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 externshipâa minimum of eighteen weeks' paid work in the industry, at restaurants, hotels, food magazines, or even the TV Food Networkâthey 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 somethingâwhether adding a new class, opening a new restaurant, or producing a new bookâthe $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 yearâsome 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.
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hef 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”âDavid Scott was at my table, a tall, clean-cut Californian in his mid-twenties with short dark hairâ“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 itemsâgray-and-white-checked cotton cloths that students tuck into their apron stringsâfrom 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
.”
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he 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 concasséâchopped 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 onionâevery day we would mince half an onion and thin slice the other halfâto 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.”
For the next couple of hours, as we did our cuts, Chef Pardus would correct our hand position on the knife. We were not to grip the entire handle of the knife like a hammer, we were not to extend an index finger across the top of the blade; we would grip the blade between index finger and thumb and with the rest of the hand grip the knife's handle. There was no other way to do it. If Pardus wasn't showing someone how to grip a knife, he was telling people to clean up the mess at their station or to look at the mess on the floor at their feet. Then he would say, “I do more talking on Day One than on any other day. In a week this kitchen will be humming.”
I had been loaned a knife kit by the Institute. It was, I sensed immediately, a powerful possession. The bag contained a twelve-inch chef's knife, a paring knife, a boning knife, and a slicing knifeâeach with a rosewood handleâa digital thermometer, a pastry brush, some pastry-bag tips, a two-ounce ladle, and a small pepper mill. As we all got to work, the chef, looking a little concerned, said quietly to me, “Are you O.K.? Are you comfortable in a kitchen?” I told him sure. About two minutes later, having
gathered most of the items I needed, I reached for a scrap of cheesecloth to my left. My chef's knife lay flat on my board between my hand and the cheesecloth. As I reached, the tip of my ring finger hit the blade. The knife had been sharpened so well that it didn't move when I hit it; my finger simply slid into it and I had a clean cut. A sharp knife is a safe knife.
To be the only person in the class who had not worked in the industry and to cut yourself almost as soon as you produce your knife is embarrassing. I wanted to avoid calling attention to myself; I also wanted people to think I knew what I was doing. The chef was nice about it, said it was good luck to cut yourself the first day. “Go wash your hands. I'll give you a Band-Aid.” He retrieved a bandage from his desk drawer. He also gave me a finger cot, referred to as a finger condom because that's what it looked like and how it worked. It covered the bandaged finger completely, and it did not impede me further as I executed my standard daily mise en place. Bianca Rizzo, twenty-one years old, from Queens, stood beside me doing the same. Greg Lynch, thirty-two, and David Scott and Travis Alberhasky, both in their mid-twenties, stood across from me, their backs to the stoves. All three had worked in kitchens before, and Greg had turned down a promotion to become head chef at a Vermont bed-and-breakfast shortly before he left for the Institute. He was here for one reason: money. A diploma from the Culinary would translate into bigger salaries down the road, and he hoped to get a fairly quick return on his thirty grand.
Each day, then, we would chop our two pounds of mirepoix (named, as so many things are, after an eighteenth-century Frenchman, in this case a field marshal named Duc du Lévis-Mirepoix, whose cook flavored his sauce Espagnol with it). We would slice half an onion, keeping our fingertips tucked in to go fast without bloodying the onionâ“Keep your fingers curled back and your thumb tucked behind your fingers,” Pardus said. “I'm telling you right now, someone here is going to slice their thumb chopping parsley because they didn't keep it tucked behind their fingers.” You could literally lose sight of your thumb squeezing a large bunch of parsley to begin fine-chopping it. We would concassé two plum tomatoes and make a sachet d'épices from a square of cheesecloth in which we enclosed five or six peppercorns, a bay leaf, a thyme sprig, and several parsley stems; garlic is often included in a standard sachet, but Pardus asked us did we know how the stock would be used? Would it be reduced to glace and used for a sauce, and would that sauce want garlic? This is how he wanted us to think in his kitchen. We would give him two turned vegetables. He would also
include a couple of special cuts, paysanne and batonnet carrots, for instance. Before six o'clock we would approach the chef like Oliver Twist stepping toward Mr. Brumble for more gruel; the chef, seated at the desk, would glance up through his gold-rimmed spectacles to see your face, then look down, paring knife in hand to flick through the minces. “Your diced onion looks good,” he told me on this first day. “Mmmm, your shallots look a little uneven.” He was able to produce various sizes of mince on the blade of the knife as evidence. I nodded.