The Reach of a Chef (7 page)

“What do you think a chef is?” he concluded. “What does chef mean? It means
leader.
”

Shortly after he became president, Ryan oversaw a major revamp of the curriculum, a tightly constructed rotating system that allowed, typically, ninety new students to arrive the Monday after ninety graduates departed, once every three weeks. It’s called the progressive learning year, in which each class moves through the curriculum in blocks of fourteen teaching days, each block building on the last. It was a colossal headache to reorganize this old curriculum—switch classes around, get rid of some, lengthen others, give students longer periods in specific restaurants. Almost as soon as it was implemented, Ryan asked his lieutenant, Victor Gielisse, to start planning for an even bigger change.

He intends to revert the progressive learning year into a trimester system more like a traditional academic university, a curriculum that would maintain a common core for all but also allow students to pursue varied segments of the food revolution. By way of example, he noted that the great English universities, and those in the early years of the United States, had a core curriculum of the classics, and the graduates went on to be either politicians, lawyers, or ministers (doctors, remember, were closer to barbers in the work hierarchy at the time). Then the scientific explosion happened, and suddenly, given an unprecedented inpouring of new knowledge, the old model of education couldn’t contain it or address it.

That situation now applied to the food world, an industry flooded with information from all over the world. It’s not unlike the transformation of the worlds of medicine, law, or business. In the early years, doctors were generalists. More and more knowledge poured in, forcing doctors to grow increasingly specialized in order to make use of that information. Food professionals must make similarly narrowing choices, and Ryan wants to accommodate students’ desires to explore the paths that appeal most to them. Law school and business school curricula have gone the same way. “Joe Wharton came and initiated a special business course at Penn and look at it now,” Ryan said. The CIA is often called the Harvard of cooking schools, but maybe it more closely parallels the Wharton School.

And no wonder. When Ryan was a student, you came here to learn how to cook. When a recipe called for mushrooms, it meant white button mushrooms. Wines were white or red, and the good ones came from Europe. Fresh herbs beyond curly parsley were a rarity. And when you left, you got a job as a cook and maybe became a chef. That was about it.

In a class currently taught to CIA bachelor’s students, Introduction to Interpersonal Communication—needless to say, not a class or even an idea when Ryan was a student—one assignment is to choose and explore a food-related career from a list of 250 options divided into 8 broad categories: Communications, Education, Management and Service, Nutrition and Sciences, Visual Arts and Design, Culinary Arts, Baking and Pastry Arts, Farming and Growing. Here’s a sample of jobs within those categories:

The field wasn’t relegated to chef anymore, and the key to success after school seemed to be combining a broad-based education with a deep focus in one of those eight arenas.

“We’re not a training institution—we’re an institution of higher education,” Ryan said. He wanted the graduates of this former trade school (don’t call it a trade school today; “I made that mistake once,” a chef confided in me, noting he’d not do that again around top brass) to progress from making money with their hands to making money with their heads. He gets resistance about this from some people within the CIA who want to train broiler cooks. “That’s what you need on a Saturday night,” he said. “But it’s not what the industry needs for the long haul.”

Ryan clearly had an ambition to make this institution not just a great one in the food industry but one of the great educational institutions period.

“I want this to be a place of inquiry and original thought,” he concluded.

“How you guys doin’?—Good.” Chef Turgeon hadn’t waited for an answer nor did he look at anyone as he spoke. He’d taught about fifty three-week blocks of Garde Manger, cold food and buffet preparation, the last class before students left for their externship, four months’ working in the industry before returning for the second year of culinary school. He knew the seven
A.M
., glazed, just-shaking-the-head-clear nonresponse from just as many blocks of the American Bounty restaurant, the final teaching kitchen at the CIA, where he’d been my chef in 1996.

Dan Turgeon had fair hair, graying at the sideburns and now thinning beneath a toque that made him seem taller than his six feet, a long, narrow face, blue eyes, a stiff-straight posture that projected an instructorly disposition. His speech was monotone, but his words were commanding in their blunt, declarative nature.

“What you gather now, you don’t gather later,” he said to his eighteen students, grouped in threes in the windowless boxcar-shaped kitchen. “Get what you need, get it at your station. You want to stay in one place and cook for four hours. Lot of demos today. I’m gonna suck up about twenty-five minutes of your day. Questions?—All right, go.” Turgeon perched on a stool at the computer terminal to check e-mail as the students scurried to dry storage, to the cooler, ducking into their lowboys, to collect their mise en place.

Turgeon had welcomed me back and, at my request, put me to work with one of the groups. I wore my old jacket, houndstooth-check pants, neckerchief, and paper toque. I’d asked to be in his class mainly because Turgeon had been such a terror to me when I was first here. I’d spent just seven days on the grill station at American Bounty, but the impact of the experience was such that it seemed as though I’d been there for months. Experiences that make a permanent mark on the way you think ought to take longer. I’d spent a matter of days with the guy, which I recall more or less as continual white-knuckle fear that I wouldn’t be ready for service, and even now I hear his voice in my head, telling me to stop what I’m doing and clean my station, that it’s a battle, every day, me against the clock. A shrink would tell me my seven days in Bounty have all the benchmarks of classical trauma. I was shell-shocked for life.

All of which is to try to explain why I had such affection for the guy. He’d been right about everything, and I wanted to see what he was up to.

Turgeon was my age, Chicago born, found a job as a kid bussing tables, moved quickly to where all the cool stuff was happening (the kitchen), and had been there ever since. He graduated from the CIA in 1985, the year I graduated from college, and surely accomplished a lot more as a cook and a chef, much of it in D.C. and Maryland, than I did at anything in the eleven years between our graduations and the day he threw me on grill. At the time he seemed years older than me. He still seemed older, I found, but he was a lot more pleasant to be around now.

Dan had been in garde manger for four and a half years, a leap back to the middle of the curriculum and students of a different level from those he was used to in Bounty, where he got a new kitchen staff every seven days—truly a unique situation in the restaurant business. Now he had students for fourteen days over a period of three weeks, teaching a very different kind of food, a branch of cooking that was of particular interest to me, personally, because of the craftsmanship required to make it great. This was not Saturday-night restaurant food, heavy on the mise, high on the heat. This was food that was eaten cold, or if it was served hot, nevertheless came off the buffet line. This was the arena of the
pâté en terrine
and
en croute,
the plated ap for a party of thirty, wedding receptions, buffet service for big groups.

In restaurants, the garde manger station is the salad station, but traditionally the garde manger was the keeper of the food, the scavenger, the leftover wizard. He or she ground meat trim and fat and salt and seasoning and cooked it, thereby extending the life and usefulness of what had been scraps. The garde manger chef was an expert in seasoning because this food was often eaten cold and therefore required especially forceful use of salt and spices. The garde manger had to be especially keen in making food look good, because cold food almost never had the visual appeal that hot food did. The garde manger had to be versed in preservation techniques, such as salting and drying, had to understand specialty items like foie gras and cheese, had to be an ace saucier, again because cold food needs the serious muscle of craft behind it.

Garde manger is ultimately about specific specialty techniques, rather than a type of food, techniques that include forcemeat (from
farcir
—“to stuff”—it refers to meat, fat, and seasonings ground and mixed in preparation for a pâté or a sausage, or even a ravioli or some blanched cabbage leaves), curing and smoking, and more generally the creation of hors d’oeuvres and canapés.

“I was really apprehensive about this,” Turgeon said, “but it’s turned out to be my favorite class.”

Classical garde manger has long shouldered the burdens of its past—big buffet tables heaped with cold food, cut fruit garnishes, and tallow sculptures. They featured one if not many
pâtés en croute,
which in thoughtless hands is a dry meat loaf surrounded by rubbery meat gelatin and soggy pastry crust. Even the CIA course guide acknowledges its ambivalent past: “From its opulent roots with great master chefs such as Carême (with his lavish but not always palatable buffet presentations), Garde Manger has changed to meet the more practical demands of today.” Not just meeting practical demands, but embracing the new dynamism of American cuisine, I might add.

The garde manger class concluded with what’s called a Grand Buffet, an event that sounds straight out of the age of Carême and takes up four of the class’s fourteen days, three in preparation, and one day for setup and service. It’s a big deal. Large serving tables beneath vast tablecloths are assembled in the center of the dining hall (a former chapel that retains its stained-glass Bible scenes) and special serving platters are brought in. All of it has to be trucked from the basement level, where the garde manger kitchens are, to the main floor. Baking and pastry classes, held in a different building, bring in all their buffet concoctions, from baguettes to pretzels, plated desserts to petits fours on mirrors. And half the school is invited to have lunch here on this day, the day of the Grand Buffet, or several hours later, their dinner, prepared by the
P.M
. garde manger students.

Turgeon has divided the class into six teams working three stations, each station serving a particular style of cuisine. Almost needless to say, there is a classic French station—France is where so much of the garde manger discipline originates. So Turgeon will oversee the slicing, presentation, and serving of dishes one expects to see at a Grand Buffet—roulade of foie gras and magret (the breast of the Moulard duck, raised for its foie gras—it’s almost as rich as a thick strip steak) with a fruit compote and sliced toasted brioche; a salmon
pâté en croute;
a smoked chicken liver terrine.

For the Italian station, he’s included a pork loin stuffed with sausage, which will be served with a Caesar salad and eggplant “croutons.” He calls out “Demo!” and the class huddles around station six as he demonstrates rolling the loin, butterflied and pounded flat, around the sausage and tying it. It will be browned, then roasted. “Watch the sear on the pork,” he tells the group, noting pork’s low-fat content. “The industry has raised these pigs to be chickens—they oughta have feathers.” Next he moves on to the table preparing the favas for the three-bean salad, served with the tuna confit. He peels a raw fava—it’s kind of a pain, he says, but it makes a difference. This was new—I’d peeled thousands of favas for his American Bounty succotash, and I always cooked them, shocked them, then peeled them. When they’ve been cooked, they pop right out of the skin; raw, it’s like peeling an egg. When I noted the change, Turgeon informs me, every now and then with the old method, a batch would turn brown; this way, they never turn brown. Then on to the tuna, which he wants cut very small. “Portion size is really critical,” he says. “You don’t want a lot of big stuff on the plate. Get in touch with your feminine side, don’t be afraid of it. Think of this as Barbie food.” Then he barreled forward, on to the foie gras roulade.

I felt lucky he’d put me with the group in charge of something a little less familiar and more exciting: the Southwestern station. This was what the school meant by embracing the more practical demands of today. There would be a terrine, of course, but on this station it would be a chile-chicken terrine—dark meat ground with fat and seasoned with shallot, jalapeño, garlic, and oregano. Its interior garnish (things left whole and folded into the meat-loaf mixture that make the pâté visually and texturally dynamic) included roasted poblanos in addition to ham and chicken breast. The team making it must research and devise a suitable accompaniment—it would be some sort of chunky salsa.

Turgeon had a bent toward this kind of food, with its vivid flavors. In Bounty the steak that came off my station got a dry rub of ancho and cayenne powders, cumin, mustard, paprika, salt, pepper, sugar, and dried oregano before being grilled, and was served with a barbecue sauce—with a base of roasted tomatoes and veal stock—that included more dried and ground peppers, coriander, molasses, honey, and was at the end spiked with cilantro and bourbon. Now, for his Grand Buffet menu he did an ancho-rubbed skirt steak, which would be served as a tortilla with lime-cilantro sour cream, roasted red pepper and achiote salsa, and a chipotle pico de gallo. That’s delicious just to think about, just as delicious sounding even if you didn’t know what all that stuff meant, and you’d have to be a really bad cook to screw something like that up.

He did a sweet corn–and–shrimp soup, a chowderlike concoction seasoned with jalapeño, cumin, coriander, and lime. There were pork empanadas and barbecued lamb tamales (which used a barbecue sauce similar to the one I’d made in Bounty; mercifully, this one included no brown sauce about which I had become bitter and resentful while working there) and wild mushroom–and–cheese quesadillas. Even the salads were exciting, especially the one featuring fingerling potatoes, chorizo, and roasted poblanos.

This was American regional cuisine from the Southwest, a breath away from Mexican cuisine. But it was also, now, amazingly, the stuff of a classically influenced Grand Buffet.

Turgeon would stride past the tables during setup in the main hall, looking serious as a Doberman. Directly behind these students, the other
A.M
. class set up its stations. Casting a glance at the instructor of this class, John Kowalski, CIA class of 1977, Turgeon, ever straight-faced and deadly serious, said, “Hey, those recipes you got out of
Martha Stewart Living
are looking pretty good.”

Kowalski, busy with setup, grimaced but failed to come up with a return thrust. There’s a healthy competition among instructors here, especially when their food is on display side by side.

Turgeon estimated this was about his fiftieth Grand Buffet—nothing compared with the four hundred or so Chef James Heywood did during his many years as a garde manger instructor, but it felt impressive nonetheless. For his students, every thirteenth day of every block went like this: 7:00
A.M
. to 9:00
A.M
., gather mise en place, post To Do sheets, glaze, slice, dress, and finish all food. From 9:00 to 9:20, take equipment upstairs. By 10:00
A.M
., finalize mise en place, change jacket (this is public cheffing, after all—gotta look clean), and organize stations. From 10:00 to 10:30, take food upstairs. At 10:30, Turgeon would demo each “interactive” station (those stations slicing meat to order or heating and finishing soup). At 11:00, roughly 350 students filed in and had their pick of French, Southwestern, and Italian foods, or, on the other side, Kowalski’s class’s stations, American regional from the South and from the Hudson Valley, and a station devoted to fish. In an hour their work and three days of preparation was done, time to break down, clean up, scrub the kitchen, and set out stools for the day’s evaluation and a Day 13 quiz. (Turgeon, who was doing doubles this week, would repeat each step exactly seven hours later with the
P.M
. class.) Tomorrow would be the students’ last class before leaving for an externship, paid work in the field, for at least four months.

My very first day there, Turgeon called to me: “Hey, Michael, c’mere.” He wanted me to see an e-mail that related directly to something we’d been talking about.

When I’d been there earlier in the spring, I began asking most chefs I spoke with how the place was changing. There were various responses, of course, but a single issue was almost unanimously common: the students had begun to complain. Not about anything specific; they were just generally more quick to voice discontent—about homework assignments, grades, workloads, stress factors, how difficult this or that instructor was being. If they didn’t complain to their instructor, then they complained to the dean in charge of that instructor’s team, and if not to the dean, then to their parents, who then called the school.

When I asked Ryan about this, he said, yes, both students and parents complained with increasing frequency. He said he hoped he wouldn’t be like that when his kids were in school, but then shrugged as if to say,
How can you know?
Indeed, perhaps it was a change in the culture at large, related to parents’ deepening involvement in their kids’ lives as well as to a culture increasingly attuned to diversity in the workplace.

Whatever the reason, for the chef-instructors at a culinary school, the effects of this complaining may be more pronounced than they are for instructors in other types of schools. It seemed to undo a primary dynamic of the kitchen—the chef as omnipotent authority. Eve Felder, CIA class of 1988, who’d been my garde manger instructor, was now the assistant dean in charge of curriculum and instruction. She suggested the change in the dynamic may have begun in 1989, when the school first gave students teacher-evaluation sheets, officially called “Feedback Forms,” to fill out at the end of each block. This was a revolutionary idea (and not a very pleasant one) to a chef who had been pretty much allowed to do what he wanted in his own kitchen. “My staff gets to evaluate me? Grade
me?
” Furthermore, everywhere in the industry, in every kind of kitchen, complaining wasn’t done—you just didn’t do it. This was a fundamental part of kitchen culture. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps kitchen work is so damn hard that if you had any complaining gene in you at all you just got deselected out quickly. You let one complainer into a place this hard and hot and miserable, and pretty soon you’ll be overrun by whiners. Or maybe it was simpler than that: Complaining in a kitchen just doesn’t make any sense. It would be like walking through the Sahara and complaining about how hot it is. Obvious and irrelevant.