The comedian remark made me think of Emeril, the biggest celebrity chef there was, but whom Amanda Hesser in The New York Times had called a “jester.”
“You have to take a look at the big picture,” Ryan said immediately upon my bringing this name up. “Is Emeril Lagasse good for the profession? The answer is yes.”
This of course was a tacit way of saying he didn’t like what Lagasse did on his show, an all but unanimous opinion among chefs.
“I don’t know if you read The New York Times article,” he said. “That was true.”
Politically astute and in a position of authority, Ryan didn’t want to say anything bad about Lagasse publicly, but I pressed. He was willing to talk off the record about his feelings and ultimately composed an opinion via e-mail that he felt comfortable with:
Cooking on a television show is quite different from cooking in a restaurant. The food cannot be smelled or eaten—a fact that Emeril often highlights by teasing his audience to request “smell-a-vision” from their cable companies. Given the situation, Emeril does some things that he probably doesn’t do in his restaurants. I also often hear chefs criticize Emeril’s culinary techniques, but television is entertainment—it is not a training program or culinary school. In fact, television audiences often love it most when the talent messes something up and has to recover. That was certainly true of Julia Child, and beyond the realm of cooking shows—Johnny Carson was the master at turning a joke that bombed into something funny. Whatever the criticisms about Emeril, I think that net, net—he is a positive force. I like Emeril and respect him. I do wish that he could move away from throwing raw spices on his plates, but I don’t think that his audience would allow that. It’s one of his signature moves now. Anyway, it could be worse—he could be screaming profanities at someone, or acting unprofessional, and thankfully Emeril has never done that.
I sensed the remark about raw spices was a particular peeve of his—he’d mentioned it before—and it’s one I appreciated. Emeril had become famous for throwing raw spices on food and shouting “Bam!” That was his trademark, the move he was most associated with, the technique that half a million households were being trained to do nightly. Be like Emeril, go out and buy your own bottle of Emeril’s Essence and “kick it up a notch” by taking big pinches of raw spices, slamming them into the pan, and shouting at your food. For me, fun though it was, good TV though it was, this single act was symbolic of the worst of Emeril: His most famous message and lesson to millions was a bad one (not to mention a sales pitch for his line of spices). He was teaching a lot of people a lesson in mediocrity. How do you best use spices? You toast them for maximum effect. Do you have to toast the whole seeds and grind them fresh in order to use them? No. Can you just open Emeril’s blend, which you’ve had in the cupboard for six months, and throw it into your food? Sure. Will it change the flavor? Yes. Should people know the difference between one way and another, the right way and the compromised way, at least be able to make a considered choice in their own kitchens? I think so. To me that’s what cooking’s all about. Cooking is not about shouting at your food, but also there’s nothing wrong with shouting at your food. We take the good with the bad. And anyway, I’d feel too much like a foodie snob to say anything truly bad about Emeril. I’d hear about how great a guy he is—has a big charity fund. Kids with terminal illnesses have made a trip to this guy’s show their top make-a-wish priority. He’s a unique American celebrity, the first of his kind, an original.
Ryan leaned back in his chair, relaxed and comfortable. Behind him spread the beautiful Hudson Valley, students in chefs’ whites thronging below, the CIA nearing its sixtieth anniversary, stronger than ever in a culture that promised only to increase the opportunities and esteem for chefs. I just looked at him.
I said, “You must be having a blast.”
“Yeah, I totally am,” he said, smiling warmly—it seemed he was dropping his guard. “I think I’m at one of the great places of the world. And I would say, part of what has happened [in the chef world], the CIA is responsible for. Don’t forget in 1946—”
He halted. The scent was powerful, and we’d both smelled it at the same time and thought the exact same thing. Spices. The aroma of coriander seeds and peppercorns being roasted somewhere below had wafted up and into the room. Ryan was delighted to have support material floating in through the window. “See! We’re not throwing in raw spices—somebody’s got ’em in a pan, toasting them!”
It smelled great, and I wondered how they’d be used—some sort of Asian preparation, perhaps, or maybe someone had finished curing a beef brisket and was about to turn it into pastrami.
“In 1946,” he resumed, “the image of a chef is pretty damn low. Anything good is European dominated, and Mrs. Roth, with the help of Mrs. Angell, formalized culinary education. The level the CIA was aspiring to achieve did not exist in the world. And so we started off with this uniquely modern approach.”
Frances Roth, a lawyer by profession, founded the CIA, then called the New Haven Restaurant Institute, to give war veterans a skill useful in the food industry. She could scarcely have imagined that the American food industry would in four decades become a food revolution. The place opened with a class of fifty students. Today approximately fifty-five thousand people are enrolled in hundreds of culinary degree programs throughout the country. Ryan believed that not just the school but the level of professionalism this lawyer brought to the mission of the school was responsible for its growth and prominence, and the status of the chef in America.
“Without professionalization it doesn’t happen—chefs are perceived as fry cooks and hash slingers,” he said.
“When modern-day chefs do things that somebody—let’s say there are some things that people see in Rocco’s show that they don’t like or in Emeril’s show culinary-wise, or in Tony Bourdain’s book, their fear is that we’ll go back to those days when we were viewed as hash slingers. So there is some real fear of that. But I think the momentum professionally is too great.”
“So where’s it going?” I asked. “Are we at a crest?”
“I have to think that we’re only beginning on this journey,” he said, noting that he’s been searching other businesses and industries for a model he might learn from, but as yet he hasn’t found a profession that’s “become so white-hot and done some wrong things and exploded.”
He also notes that the world is different than it was when the CIA opened its doors. Ryan is well versed in business literature, often bringing up gurus Jim Collins and Tom Peters. It’s not just a matter of getting the right people on the bus; you’ve got to get them in the right seat, he explained when talking about hiring his staff.
Business in the old economy, he says, is like a crew race on the Charles River: a competition on still water against a clear competitor, a rigorous, organized, concentrated effort expended over a known period. At the end there is a clear winner, and it is done.
Our current business world is white-water rafting: “You’re hanging on for dear life,” he said. “It’s not linear. It’s directional at best. You can’t see obstacles, you can’t see competitors. This white-water situation is permanent, so get a grip.”
And it’s that kind of world he wants CIA graduates prepared for when they leave. Students have to be more than cooks. The dynamic of history can be described as one of “increasing complexity.” There was only one time in history when we went backward, he noted, and we named it the Dark Ages. Everyone entering the work world, culinary graduates no less than anyone, needed to account for this increasing complexity. To the kids who come in here saying I just want to learn how to cook, Ryan says, once you’re out in the world “you don’t get to just cook. You’re going to be doing a whole lot of other things, so to prepare students to just cook, it’s belittling to the profession.
“What do you think a chef is?” he concluded. “What does chef mean? It means leader.”
Shortly after he became president, Ryan oversaw a m
ajor 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:
Literary Agent
Restaurant Public Relations
Bacteriological Technologist
Industrial Hygienist
Catering Director
Military Foodservice Manager
Commercial Kitchen Designer
Food Stylist
Winemaker
Hydroponic Farmer
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.
CHAPTER 3
A Kinder, Gentler Kitchen
“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 Reach of a Chef Page 6
