July 30,
2007
Now we're cooking: Students get a lesson in the culinary arts
Leana Jelen ’10 (right), a freshman from
Chicago, learns how to make a roasted tomato sauce as part of a cooking
class for undergraduates.
“It’s only food. So don’t be
intimidated,” executive chef Mary Locke tells the dozen or so
undergraduates who’ve signed up for a cooking class in Danforth
Dining Hall. It’s the first such class the University has offered
students, and a chance for the group to prepare a four-course meal under
the guidance of Locke and Tony Pignagrande, executive catering chef for the
Meliora restaurant.
They quickly divide into two groups with slightly
different menus to tackle. Mesclun greens with creamy orange dressing,
grilled chicken skewers, multigrain pasta with an oven-roasted tomato
sauce, and bananas Foster are some of what’s planned.
Pignagrande’s group gets a quick lesson in how
to dice onions. “This is changing my life,” Janna Gewirtz
’09 quips, perhaps half seriously.
Locke’s group works their way through a large
mound of lemons, squeezing fresh juice that will be used to create the
sauce for the chicken. One of the goals of the class is to teach students
how to use fresh ingredients for preparing everything from vinaigrettes to
pasta sauces. “This juice is much better than that stuff you get
in the yellow plastic bottle,” Locke advises.
Forty-five minutes into it, the kitchen is starting to
fill with the smell of herbs, garlic, roasting chicken. The pristine
cookbooks handed to the students at the beginning are now looking messy and
well-used.
The class was a joint effort of Dining Service and
University Health Service to help students develop new skills, a sense of
independence, and perhaps even a new passion.
Janna Gewirtz ’09 and classmates practice their newly acquired dicing skills.
Some of Pignagrande’s students are still working
on their roux while a few others are timidly trying to master the
professional-grade Robot Coupe food processor to make a compound
butter.
A student from Locke’s group races across the
kitchen to check his recipe, which he left at another station. The pace is
picking up. Wiping sweat from his face with the back of his plastic-gloved
hand, he asks someone from the other team, “Can we steal some of your
knives?”
Once the chicken is pulled from the oven and
transferred to large white platters, the students start dressing the salads
and start to prep for the bananas Foster. Locke reads the
ingredients like a checklist: bananas, cinnamon, nutmeg, butter,
brown sugar, rum, and the flame.
“What does the flame do?” asks a student.
“Burns off the alcohol,” replies Locke.
“And increases the levels of awesome,”
another student adds.
The group smiles in anticipation.
Finishing up her pasta dish, Leana Jelen ’10, a
freshman from Chicago, seems more comfortable in the kitchen
terrain than she did in the beginning. Soon she’ll be
sitting down with classmates to enjoy the meal.
“I’ve always liked cooking, but I wanted
to learn some new techniques. I’m glad it was so hands-on,” she
says. “It’s nice the chefs were right there with us through all
the steps. And it’s really cool to have my own
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