WHEN I ENTERED THE CULINARY INSTITUTE OF AMERICA as a journalist to write a book about learning to cook professionally, I became one of its best students ever. Not because I was smarter or more talented than anyone else, but because of the unusual nature of my long immersion as a nonstudent. I was there to find out what the oldest and most prominent cooking school in the country thought one had to know to be a chef, and to convey this through story, which required characters, conflict, dialogue, action.
In order to get this story, I had to take notes all but continuously. If I wasn’t chopping or sautéing, I was scribbling in a notebook. I recorded interviews with chefs and transcribed them. Every night I returned home and typed out all my notes, whether they concerned how to make a brown veal stock or the background of the lead characters in my story, which was eventually published as The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America. No one took better notes, let alone typed them all out. So not only did I get a good story, but my reporting gave me an in-depth knowledge of the culinary fundamentals, and reinforced both the intellectual and physical skills—the tools—necessary to continue educating myself in the kitchen.
Part of my good fortune was to be placed first thing in a “Skills kitchen” with a young, articulate chef, Michael Pardus. The old way of teaching cooking was this: the apprentice watched the chef and then did as the chef did; if he asked “Why?” the answer was “Because I said so.” Here, in the first of all the teaching kitchens at the CIA, we learned why. And we started with the basics—how to hold a knife, how to slice an onion, how to make a stock, and so on. We were always taught the whys of those basics: you grip the blade between the thumb and the first knuckle of your index finger because it gives you maximum control; you first knock out the core when slicing an onion so that all the slices separate; you cook stock not at a simmer but rather at scarcely a bubble, so that fat and other impurities do not emulsify into your stock.
As the seminal chef Auguste Escoffier notes in Le Guide Culinaire, referred to at the school as “the bible,” nothing of importance can be attempted before you learn the basics. Nothing.
Pardus loved the basics and the whys of cooking. And I loved to spar with him over details, to question his evaluation of my hollandaise sauce or the seasoning of my soup. He liked to be called out and challenged; I believe that’s a big part of what made him a great teacher. He thought out loud, and thereby taught us how to think as well as how to season our pasta water or clarify a consommé.
In that Skills kitchen, we learned the fundamentals. We followed recipes but only in the service of techniques—and the primacy of technique over recipe was then, and has been to this day, the guiding principle in all that I do in writing about food and in cooking. Chef Pardus often directed us to one recipe or another in the CIA textbook, The New Professional Chef (Fifth Edition, a book I still cherish), but it was always in order to illustrate a technique. Therefore, we braised lamb shanks according to the recipe on page 469 (that page in my copy remains dog-eared nearly two decades later), but the point was to learn a technique: braising. Braising is used for tough cuts of meat; the meat is first seared to build flavor, add color, and set the protein, and then cooked low and slow in a moist environment so that the collagen, the connective tissue that makes the meat tough, breaks down into gelatin, leaving the meat tender and giving body to the cooking liquid. We learned that these facts applied not only to the lamb shanks on page 469 but also to pork shoulder, osso buco, beef short ribs, or any tough cut of meat.
Likewise, we weren’t given a recipe for roasted chicken to prepare for Chef; we were given a chicken so that he could teach us the fundamentals of the technique: roasting.