Each of these students had been here for nine weeks already, since shortly before Christmas, in an incoming class of seventy-two. Everyone had begun with fourteen days of Introduction to Gastronomy and Culinary Math. Then they had had seven days of Sanitation and Nutrition, seven days of Product Identification (learning about produce, evaluating quality, buying it, and studying food purchasing)—six-and-a-half hours of class, then two hours of Culinary French in the evening. They moved into Meat Identification next, learning the muscular and skeletal construction of animals, and after seven days they had moved to the basement for Meat Fabrication, where they would practice their subprimal cuts, their boning, their Frenching.
Bob del Grosso, a slender forty-one-year-old with a narrow face and dark features harkening back to his family’s roots in Italy, taught Introduction to Gastronomy to everyone who entered the Culinary Institute of America. His résumé was filled with Connecticut restaurants: line cook at the Black Goose Grill in Darien; chef at the Lakeville Cafe; at Le Coq Hardi Restaurant in Stamford, he was, variously, charcutier, first cook, sous chef, and finally executive chef. Del Grosso was also a trained micropaleontologist, with a master’s from CUNY at Queens College. A booming oil industry had ensured plenty of jobs in his field, but as he was considering a Ph.D. in micropaleontology in the early 1980s, the oil bubble burst and his future grew cloudy. He gradually became so anxious about what he would do, he couldn’t sleep and took to pacing. One morning he fell asleep on the living room floor. When dawn came, he was awakened by a beam of light in his eyes. “I had an epiphany,” he told me. “I thought, ‘I can cook!’”
Del Grosso taught in what appeared to be an old-fashioned lecture classroom—with posters of fish, vegetables, and pasta shapes taped to the wall, an extended blackboard, long curved multileveled rows of permanent seating. When he began teaching the course he was amazed to find out how few people even knew what gastronomy was. “Astronomers know what astronomy is,” he said. “Physicists know what physics is. But people who claim to be gastronomers, or gastronomes, don’t know what gastronomy is.” Del Grosso stood before the rows of seats and talked, questioned the students, paused, squeezing his chin thoughtfully, a near caricature of Ed Sullivan, in what seemed an endless digression on food. The course did have an agenda and schedule, beginning with the notion of etiquette, and moved from there to the history of the chef in French cuisine, into nouvelle cuisine, followed by the contemporary scene, Alice Waters, and the chef-farmer connection. One class was devoted to the question “What is food?” and the final class addressed the ethics of food production.
“Let’s identify the process of nouvelle cuisine,” he would say to his class. “Not an easy thing to do. My belief is that you must cook to the essence. Think of nouvelle cuisine as Socratic cooking. How many of you have read Plato?” About a half dozen hands rose in a class of thirty-six. Del Grosso briefly mentioned The Republic, the allegory of the cave, and the notion of Platonic forms. “There is a perfect form of the salad,” he said. “Say you’re a Socratic cook and you want to make a hamburger. You would begin the process by posing a question: ‘What is a hamburger?’” He posed this to the class. One intrepid student offered, “A round patty of ground beef put between toasted buns.” Del Grosso clarified: “Round? Let’s call it disc-shaped.” A lively discussion of the hamburger followed. The point, del Grosso said, was to get them thinking critically about food. Many of the students had little education beyond high school, and many, whether from the armed services of the United States or having worked only in kitchens, were not used to this sort of thinking. “A chef should be Socratic,” del Grosso continued, “questioning everything, including the placement of the silverware. Cooking to the essence,” he said with a flourish. “‘What are you, beef?!’ Cook to your answer. It’s a very different way to cook. It requires a lot of thinking. I’m not going to encourage you to cook this way all the time because I don’t. Imagine if every time you cooked an egg, you had to ask, ‘What is an egg?’ But it’s useful to do so every now and then.”
This course aimed to introduce the students to the culture upon which the school was based—and that culture had its roots in classical French cuisine. But his was a class, by design, of rambling. Del Grosso would expound for fifteen minutes on Celebration, the Walt Disney Company’s planned town. And when a student mentioned the word “confit,” he stopped the discussion of Gault and Millau, the journalists who coined the term “nouvelle cuisine,” to ask if everyone knew the word “confit.” Sensing that not everyone did, he began with the meaning of confit, and confitures, the history of confit, its purpose of preservation, and concluded with a small discourse on how he personally prepares confit de canard.
After describing his dry marinade and the cooking of the confit, del Grosso explained that he stores the duck legs, submerged in their congealed fat, for at least two weeks, preferably in glass jars, but plastic will do if you’re in a restaurant kitchen and don’t want glass jars all over the place. After two weeks, he would simply remove the legs from the fat, wipe them off, pass them under a broiler or salamander to crisp up the skin and heat the meat some. He would then serve them with potatoes that had been fried in clarified butter, along with deep-fried parsley. “Have you had deep-fried parsley?” he asked. He closed his eyes and said, “It’s a miracle.”
Such a class seemed spiritually at odds with Culinary Math, which took up the other half of an incoming student’s day.
Homework questions: Convert twelve quarts and twelve tablespoons into a single unit of quarts. How many cups are there in four pounds of honey? You are catering a function of 350 people; you estimate that each person will eat three quarters of a cup of potato chips; how many pounds of chips should you order?
Such things were important to know. A pint is not a pound the world round. A pint of ground cinnamon, for instance, is only half a pound; a pint of honey is a pound and a half.
“You will be doing a lot of conversions when you get to Skill Development One,” Julia Hill told her class. “If you’re not comfortable with conversions, get comfortable.” Hill used to be an accountant. She left that profession to become a restaurant manager. Eleven years ago, she arrived at this school to take a continuing education course and never left. “The moment I set foot on this campus,” she said, “I knew this was where I belonged.”
Her class, a review of math applications relevant to the food-service industry, was an interesting series of puzzles. When possible, she would have students bring their knife kits, hard black briefcases filled with tools. They would take apart pounds of carrots in problems addressing “as purchased quantity” and “edible portion quantity.” The class began with three days of basic math, fractions, decimals and how they behaved, then moved into conversions, cost, costing recipes, ratios, and lastly alcohol measurements.
“The definition of ‘cost’ in this industry,” she told the class, “is: cost is what you use, not how much you bought it for.” Cost, therefore, was an idea, not necessarily an absolute. But this was about as close to the world of ideas as the class got, and many were glad for this. Some loathed del Grosso’s class, but loved the concreteness of Culinary Math. Others hated both classes and spent nine weeks longing for the kitchen.
This was A Block. The people in it were called A Blockers. Their average age was twenty-six, and 10 percent of them would drop out. Twenty-five percent of them were women, 12 percent were minorities. A Blockers wore street clothes, but were requested to dress in light shirts, dark slacks or skirts, and dark shoes. B Block, which included sanitation and nutrition, followed A Block, and C Block—Meat Identification and Fabrication—came after that. This never varied; every graduate had gone through the school this regimental way since 1976, when the Culinary shifted to what it called a progressive learning year, though the curriculum itself expanded considerably during the following two decades. Each block, fourteen class days spread over three weeks, built upon the previous block.
This idea
of building on the knowledge and skills learned in the previous class is the overarching agenda and method at the Culinary. A student doesn’t enter the first kitchen until he has a basic understanding of sanitation (including, for instance, why stocks need to be cooled quickly). In Skills, students learn to sauté one chicken breast so that in the next class they can sauté sixteen of them fast. This idea carries the student through thirty weeks and seven different kitchens to Garde Manger, the final class before externship. After externship—a minimum of eighteen weeks’ paid work in the industry, at restaurants, hotels, food magazines, or even the TV Food Network—they ease into the cool kitchens of baking and pastry. They then spend six weeks out of their whites in a lecture hall, learning about wines and menus, restaurant planning, and restaurant law, after which they move back into the kitchen for the final chunk of their degree, which concludes with twelve weeks in the school’s four public restaurants, half the time as cooks, half the time as waiters.
The curriculum is logical in conception and relentless in practice. Life here is marched out in three-week intervals and there is no stopping. Once every three weeks, the halls fill with parents and relatives of seventy-two graduates of the Culinary Institute of America, and the following week seventy-two new students begin Gastronomy. Every three weeks seventy-two students leave for their externship, and seventy-two return. The school allows itself a two-week break in the summer and winter. There are no classes on Sundays. Other than that, the place never shuts down. The first class, A.M. Pantry, or Breakfast Cookery, begins at three-fifteen in the morning, about four hours after the last class of the previous day ends. There are twenty-one blocks in all, eighty-one weeks including externship, or roughly two years, depending how long one spends on extern. The total cost, including a dormitory room, is about $34 thousand. If a student has more time and money and stamina, he or she can spend two more classroom years here, what will then be considered junior and senior years, and graduate from Culinary Institute of America with a bachelor of professional studies degree.
But there is more to the Culinary Institute of America than these seventy-two students graduating every three weeks no matter what. The Institute has become, in the words of one food journalist, “a paragon of culinary education.” When the CIA does something—whether adding a new class, opening a new restaurant, or producing a new book—the $313 billion food service industry watches. While it’s never been known for creating legions of cutting-edge chefs, and its graduates are often criticized en masse for thinking they know more than they do and demanding more money than they’re worth, the CIA is nevertheless often called the Harvard of cooking schools and boasts many famous graduates: Jasper White, Waldy Malouf, Chris Schlesinger, Dean Fearing, Susan Feniger, Rick Moonen, Charlie Palmer, David Burke, and Todd English, for instance, are CIA alumni. Through its continuing education programs and new California campus, it educates thousands of industry professionals every year. Its several cooking programs outside the United States make its impact international.
Opening in 1946 as the New Haven Restaurant Institute with an enrollment of fifty men, and moving to its current campus in 1972 to accommodate an enrollment of more than a thousand students, the school now enrolls more than two thousand students each year—some just out of high school, others middle-aged and beginning second careers. Tim Ryan, senior vice president of the Culinary, with telling understatement, told me, “We’re a food and beverage place.” But the Culinary is in fact the oldest, biggest, best-known, and most influential cooking school in America, the only residential college in the United States devoted solely to the study of the culinary arts. It employs more than a hundred chefs from twenty countries. This brick monastery on the verdant banks of the Hudson River contains more food knowledge and experience than any other place on earth.
Chef Pardus slid off the desk and stood. “This class,” he said, “is to provide a culinary foundation for the rest of your time at the CIA and for the rest of your culinary careers. If you don’t know what mirepoix is, what demi-glace is, what cuisson is, and you go to work in a high-end restaurant, you won’t be taken seriously.” The school, he said, gave you “a professional language,” a standard. “If I ask David”—David Scott was at my table, a tall, clean-cut Californian in his mid-twenties with short dark hair—“to panfry a pork chop, and if I ask Lou to panfry a pork chop, I want to make sure they have the same idea about what a pan-fried pork chop is. It’s got to be part of you.”
Pardus went over the uniform policy, codes of dress, hygiene, and courtesy. “You know the rules,” he said. “I don’t want to lecture you.”
“We’ve got quite a few women in this class,” he said, five of seventeen. “This is good. A lot of guys here need to learn how to work with a woman on an equal level.”
Pardus walked to the steam kettles and ran through homework policy while skimming mats of gray foam off the blanching beef bones. “If you don’t have your homework, I don’t care why. This is college, this isn’t grade school.” Four two-page papers would be due during the next three weeks (brown veal stock, derivative sauces, emulsion sauces, and starches); comments on assigned videos and regular costing forms must be completed.
Each student had the chance to earn seventy-five points a day on daily preparation, attitude and teamwork, knife skills, the assigned soups and sauces, timing and sanitation, amounting in the end to half the final grade. You pretty much had to not do your knife cuts to get a zero on these, but if all your food was not finished by six o’clock, points were deducted. If you didn’t present your food to Chef Pardus by six-thirty you received zero points because by six-thirty, he said, “your customers have left and your food isn’t worth anything.”
He reminded everyone to carry knives held down and at our side, no horseplay, no throwing things. And a word about side towels. The Culinary imported these sturdy items—gray-and-white-checked cotton cloths that students tuck into their apron strings—from Germany because it couldn’t find acceptable ones in the United States, and they were excellent tools. At this stage in a student’s career, the towels were crisp and clean, all but new. “Side towels are not for wiping your board,” Pardus said. “They are not for wiping your knife, they’re not for dabbing your brow. They’re for grabbing hot things. Things are going to be hot. Anticipate it, expect it.”
“You’re going to be lifting a hundred and twenty pounds of bones a day,” he said. “I don’t want to remind you, bend your knees. If you’re going to be in this business, you’re gonna need a strong and healthy back.”
“I want these floors kept clean. If you see something on the floor, pick it up. I don’t care if you didn’t drop it. It’s your floor; keep it clean.”
The chef demoed everything. His first demo was peeling a carrot. I didn’t think one way or another about this, though I’d heard people complain that the Culinary Institute of America makes everyone learn how to chop an onion, regardless of background, and that this was somehow an onerous circumstance. I knew how to chop an onion, but I honestly didn’t mind watching how someone else did it. And there was always something to learn, even about peeling carrots. Pardus didn’t hold the carrot in the air to peel it; he rested the fat end on the cutting board, rotating it with his fingertips. This was faster and conserved energy. If you were peeling twenty pounds of carrots, it would make a difference. And you wanted to be fast. If you were paying diswashers five dollars an hour, and they were peeling carrots for you, Pardus said, “you’ve got to be able to show them how, you’ve got to be able to beat them in a race.”
We stood around the chef, who stood facing us at the head of Table Two, watching him peel a carrot. Somebody asked if it was necessary to peel carrots at all if they were going into the stock.
Pardus stopped peeling and said, “Do you peel a carrot? Some people don’t. I like my stock to taste as clean and fresh as possible. My way is not the only way to do things, but I’ve found that people who don’t peel carrots don’t do it because they’re lazy.�
�� He smirked. “Put the peels on their salad if they like peels so much. You want to eat this?” He lifted the clump of dirty limp peels from the cutting board.
Everyone would cut two pounds of mirepoix, one part each of celery and carrot, two parts onion. And we would do this every day for the next six weeks. This mirepoix would flavor the stock we made each day.
Next he demoed tomato concassé—chopped tomato. He already had a pot of water on the stove boiling to loosen the tomato’s skin. It was the middle of February and the tomatoes were pretty firm so he suggested forty-five seconds in boiling water, then into a bowl of ice water. Every table had a bowl of ice water on it for shocking tomatoes. Chef Pardus peeled the tomato, removed the seeds, chopped it, and told us, “That’s tomato concassé. That’s it.” He instructed us, when mincing an onion—every day we would mince half an onion and thin slice the other half—to make the initial cuts as thin as possible, so you didn’t have to overwork it later and smash all the juice out of it. The mince should be dry and bright, not gray and soggy. Peeling and mincing garlic and shallots was next, parsley fine-chopped but he didn’t want powder, and finally the annoying tourner, a vegetable cut in the shape of a football. We would keep our fine knife cuts in small paper cups and hold these in a hotel pan along with our two pounds of mirepoix. At the end of the day our various cuts would be combined in plastic bags.
On this, our Day One in Skills, Chef Pardus dismissed us to our tables and we began our standard daily mise en place. Even though he had given us a tour of the kitchen I didn’t know where anything was, and I circled around looking for a bowl for scraps, a hotel pan (a deep rectangular steamtable insert), a roll of brown paper towel. I asked Paul, who appeared to know exactly where everything was, how he knew and he said, “I don’t know. I just do.”
The Making of a Chef Page 3