New York Times articles

Thanks to Ed Manley at IFSEA for passing along this interesting, sad, but largely true article. Students listen up - there's a lesson in here somewhere - I believe it's called prepare yourself with all the skills you can attain so that you can seek a variety of jobs in a variety of fields, and you can switch jobs and fields in order to make a steady ascent to the top.

Subject: Cooking School Articles from Today's New York Times

Asimov, Eric, "Cooking School Graduates Go From Frying Pan to Fire."
The New York Times, Wednesday, June 24, 1998

New York -- By the time Matthew Laux completed a two-year program in March at the New England Culinary Institute -- after paying nearly $40,000 for an education that covers all aspects of the food service industry -- he had earned his reward -- a job at Trois Jean, a New York bistro, where he peeled and chopped vegetables 12 hours a day, six days a week. For this, he received $65 a shift.

Of course, peeling and chopping was not all Laux was expected to do in the restaurant's garde-manger, or cold-foods station. He also assembled vegetables into salads; he whisked vinaigrettes; he artfully positioned cold appetizers and desserts on plates, and he did whatever else he was told, since in a restaurant kitchen, "No," is not an answer.

"It's a pretty weird profession," Laux, 22, conceded. "I didn't really know how hard it was going to be."

More than a few would-be chefs who enter the dozens of American culinary schools envision owning their own restaurants. They can practically taste a future in which grateful diners swoon over their meals, race to bookstores to buy their cookbooks and then head home to watch their cooking programs on television.

The food service industry is booming nationally, and students who complete a culinary school education almost certainly have a career ahead of them. But they may not have a life.

As it is with Little Leaguers who dream of playing one day in Yankee Stadium, the fantasies of culinary students can melt like butter in a hot pan the first time they set foot in a restaurant kitchen and are handed a sack of potatoes to peel and slice. Not only are grandiose visions at risk, but even tamer hopes fade -- things like going on dates, marrying, having children.

Seventy-hour workweeks are typical for lowly recent graduates, whose glamorous tasks at the bottom rung of the kitchen ladder may include picking the cartilage from pounds of crab meat, removing liver and membranes from mounds of lobster shells so they can be boiled for stock or squeezing the flesh out of countless pea skins for soup. In the best kitchens, perfection is the standard, and those hapless souls whose work is not quite up to snuff can expect invective rather than understanding.

Their environment is physically demanding. They spend their time sweating before stoves or freezing in walk-in refrigerators, or maybe doing both. And the pressure is intense, especially as orders fly in during peak meal hours.

For this, new graduates can expect to earn perhaps $20,000 to $30,000 a year, which doesn't go very far, especially with school loans to repay.

"'You're out of the easy school -- now you're at the hard school,"' Serge Madikians recalls being told when he began working this month at the Monkey Bar in Manhattan. But Madikians, freshly minted from the French Culinary Institute in New York, said he was happy to hear it.

"After the high of completing school, I realized I was just beginning a long process of gaining an understanding of ingredients and food," said Madikians, who hopes one day to open his own restaurant, cooking Persian food through the prism of the French techniques he has learned. "A humbleness came, and I said, 'Let's start at the bottom of the totem pole."

More than many, Madikians, 36, seems to understand how far down the bottom is. He was earning $47,000 a year as assistant director of intergovernmental relations in the New York City Buildings Department when he enrolled in culinary school with the vague idea of one day investing in a restaurant. But two weeks into the program, he was hooked on cooking. "I loved it," he said. "The smells, the light, the noise made me really feel alive."

To pay for school, he cashed in his city retirement plan. Now, though he makes $9 an hour and has no medical or dental insurance, "I see this as paying my dues."

The time spent paying dues can vary tremendously. Typically, a young chef can expect to spend up to a year in an entry-level job, though those identified as talented can move up more quickly, within a few years passing through the various stations of the kitchen -- grill chef, sauté chef, fish chef, saucier -- with the hope of becoming sous-chef, the executive chef's chief assistant.

A sous-chef can expect a decent but not extravagant wage -- maybe $30,000 to $65,000 -- and is in a position to land his own kitchen at another restaurant. Spending too long in one position can be a sign that your talents lie elsewhere -- waiting tables, for example.

But not all novice chefs are passionate enough about the restaurant life to tolerate the hardships. Laux left Trois Jean for a short stint doing similar work in the huge main kitchen of the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Manhattan, where dozens of workers prepare meals for as many as 3,000 people -- when the Tony Awards roll around, for example. He said his job there, which ended last week, paid better and was far less stressful. "There's so many people, it's not all riding on me," he said.

Next, he is off to Belize to be the chef at a small resort. But he questions whether he has the drive to work in restaurants much longer, and is considering more manageable areas of the industry, like catering or working as a private chef.

Michael Ruhlman, a writer, has experienced firsthand the culinary student's struggle to live in a world bounded by steaming caldrons and zucchini peels. For his book, "The Making of a Chef" (Henry Holt, 1997), Ruhlman joined a class at the Culinary Institute of America and chronicled the evolution from novice to cook. He saw seasoned chefs picking out those who would be successful by looking for an attitude, which he described as an "insane, angry, furious drive for perfection." "You need this anger, this ferocity," Ruhlman said. "Otherwise you're not going to survive. The work is so hard that this anger has to be there. You get mad, and it's the only way to get the work done."

Anger may be the only recourse when you're "in the weeds," as chefs call the nightmare of not being ready when orders pour in and you fall behind and can't see a way out. Ferocity may lie behind reports that one famous French chef prods his workers with a fork to get them to go faster. Intensity and purposefulness drive chefs to be demanding, not compassionate.

"Thomas Keller made me eat a raw tuna membrane," Ruhlman said, recalling a visit to the famous chef of the French Laundry restaurant in Yountville, Calif. "I asked him why he was removing it, and he made me eat it. He said, 'Sometimes you have to know the truly terrible to avoid it.' "

Young chefs sometimes liken the busy dinner hours to combat, with all the adrenalin frenzy, and subsequent release, of battle. "There are times when I am completely overwhelmed, completely out of control," said Scott Wyant, a 25-year-old graduate of the Culinary Institute of America who has been cooking at Olive's in Boston for six weeks. "I'm in the weeds and think I'll never get out. Then an hour later, I wonder, 'How did I do that?' "

As rewarding as it seems at the end of the night, Wyant is already planning alternatives. "I definitely want to get out of the restaurant business," he said. "The hours are ridiculous, and it takes a toll. I love the industry - don't get me wrong -- but there are a lot of other aspects to it."

Aside from other cooking jobs, as in corporate dining rooms, private homes or catering companies, positions abound for culinary school graduates. Sue Hoss, 31, who graduated from the New England Culinary Institute in 1997, is an assistant editor at Cuisine, a magazine in Des Moines. She still occasionally dreams of owning a restaurant, but appreciates having a relaxed workweek and nights and weekends off.

Helene Borgstrom, 36, a 1997 graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, cooks on the corporate jets of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, a job that takes her from Tel Aviv to Tokyo. Money is rarely an object, and she can splurge on expensive Kobe beef if the urge strikes. Sometimes, though, she misses the energy of the restaurant kitchen. "Then my mom reminds me of the 14-to-16-hour days I used to work," she said, recalling her grueling internship in a restaurant in France.

Internships, which most culinary schools require as part of their curriculum, give students a taste of restaurant life. Beyond that, the schools try to temper their students' initial expectations. "I think everyone has delusions of grandeur, and they want to open their own restaurant right away," Ms. Borgstrom said. "Believe me, they try to dissuade you from that."

Jerry Gulley, 29, also a 1997 graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, is now a product manager at Digital Chef, an on-line retailer of food and cookware, earning about $50,000 a year. His first taste of restaurant cooking sent him in another direction. "I'm very inspired by cooking, but I prefer doing it on my terms," he said. "Working eight or nine hours on a hot line pumping it out -- I have tons of admiration for people who do it, but it's not what I see myself doing."

Still, the allure of the kitchen wafts ever outward. Dan Petrilli, 38, was a loading-dock foreman, but quit to attend the New York Restaurant School. He graduated in 1997 and now works as a line cook at the Grill Room, Larry Forgione's restaurant in the World Financial Center. "I made a lot more money with the teamsters," Petrilli said. "I'm putting in 15-hour days, but I love what I do. I'm one of the fortunate ones that can say that."

*****

Hesser, Amanda, "The Culinary Institute of America -- A Top School Broadens the Classic Curriculum."
The New York Times, Wednesday, June 24, 1998

It used to be that if you wanted to become a chef, you were expected to go to cooking school in Paris. There you learned classic technique, the organization of the French kitchen and discipline under the critical eye of French instructors. Words like souffle, galantine and fricassee trickled into your vocabulary, a chef's knife became an extension of your hand. And when you returned to the United States, you were practically guaranteed to land a job at a top restaurant.

But over the last decade, the culinary world has changed. Cuisines fused, and American kitchens were transformed from French food factories into dens of creativity. Restaurants began relying on local produce and a home-grown sensibility. And as they prospered, they created a new demand for chefs that a handful of schools abroad could not satisfy. Cooking schools have since sprouted all over this country -- there are now almost 800 -- and French cuisine is only part of the curriculum.

Today, when we go out to eat, the dishes we order more often reflect the values of schools like the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., or Johnson & Wales in Providence, R.I., than of any revered Paris institution. Consider the July issue of Food & Wine magazine, which hails the 10 new chefs it considers the best in the country -- seven were trained in the United States.

But nowhere is the break with the past clearer than in a comparison of the Culinary Institute, the most influential school in the United States, with its counterpart in France, Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.

Le Cordon Bleu has not wavered in its allegiance to French cooking -- choux pastry and beurre blanc are as much in its blood as ever, and its cuisine focus remains purely French. The Culinary Institute teaches that, too, but it is more interested in introducing students to the world of cooking, the business of running a restaurant and even how to cope with it all, with classes like stress reduction and personal health.

The institute's campus is on a hill, high over the Hudson River in what was a Jesuit seminary before cooks wielding whisks descended upon it in 1972. Today, there is no mistaking you are at a cooking school. The names of the buildings read like advertisements for the food industry. The General Foods Nutrition Center houses one of the school's four restaurants, which are staffed by students and open to the public. The Conrad N. Hilton Library is filled with cookbooks and a kind of sidewalk of the stars, lined with clay handprints and photos of chefs like Jeremiah Tower and Eric Ripert.

It also houses the Danny Kaye Theater (yes, the entertainer), which looks like a university lecture hall, except that instead of a podium there is an up-to-the-minute demonstration kitchen, complete with overhead mirrors and television screens displaying close-ups of the stove and preparation area.

Starting at 730 a.m., the campus crawls with some 2,100 students, knife cases in tote and toques bobbing. In 36 spacious and modern teaching kitchens, the air is filled with the sounds of mixers whirring, knives tapping on cutting boards and the occasional roar of an instructor. Some students are fresh-faced, right out of high school, some are grayish, an unusual mix with an average starting age of 23. Yet there is a powerful feeling of solidarity everyone is here to cook.

The 103-year-old Le Cordon Bleu looks a bit worn in comparison. It is squeezed into a narrow building in a quiet residential area of the Left Bank in Paris. The classrooms are less modern and smaller than the Culinary Institute's. But the atmosphere is more personal, with a student-to-instructor ratio of 10 to 1, compared with 17 to 1 at the Culinary Institute. There is no library and no restaurant, not even a school cafeteria.

But Le Cordon Bleu doesn't aspire to a campus environment. A temple is more like it, with students as worshipers who have made the pilgrimage to learn the secret of cooking and to take it back home.

"Let's face it," said Lindsay Gott, a student from San Francisco, "it's Paris, and the enthusiasm about food that's here, you feel it."

It is certainly something the Culinary Institute lacks. Tucked away in upstate New York, it suffers like many other campuses, from insularity. Students have little exposure to real restaurants. There is a wine club, an ice-carving club, even a cigar club, but few field trips to restaurants in New York City.

The institute applies a university philosophy to its curriculum, too. There are a 21-month program for an associate's degree and a 38-month program for a bachelor's degree. As cooking schools go, that is a lengthy commitment. (Le Cordon Bleu's program lasts nine months.) But students at the institute are earning a college degree -- an associate in occupational studies or a bachelor of professional studies -- approved by the state Board of Regents.

"Nowadays, just to be a great culinarian isn't enough," Tim Ryan, the senior vice president of the school, said, "People need to have the business acumen, the business skills."

So bachelor's degree candidates must complete courses in cuisine and pastry, management, economics and psychology. "We do want to stress balance and healthier living, so people stay healthier, livelier and in touch with their creative forces," Ryan said.

Students also spend four weeks at the school's recently opened Greystone campus in St. Helena, Calif., visiting wineries, restaurants and farms.

The bachelor's program, a school spokesman said, is a response to the change in perception of chefs. In census polls during the 1970s, a chef was considered a domestic servant. Today, chefs are categorized as professionals.

There are no such notions to put to rest in Paris, where being a chef has a long tradition of respect. Le Cordon Bleu's three-semester program is carefully designed for students to master just one thing -- French technique.

Students -- whose average age is 26 -- are first taught the fundamentals, from technique to palate education. The second semester focuses on French regional cooking, and the third refines skills and lets students unleash their own creativity on classic dishes.

Never do instructors teach how to run a restaurant. "We don't play with academics," Andre Cointreau, president of the school, said, "We are only dealing with hands-on culinary training at the highest level." Many prefer this to learning how to fold napkins and calculate the cost of ingredients.

"I really care about cooking," said Frankie Carl, 45, a former homemaker from New York City in her final semester. "I don't care about the business side of it. I'd hire someone for that."

The Culinary Institute tries to keep up with the restaurant industry. In its baking kitchens are installed stone-deck ovens like those used in many bread bakeries, and the school has added instruction on slow-fermentation breads made with organic flours, a big departure from the hotel rolls taught at most cooking schools. (Le Cordon Bleu still uses a convection oven.) And in the St. Andrew's Cafe, the school's light-cuisine restaurant, students are taught to use a wood-fired pizza oven and rotisserie.

In the classrooms, though, students are merely introduced to emerging cuisines of the world. As part of the core curriculum, for instance, students take an Asian cuisine course that lasts only seven days -- three days for Chinese cooking, three days for Japanese and one for Vietnamese.

At the Greystone campus, in the former Christian Brothers Estate winery, the school offers continuing-education courses ranging from wedding cakes to food writing to "fire, spice and the global grill."

This is where Le Cordon Bleu suffers most in comparison. The French school sniffs at trends and completely ignores fads. Though it has added a wine course, cheese instruction and a few continuing-education courses, there have been no major shifts over recent years in the way it teaches classic technique. Patricia Gastaud Gallagher, the academic director, says the school is paying more attention to seasonal ingredients, but a class being taught in April was making lamb tart using tasteless winter tomatoes and cucumbers.

In some ways, Le Cordon Bleu seems frozen in time. A brochure showcases pulled-sugar works and fish en gelee. It is difficult to imagine such antiquities enticing anyone to become a chef.

Yet, the school has a waiting list and has just opened a fourth outpost, in Australia, adding to those in London, Tokyo and Ottawa.

Le Cordon Bleu's greatest strengths are its site and its short program. Some students -- especially career-changers -- value how quickly one can earn a degree and the total immersion in the food culture of Paris.

The grand diplome in cuisine and pastry can be earned in 12 months, including a 3-month restaurant internship. And in that year, the student will come out with a thorough understanding of a cuisine. Not just any cuisine, but one whose techniques form the base of most Western cooking.

The Culinary Institute's approach -- introducing students to the world of cooking, rather than mastering it -- is both the school's edge and its fault. Students see what the culinary world has to offer but it is merely a starting point, like any undergraduate program.

But if you are an aspiring chef that starting point will be a decisive influence on the shape of your career. You may no longer need to go to France to learn to cook, but if you want to serve foie gras dusted with five-spice powder in Los Angeles, New York and Tokyo, you may need to stay here to learn how to do it.

*****

Grimes, William, "Beginners' Courses Range From the Casual to the Classic."
The New York Times, Wednesday, June 24, 1998

New York -- A pile of carrots, turnips, onions, shallots, lettuce leaves and potatoes lay on a stainless-steel table at the French Culinary Institute's teaching kitchen. My mission, on this first day of La Technique, the institute's basic course for amateur chefs, was to turn those vegetables into textbook examples of the basic French cuts -- juliennes, paysannes, chiffonnades and the nearly invisible specks known as macedoines.

No problem.

I sized up the carrot in front of me, set to work and, with a deft slice, removed the tip of my left thumb.

This was not in the course description.

My goal, rather than self-mutilation, was to test the basic-skills courses offered by New York's top cooking schools -- the French Culinary Institute, Peter Kump's New York Cooking School and the culinary arts division of the New School. In a city where you can find a course on everything from flirting to klezmer playing, it is no surprise to find that the amateur chef with higher aspirations, or even the fumbling beginner, can find professional help. In the past, a small army of chefs and caterers took in small groups of students and passed along their skills. With the restaurant boom of the past 20 years, however, the private tutors have largely been replaced by schools that have a more or less formal curriculum, with many courses designed for nonprofessionals.

They are doing a thriving business. The New School has more than tripled its enrollment in the past decade. In 1995, Peter Kump had to add on a second location, doubling its capacity. "Enrollment is going up all the time for these kinds of classes," said Gary Goldberg, the executive director of culinary arts at the New School. "There is a whole generation that knows about food, but does not know how to cook it."

All three schools offer a range of courses. But for the ambitious amateur, or the hopeless duffer who needs a good grounding in the basics, the schools have developed the culinary equivalent of an undergraduate survey course programs that promise to transform toast-burners and roast-ruiners into reasonably competent home chefs in a matter of weeks.

In the catalog descriptions, the courses sound quite similar. But after attending 10 hours of classes at each school, I discovered marked differences. A lesson on sauteing can mean that students watch the stove as the instructor explains what's happening. Or it might mean that they dice up vegetables, grab a pan and go to work, with the results subject to a searching critique.

My bleeding thumb brought on intense feelings of nostalgia for the New School's gentle introduction to the rigors of the kitchen, Fundamental Culinary Techniques.

One evening a week, for eight weeks, about a dozen students rang the doorbell at a nondescript townhouse on Greenwich Avenue, just west of Seventh Avenue South. They headed downstairs to the New School's dining room and small kitchen, where the instructor, Stephen Schmidt, waited, sleeves rolled up and knife in hand.

For the next three hours, the class sat on tall stools around the kitchen counter and, a little like a studio audience called up onstage during a Food Network show, watched and listened as Schmidt worked his way through the components of the evening's meal, explaining as he went along. We came, he cooked, we feasted.

As his text, Schmidt used photocopied chapters from his cookbook "Master Recipes -- A New Approach to the Fundamentals of Good Cooking." (A former restaurant chef, he also contributed several chapters to the revised "Joy of Cooking.") Taken together, the recipes constituted a tour of the cooking basics.

The bill of fare one evening included sauteed lamb chops with a mustard and caper deglazing sauce, roast beef rib with Yorkshire pudding and horseradish sauce, roasted brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes, potato and brie gratin, and roasted potatoes. Lots of material there. From time to time, Schmidt would hand around some paring knives or potato peelers, and students would do a little slicing and dicing, but the emphasis was on demonstration, not participation.

Students could learn as little or as much as they liked. There was no exam, no diploma or certificate to work toward and no pressure. Schmidt would reinforce his lessons by throwing out questions -- "Why did I just put the Yorkshire pudding in the top of the oven?" -- and awarding a verbal "gold star" if anyone came up with the correct answer (oven heat travels from the top down).

This easygoing style seemed to suit the students in my class, who were in their late 20s and early 30s and, in most cases, were taking their first tentative steps in the kitchen. The course costs $570, plus a $145 materials fee.

If you listened and took notes, there was a lot of useful information floating around the room. A stick of salted butter has about a teaspoon of salt. A slice of bread makes about a quarter cup of bread crumbs. A peach does not ripen once it has been picked, so feel it and smell it before you buy it.

Perhaps most important, Schmidt communicated the sense that cooking is partly trial and error, and most of the time, a lot of fun. With great enthusiasm, he tested a tip offered by a British friend, who had scolded him for not shaking his parboiled potatoes in the pan before roasting them.

He gave it a try during one class and found that, sure enough, shaking roughened the surface of the potatoes just enough so that butter adhered to them more evenly, resulting in a perfect crunchy crust. The message was clear. Food is a big subject. We're all students. Proceed without fear.

For wobbly beginners, the New School is the place to go. It offers an easy, welcoming introduction to the art of cooking, in a sociable environment. Home chefs who cook fairly regularly will be frustrated by not getting to roll up their sleeves and get dirty, but for novices, a little hands-on experience each week is probably enough.

The introductory course at Peter Kump's cooking school is called Techniques of Fine Cooking 1, but it is better known by the clipped, no-nonsense name Tech 1. Presented in five classes of five hours each, at a cost of $295 plus a $190 materials fee, it is designed to present the techniques that underlie most recipes, rather than the recipes themselves.

Tech 1 plunges right into the hurly-burly of chopping and mincing almost from the first moment of the first class, which started with a preparation for gazpacho. The students, who were instructed to show up with a professional-quality paring knife, chef's knife, apron and dish towel, got a brief lecture on kitchen utensils, cookware and proper left-hand positioning when using a knife -- left thumb tucked behind the fingers, fingers curled inward, knuckles resting against the knife to support and guide it. Then they jumped right into the business of chopping. When the vegetable massacre was finished, the class moved on to blanching and sauteing, and how to make a properly emulsified vinaigrette.

The third-floor kitchen at 307 East 92nd St., reached by a near-vertical staircase, was small, with just enough room for two work tables, two sinks and two stoves. (It will shortly be a thing of the past, as nearly all the instructional programs relocate to three floors at 50 West 23rd St. by the end of the year.) The eight members of the class divided into four-person teams at each table and shared the work by consensus, making sure that everyone got a decent chance to truss a chicken or shake the saute pan with that chefly snap of the wrist that sends the vegetables on a controlled flight path up over the pan and safely back in.

The course covered a fair amount of ground, set forth in a three-ring binder filled with recipes, information on techniques and ingredients, study questions like "In roasting, what role does fat play?" (it keeps the meat moist), and a lesson plan for each class. Our instructor, Melanie Underwood, formerly a pastry chef at the Four Seasons and a sous-chef at the Plaza, introduced each new step with a short demonstration and then turned the students loose to reproduce her efforts.

Although the atmosphere was relaxed, Ms. Underwood managed to push the class along through the day's program with remarkable efficiency, circulating between the tables to keep an eye on each student's progress, offering a word of encouragement here, correcting a mistake there, and fielding questions. In a class that ran from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. there was no lunch break. When hunger pangs became crippling, students would drift over to pick at a communal plate of crackers, cheese cubes and fruit. The reward came at 3 p.m., when, as at the New School, the students gathered to eat the day's experiments.

The class was a mixed bunch in most respects, but sex was not one of them. I was the lone male, a singularity explained by the class' daytime hours. Night classes are typically two-thirds female, one third male, with heavy representation from Wall Street and the financial markets, where it seems that cooking now counts as one of the desirable manly arts. The members of my class, a heavily international group, was a little older than the New School team and a little more focused on techniques and principles.

Tech 1 managed to retain some of the fun factor and the sociable atmosphere of the New School's course while putting the students through a reasonably demanding, workmanlike regimen. This is the course for beginners and low-level intermediate cooks who want a fairly ambitious, structured experience and have the energy to do focused work for five hours at a stretch.

At the French Culinary Institute, the joking stops. The school, which is dedicated to turning out professionals trained in the classic French techniques, retains the feel of a professional school, or perhaps a military academy, even in La Technique, its 22-week course for "serious amateurs."

Students are issued a chef's jacket stitched with their name and the school motto ("Qualite, Discipline, Realite"), a scarf and a pair of black-and-white-checked chef's pants. They are outfitted with a set of professional knives and a red plastic toolbox filled with implements like a balloon whisk, a whetstone and a pastry bag. With 22 weeks of class work to come, it's hard not to think of boot camp.

The Technique kitchens are so spacious and well equipped that in a smallish class, like ours, each student had his own stainless-steel work station - correction, poste de travail -- four burners and an oven. The tuition is no joke either -- this fall, it will jump from $3,960 to $4,290 for 22 five-hour sessions.

Alison Muir, the instructor, was a former chef who had been tested in the fires of La Varenne cooking school in France, and she brought French rigor and perfectionism back with her. Although the recipes provided in the three-ring notebook that served as our textbook came with precise measurements, real chefs, we were told, measure by eye, and we should get used to doing the same. Those who did not make the grade would not get their certificate of completion.

Graduates of La Technique, which devotes an entire lesson each to stocks and sauces, eggs, potatoes, fish, shellfish, consommes and marinades, pastry, and each of the major meats, are eligible to enter the intermediate level of the professional program, although no more than five percent do. "In the professional course, I yell at people, and they have to call me chef," she said. "You can call me chef, or Alison, whatever you like. Otherwise, the courses are pretty much the same."

I'll say. That first day, my thumb swathed in a hundred layers of gauze, I played a desperate game of catch-up, racing against the clock to produce my quota of acceptable dice, mini-dice, microscopic dice, paper-thin slices and confetti-size bits. I left class in a lather, dreading Lesson 2.

But, like most of my classmates, I found the knife work easier in the second week, although Ms. Muir pointed out that no one had yet executed a respectable julienne. For the first hour, we refined our vegetable cuts and struggled to master the art of tournage, which required us to render carrots, turnips and potatoes into an attractive football shape, in sizes ranging from a peanut M&M (bouquetiere) to a little finger (chateau). Turned vegetables look attractive on the plate, and they cook more evenly in the pan.

"To get good at this, fill up a bowl with vegetables and sit down in front of the TV," Ms. Muir said. "It's very relaxing. I start remembering my dreams, and one of these days I'll probably start channeling the dead."

Half an hour into the tournage, I developed a painful blister on the second joint of my right thumb. My vegetables looked like primitive arrowheads. Carrots were the worst, intractable little orange pillars with an infuriating tendency to chip rather than accept a smooth curve. But the rest of my cuts, Ms. Muir said, showed a 50-percent improvement.

Next, using all four burners, we went work on cooking the vegetables steaming (a l'etuve), boiling and shocking in ice water (a l'anglaise), glazing without browning (glacer a blond), and glazing until the sugar in the pan caramelizes and turns the vegetables dark brown (glacer a brun). The goal was to have all the vegetables emerge at the same time, ready for assembly on the plate, with a pea-filled artichoke heart as the centerpiece.

And that's what happened. With all burners blazing, I managed to pull it all together just as the clock wound down. The dish looked pleasing, edible and colorful. It passed inspection, with one minor demerit. "You didn't French your beans," Ms. Muir pointed out. True. I had forgotten to slit the beans and remove their seeds. But that was a lot better than opening a vein in front of the whole class. For one fleeting moment, I was a real chef.

This is the course for the few, the proud, the brave, a full-tilt workout for keen amateurs who want to take their game several levels upward, or perhaps even get a whiff of what it feels like to be a professional. Hint: It feels like hard, hard work.

Where to Study the Not-So-Basics

FRENCH CULINARY INSTITUTE
462 Broadway (at Grand St.)
(212) 219-8890
Course: La Technique
Next class: Oct. 31
Class Size Maximum of 22
Tuition $4,290 (includes knife set, utensils, chef's uniform)
Instructors:10 years' experience as a sous chef and chef de cuisine.
Time/Duration: 22 weeks -- Saturday, 930 A.M. to 230 P.M.

NEW SCHOOL
100 Greenwich Ave. (at Seventh Ave. South)
(212) 229-5690
Course: Fundamental Culinary Techniques
Next class: July 8
Class Size: Maximum of 14
Tuition: $570 plus $145 materials fee
Instructors: Culinary professionals (chefs, caterers, cookbook writers)
Time/Duration: 8 weeks (one three-hour class each week); afternoons and evenings, days vary.

PETER KUMP'S NEW YORK COOKING SCHOOL
307 East 92d St. and 50 West 23d St.
(212) 410-4601
Course: Techniques of Fine Cooking 1 ('Tech 1')
Next class: July 2
Class Size: Maximum of 12
Tuition: $295 plus $190 materials fee
Instructors: Culinary professionals with at least 5 years experience (chefs, caterers, cookbook writers)
Time/Duration: 5 weeks (one five-hour class a week), or 1 week (a 5-hour class for 5 days); days vary.

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