instructors given me a pat-down before class they might have learned my
secret: two glassine envelopes of Minor's chicken and lobster base inside
my chef's coat, for that little extra kick. They never figured it out.
The CIA of 1975 was very different from the four-year professional
institution it is today. Back then, the desired end-product seemed to be
future employees at a Hilton or Restaurant Associates corporate dining
facility. A lot of time was spent on food destined for the steam table.
Sauces were thickened with roux. Escoffier's heavy, breaded, soubised,
glacéed and over-sauced dinosaur dishes were the ideal. Everything, it
was implied, must come with appropriate starch, protein, vegetable.
Nouvelle cuisine was practically unheard of. Reductions? No way.
Infusions? Uh-uh. We're talking two years of cauliflower in mornay
sauce, saddle of veal Orloff, lobster thermidor, institutional favorites
like chicken Hawaiian, grilled ham steak with pineapple ring and old-
style lumbering classics like beef Wellington. The chef/instructors were
largely, it seemed, burn-outs from the industry: bleary-eyed Swiss,
Austrian and French ex-cronies, all ginblossoms and spite—along with
some motivated veterans of major hotel chains, for whom food was all
about cost per unit.
But it was fun. Pulled sugar, pastillage work, chaud-froids, ice-carving.
You don't see a lot of that in the real world, and there were some really
talented, very experienced old-school Euro-geezers at CIA who passed
on to their adoring students the last of a dying style. Charcuterie class
was informative and this old style was well suited to learning about
galantines and ballottines and socles and pâtés, rillettes, sausage-making
and aspic work. Meat class was fun; learning the fundamentals of
butchering, I found for the first time that constant proximity to meat
seems to inspire black humor in humans. My meat instructor would
make hand puppets out of veal breast and his lamb demo/sexual puppet
show was legendary. I have since found that almost everybody in the
meat business is funny—just as almost everyone in the fish business is
not.