Now You're Cooking

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, May, 2000 by Jane Bennett Clark

FOOD | From French to fusion, CHEF SCHOOLS teach cuisine's finer points.

IT'S SATURDAY afternoon at the River View Cafe and Bakery, and the citizens of Whitehall, Mich. (pop. 3,500), are weighing their options. They've got the grilled cheese, the barbecued chicken, and, of course, the blanquette de porc en bouchee, or perhaps the potage St. Germain with a side of pain fougasse. Meanwhile, behind the kitchen door several toque-topped students are firing up for the next effort: creme brulee, followed by a flaming platter of rumdoused crepes suzette.

French cooking school in the Michigan countryside? Sure--not to mention Italian cooking classes in Sewickley, Pa.; vegan cooking in Austin, Tex.; baking in Essex, Vt.; and culinary vacations in countries as far-flung as Australia and Singapore. As interest in ethnic foods increases and cooking moves from daily chore to weekend pastime, culinary schools have become hotter than grease on a griddle. Says Ron Paul of Technomic, a food-industry consulting firm based in Chicago: "It's a hobby, an experience and a way to be creative."

And you don't have to go to Le Cordon Bleu to get down with the crepes suzette. The 2000 Shaw Guide to Cooking Schools ($22.95; 212-799-6464, www.shawguides.com), a comprehensive resource, lists 624 recreational programs covering food prep from French to low-fat to fusion, as well as almost 100 wine courses. Some schools charge as little as $25 for a morning session on breadmaking; others price out at several thousand for a week that includes market tours, wine tasting and sightseeing along with cooking techniques.

For instance, Cuisine Unlimited, which offers the Whitehall program as well as classes at other sites in Michigan, charges $125 to $200 a day for stateside lessons in French technique, recipes and pastry making. Owners Deborah and Mike Ward also escort students to Biarritz, France, for two-week trips that include cooking, wine courses and sightseeing, at $4,000 (for information, call 231-873-0274, or look at www.greatcooking.org).

For all those choices, selecting the right cooking program depends as much on your concept of fun as on budget and taste, says Sarah Labensky, a board member at the International Association of Culinary Professionals. "There are schools where you pay big bucks to go to Paris and work for a week in a three-star restaurant. If you want a quasi spa vacation while learning about cooking, that's a very different school."

No day at the beach

CHEF DEBORAH WARD takes classical French cooking seriously: Trained by top European chefs, she received a Gold Cross award from France for cuisine, education and humanitarianism, and worked with the Premier Sommelier de France here and abroad. She has also taken students to work alongside Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme.

But in the kitchen of the River View Cafe, she wields a decidedly American-looking instrument: a blue plastic ruler. "The French are very organized, very standardized," she says. "The training is specific." Just how specific becomes plain as Ward teaches her students the large-dice method for cutting vegetables: She lines up the ruler with a single green bean and measures off 3/4-inch intervals.

To an observer, it's a lot of science for a bunch of roughage, but Jane Kane and Veronica Muscat, cooking enthusiasts who have signed up for the day's operations, appear undaunted. Over the next few hours, en route to the soupe, they'll learn how to chop an onion efficiently (halve it root to root, make two horizontal half-cuts, slice through at right angles) and how to wash a leek (slice lengthwise, leaving the root intact, and splay under water). Ward describes the geography of a chef's knife, lectures on how to peel a carrot, and scares the skin off a garlic clove by smacking it under the blade.

Several mountains of vegetables later, the students have absorbed another lesson: Dicing enough stuff to supply soup for a crowd is not exactly a day at la plage. But Ward says learning in a restaurant gives would-be chefs a valuable reality check--and without the short course in knife technique, the process could have been worse. "If you're holding the knife correctly and standing correctly," she says, "you're not going to get tired."

Eating your mistakes

ONE EXCELLENT THING about cooking class: You get to eat your schoolwork. In this case, lunch includes the garlicky vegetable soup plus a pain de campagne and an earthy poulet basquaise, all produced under Ward's tutelage.

Then it's back to business for the afternoon session, and a serious business it is, constructing tiny swans, baskets and tarts out of prodigious amounts of butter, eggs, sugar and cream. Joining the group are Janay Taylor, owner of the Koinonia Coffee House in nearby Muskegon, and Sharon Martin-House, a local writer. For Taylor, creating small waterfowl out of choux pastry isn't a hobby: She hopes to expand her business along with her repertoire. As for Martin-House, she wants to share a bit of the world with her 14-year-old son: "Kids need to be exposed to more cultural things. Cooking is part of it."