Firehouse Chefs Serve Up Haute Cuisine

NEW YORK — Chicken Cordon Bleu will be on the menu tonight. At La Caravelle? At Lutece? At Chanterelle? Absolument!

But it will also grace the table of Firehouse 210 in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn. Nino Tadduni is cooking tonight.

Firefighter/chefs have a reputation in New York. Maybe it’s a bit of folklore, like alligators in the sewers. Or maybe it’s true--ask a firefighter.

“You want to taste great cooking?” asked Paul Yodice, currently working at the Fire Museum after being injured. “Go to my old firehouse--check out Nino’s cooking.”

Tadduni is in the kitchen sharpening his knives. Fit, with short, wiry gray hair, his face suggests a combination of Rod Steiger and Carroll O’Connor. He wears a blue short-sleeved golf shirt with a Fire Department insignia over the pocket, a long-sleeved black T-shirt under it, blue pants and heavy black lace-up boots.

He slits the chicken breasts, opening them into angels’ wings, and pounds them out. He mixes a batter--”three eggs and just a drop of milk, just a drop.” He never seems flustered.

“I never cooked till I came here, 29 years ago,” he said. “There was a bunch of cooks. I watched, I experimented on my own. I even called my mother for advice.”

Tadduni is not the only star chef the New York City Fire Department has. John Sineno, a newly retired firefighter, put together “The Firefighter’s Cookbook,” published by Vintage in 1986, which has sold nearly 150,000 copies and landed on The New York Times Bestsellers’ list for a month.

He culled recipes from firefighters all over New York--from Tony Catapano’s fillet of flounder with shrimp stuffing to Lt. T. Faherty’s shrimp creole a la Faherty to Sineno’s own stuffed green peppers with red sauce. There’s also candied sweet potatoes, Nan’s Irish soda bread and Amaretto cheesecake.

Tadduni, 52, didn’t plan to join the Fire Department. He had been working in his father’s butcher shop in Brooklyn when a man in the neighborhood signed him up for the firefighter’s test. “That guy did me some favor,” he said, dropping the batter-covered chicken into hot margarine. “This is the best job in the world.”

Despite the inevitable ribbing from the guys--”Hey, Nino, you forgot the Italian pastry”--the men give him four-star reviews. “Nino comes in, he cooks a lot, it tastes great and it ends up costing $3,” said one firefighter outside of his hearing.

Inevitably, as the water for the pasta is coming to a rolling boil, bells ring and sirens go off. Everyone springs from his position, runs for his 40-pound coat, his helmet, his boots. Tadduni revs up the motor on the fire engine, everyone jumps into his place and they’re off.

This time it is only a small fire on the subway tracks at Bergen Street. Four other companies answer the call and one says they can handle it. The 210 heads back to the firehouse.

As the pasta starts to boil, Tadduni talks. “We used to have big heavy meals for lunch--eggplant Parmesan, veal Parmesan. Now the guys watch what they eat. I use margarine instead of butter. They have a weight room upstairs. A lot of guys are cutting back on red meat.”

“Yeah,” said a voice from the other room, “one guy doesn’t eat pork, one doesn’t eat beef, some don’t eat fish. What we’re left with is chicken.”

This night the men partake of chicken Cordon Bleu, pasta, carrots, salad and Italian bread. They fly off to a fire once more before dinner and six times after.

Sitting around, drinking coffee after dinner, waiting for the next bell to sound, Tadduni talks about cooking. “When I make something, I make it up as I go along. I know the end result that I want and I aim for it.” At home, he rarely cooks. “My wife is a great cook.”

“The fame of firemen as great cooks extends far and wide,” said Bob McCarl, a folklorist and ethnographer who has studied firefighters in seven states. “It’s not surprising. Like loggers or the guys who work on tugboats--hard work, long hours and a lot of isolation--it’s only natural for someone to develop as a good cook. They’re all like the guy who ran the chuck wagon on cattle drives.”