Metz had instituted a degree in baking and pastry and had constructed a building for continuing education programs now serving thousands of industry professionals each year. The school had graduated last December the first class enrolled in the new bachelor's program accredited by the Board of Regents of the state of New York. A brand-new library and video
center had recently been completed. In the same structure, a sprawling demonstration theater had been designed where chefs such as Daniel Boulud, Gray Kunz, and André Soltner lectured and cooked. Behind the demonstration kitchen was an audiovisual production center, which created the CIA's video cooking series, but also had the capacity to broadcast cooking demonstrations and lessons to companies across the country who could not afford to send their employees to Hyde Park. The previous fall, the school released four books on food and wine. The school offered thirtyweek cooking programs in Mexico City; São Paulo, Brazil; and Puerto Rico; and taught continuing education in places as far away as India, Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
By creating an Internet site, called Digital Chef, it was hoped that one day the school might send cooking demonstrations and food information into the computers of professional kitchens and home kitchens throughout the world. Visions of the future were tantalizing. The home cook, via the Internet, could call up any of the countless recipes in the Culinary's files. When the recipe instructed the cook to sauté a chicken breast, a click on the word sauté would bring to the screen a quick demonstration of proper sauté technique. When it said julienne the carrot on a mandoline, a click would define mandoline and even tell you where you could buy one if you wanted. The professional cook, finding an abundance of flank steak, asparagus, and shitakes in the walk-in, might call up the CIA home page and engage a program that scanned thousands of recipes listing flank steak, asparagus, and shitakes as ingredients; this chef now had dozens of ideas for specials to make use of his surplus.
The previous fall, Greystone, the West Coast campus of the Culinary Institute of America, opened its doors, an awesome state-of-the-art facility that would have its own organic gardens, grow its own merlot grapes, and feature, on the top floor, brightly lit and open, perhaps the best instruction kitchen in the world, what one newspaper called “the Taj Mahal of teaching kitchens.”
Claims in publications such as
Nation's Restaurant News
that Ferdinand Metz, president of a cooking school, was a visionary in the industry did not seem unfounded.
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W
ithin the Hyde Park campus, Mr. Metz was regarded as a bottomless well of food knowledge. He had earned both his bachelor's and his
M.B.A. at the University of Pittsburgh while working in research for Heinz U.S.A. He had been a part of the culinary olympics, held every four years in Germany, for twenty years. He had led United States teams to a gold medal in the Hot Foods competition, the most difficult and prestigious part of the olympics, in 1984, then did it again in 1988. No country had ever won back-to-back golds in the Hot Foods competition. He had created a team, according to some, that all other countries looked to beat. But in a move that angered Metz, the American Culinary Federation, apparently worried that the team had become a private club of CIA chefs, replaced Metz. The United States fared considerably less well in the following two olympics without Metz's leadership, most recently taking a fifth place in the Hot Foods category, only a little better than its seventh-place finish in 1992.
Mr. Metz was a certified master chef, but he was a cook first, as Chef Smith had said. The previous fall, with the help of Tim Rodgers, he had cooked for and served the presidents of the United States and Russia when the two met at the estate of Franklin Roosevelt up the road from the Culinary.
What's more, Metz had arrived at the Culinary just as the food revolution had engaged a new gear; as Metz built up the Culinary, the country grew more sophisticated about food and more interested in chefs. No longer was the professional kitchen perceived to be a thuggish blue-collar man's world. It had become not just respectable but glamorous. Chefs, women and men alike, had become celebrities. “If cooking was to become our chief entertainment,” Fussell explains, “our cooks would have to become stars.” And Metz's school would not only share in the growing prestige of the trade, it would attempt to influence industry standards of dress, professional decorum, and values.
Metz was a stunning figureâa banquet cook with an M.B.A., an R-and-D man with a solid footing in the corporate world. He was as at ease in a boardroom as in a kitchen. He cooked dinner for his family and he cooked dinner for the presidents of the United States and Russia. To his staff, he was the embodiment of perfection. To his students he was like a Roman deity. When my friend Theresa cooked in the Escoffier kitchen, Metz appeared one day to speak with the chef. Afterward she said to me, “That's the closest I've ever been to him. I could even touch him.” Her eyes were wide and serious.
I looked forward to meeting this man. I had questions of my own and they had little to do with corporate management and strategic plans and future-of-the-industry
prognostications. I wanted to know what I'd come to find out: What must a cook know? What is a culinary education all about? I wanted to know what kind of roux
he
used for a brown sauce. And what had he done with that mache?
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I
arrived at Metz's office before the appointed hour of eight and I did not wait long before he arrived, said good morning from a distance, and unlocked the door to the far segment of his office. A few moments later he appeared at another door and welcomed me to his main office. We sat at a round table in a large room that was separated by a dark rococo highbacked wooden bench that had been a fixture at the New Haven campus. Already I sensed the difficulty of taking in the surroundings with Metz in the room. Even silent, he demanded your attention. His presence filled the room. I was vaguely aware of a small television set in the corner. From the south wall, a portrait of Ronald Reagan toasted me continuously with a glass of champagne. Near Ron was a framed copy of Metz's M.B.A. diploma. Cookbooks from the culinary olympic teams he'd managed displayed on a shelf faced me from another direction. The decor and furniture were luxurious and fine without calling attention to their own elegance. Except for a willed glimpse here and there, though, my eyes rarely left Metz.
We spoke briefly of his wife, Carol, who happened to be from Cleveland, and of my work. Dora Bottiglieri, the woman who'd refused me the macheâ“Mr. Metz doesn't
mess around
with
boxes
Ӊwheeled a cart into the room and set a small buffet in the corner, then arrived at our round table to pour coffee into china cups on saucers set beside cloth napkins. She asked about juice, orange or watermelon? I asked for orange.
“He's traditional,” Metz said to Dora.
Dora smiled at me.
We talked about his goals for the Institute in the coming years, the importance of professionalism in the industry, the new facility in St. Helena. He was so proud of the Greystone campus he left the table to dig up a photograph of the main kitchen there; we talked about the induction burners they'd installed, which only heat where the pan is. “I can put a pound of butter here,” Metz said, extending two hands side by side, “and boil a pot of water here, and the butter will not melt.” Impressive, I said, but did you get the heat you needed when you needed it? “It will boil this much water”âhe indicated an inch with his fingersâ“in about eight seconds.”
He and Ryan had both cooked on them and found them superior to gas. He believed it was the future. He believed in quality. (The school had recently put a new roof on the sprawling Roth Hall; Metz opted for slate rather than a cheaper material.) And we talked about the baccalaureate program, which was the most important development at the Culinary in twenty years, he said, as it would “marry culinary education with business management.”
All this was well and good, and of great importance, no doubt, but I was after something more specific and got straight to the point. Brown sauce. Roux. What kind?
“Obviously,” he said, “you can't make a brown sauce with a pale roux, so the question becomes what kind of fat you use.” He spoke for several minutes on the properties of various fats, confusing me utterly. I felt like I was being snowed. I knew Escoffier used clarified butter. Chef Delaplane, Corky Clark's P.M. counterpart and an admitted blond-roux guy, said in his gumbo lecture that he knew a cook in Louisiana who made roux with alligator fat. But that was as complicated as I got and Metz left me in the dust. When he had finished, I noted the reason I'd asked, and he seemed surprised to learn of the roux decree and asked me the reasons for it. I said I honestly didn't know, I had only been able to find out that it was considered incorrect, and there had been some hints that Skills students tended to make their brown roux too bitter.
“For me,” Mr. Metz said, “bitterness doesn't come into play because if it's bitter, it's been cooked too far. If brown roux is bitter, I call it burnt roux.”
I was satisfied. I could at last put the question of roux to rest.
The conversation meandered through his career at Heinz (as if he weren't already busy getting his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, holding down a full-time job, and developing Weight Watchers meals there, he also taught gourmet cooking to approximately five thousand people in greater Pittsburgh, refining and quantifying his own recipes). He still cooks every day at home, he said. At home, he cooked to perfection. Perfection was his standard and where he cooked did not change that standard. “At home,” he said, “dinner is when the food is done, dinner is not at seven o'clock or whenever.” His wife had told me that her husband considered everything that he put in his mouth critically; he ate not a single bite without evaluating it.
I happened to know, I said, spotting an opening for an odd question, that he had taken with him to his home in Pennsylvania for the July Fourth
weekend some mache. Would it be too forward of me to inquire how he used it?
He thought for a moment and said, “A lobster salad.”
Lobster salad!
With avocado and artichokes, he explained; the mache gave it a nice appearance and flavor. I said, “I bet it did.” Curiously, he did not seem surprised by the fact that I knew about his mache nor did he have any interest in how I found out.
In interviews and at his monthly A-Block reception, Metz used a few examples to illustrate a specific way of looking at food. The Reuben and cheese placement, for instance, was a regular one. He had a story about what makes an apple pie so good, which led to an examination of why a crust was flaky and to what degree (in essence, a good pie crust is simply a badly made puff pastry), and there was one about why we salt eggplant and salt's effects on water content and fat absorption in eggplant (salt leaches out water but also, Metz explained, prevents the absorption of fat, thus resulting in a leaner final product). Metz delivered such storiesâthey were very much question-answer narrativesâas if he were the lead in a Platonic symposium.
While such tales illustrated the importance of knowing why food behaved this way or that, they didn't get to the heart of the matter. One could spend ten years at this school and not know all the whys. One graduated from here with a great deal of knowledge, but still that knowledge amounted, metaphorically speaking, to a shaft of light falling on the head of a boy as he peaks through a crack in the doorway into a great and awesome hallway of light. Certainly it is important to understand what makes a pie dough flaky, the purpose of cheese in a Reuben, and the physics of an emulsion, but these were examples, branches extending from the trunk of a culinary education.
“I think a culinary education has several components,” Mr. Metz began, in an effort to describe for me the trunk itself. He was fantastically elegant in his movements and posture, projecting both ease and polish as he sipped his coffee or turned in his chair. His German accent was soft but distinct. “One is to thoroughly understand, and be able to thoroughly execute, those basic cooking principles, whether they be roasting or braising or frying, anything.” He sighed heavily, as if in exclamation. “You could almost say that if you know that, and if you know all the related aspects to it,
that's
cooking ⦠. Their mind is no longer occupied, âDo I do the braising right,
or do I have to look in the book and see?' No. It's
in
you. You know it, you've done it many times, you no longer have to look it up, you know the basic principles, you know how to perform itâ
now
your mind can concentrate on âI have fifty guests here, one hundred here.'
“And also creativity. Comprehension of those basic principles allows a person to become creative. Oftentimes, I talk to new students; they get attracted to this profession because they can be creative. But little do they know thatâthat part is very excitingâbut that part only comes after a while, it doesn't come in the first week. Because in the first week your creativity is based oftentimes on a very shallow understanding of what it's all about. And if our students know that only certain meats should be used for braising and that the same meats could not necessarily be used for grilling and poaching, that's a tremendous advantage. If a student understands sautéingâI mean there are so many levels of sautéing. We talk about one thing in order to get the principle down, but the refinement of each of these concepts is done with experience and an open mind. And the only way you can have that open mind is to no longer worry about: do I understand the basics?