, to drizzle caramel over the pies. "Dollops are ugly," Dax coaches.

On Wednesday, I quarter strawberries for a lemon whitecake swathed in cream and berries, arranged individually in souffle dishes. For this, I am honorary "Pastry Chef." Over Ding's muttering, Dax waxes on his past work in restaurants from Alaska to Bermuda, and also at sea. He cooked for a commercial fishing boat on the Bering Strait, where he saved octopuses marooned on deck with blasts from the fire hose.

On Friday, I formulate a strawberry compote to dress Callebaut milk chocolate cheesecakes. They contain an estimated five pounds of chocolate and ten pounds of cream cheese; they’ve sunk on cooling, for which Dax curses New Zealand cream cheese and the metric system. With caramel glue, we fix slices to plates we've polished, and for this I am named Sous Chef.

My promotion lasts for half a day. Then I am banned from the galley. It caused tension between the chefs.