You can be smart, really smart, and still not know how to
boil water — let alone grill a steak or stir fry asparagus. Here’s proof: this
spring, while preparing for their June move from cushy dorm living to rented
hovels, a dozen graduating Harvard seniors (smarties by definition, no?)
received the most useful and least known Harvard degree — Chef Emeritus — for graduating from Cooking
for the Culinarily Challenged. The 12 students, some of
whose cooking skills were maxed out by ramen noodles, spent three nights
cramming cooking in Harvard’s cavernous basement commissary. They got the
works: knife skills, sanitation tips, vegetable prep essentials, protein
techniques, sauce basics, and lessons on how to optimize time in the
supermarket. At the end of the three-night smackdown, the student chefs
mastered a reasonable menu of meals that are faster and cheaper than takeout
and fancy enough to delight future dinner guests. Their graduation gift? A brownie
pan embossed with the Harvard seal.
“Teach a man to fish,” says Harvard’s director of culinary
operations, Chef Marty Breslin, who conceived and runs the course, “and he’ll
eat forever.” In three two-hour hands-on sessions, burly chefs from Harvard’s residential
houses — Chef Breslin, Chef Ted Smith, and Chef Luke Parker — transformed
skinny Harvard kids terrified by runaway carrots and raw chicken into
competent, even swaggering cooks. By the third class, the students (all
aspiring foodies who patronize every restaurant in town when their parents come
to visit) were able to organize, prepare, and present a majestic buffet of
sautéed scallops, pan-seared salmon, perfectly grilled steak (with a béarnaise
sauce to die for), primavera orzo, and puréed butternut squash soup (with a
little cider and star anise for kick) with panache — and in the space of an
hour and a half. But on the first night, the students were daunted by cloves of
fresh garlic and sharp chef’s knives. “Use a rocking chair movement,” Chef
Smith whispered to one terrified guy in a glee club sweatshirt who was using a
chef’s knife to reduce an onion to rubble.
In the first class, the students approached their knives as if
they were rigged with explosives, and they moved awkwardly about the space,
bumping into one another and filling the commissary with choruses of “excuse
me” and “sorry” and “um.” When the chefs sent them to their cutting boards to
prepare a heap of fresh vegetables, the essence of anxiety bloomed like the
perfume of a simmering stock. (The cauliflower heads looked particularly
daunting.)
Just a week later, six student chefs are off in one alcove of the
kitchen puréeing and chopping, while the others are jammed six-deep at the
grill, searing salmon, toasting lentils, reducing sauces. They confidently move
saucepans and chops from high heat to low, gauging doneness by the dent their
thumbs make on the cooking meat, flipping sauté pans sky high to ensure that
the brunoise browns evenly. Two students, seemingly joined at the shoulder,
mutter to each other as one stir fries the green beans and the other nudges the
salmon filet. There is a happy hum in the space, nary a “sorry” or an “um.”
Upstairs in the dining room, each “chef” presents his or her dish, performing
reasonable riffs on Iron Chef. Okay — these students are notorious
quick studies. Careful observers, they have the kinds of minds that can take a
crash course in organic chemistry — or cooking — and “get it.” But they are
also young men and women who value accomplishment. They have acquired enormous
respect for the professional chefs who’ve taught them the most useful skill
they’ll take home from Harvard: they’ll never be hungry again.
