Feed

It’s nearly September in Boston, and it smells like Teen Spirit and … why, is that just the mildest hint of saffron? As we welcome back the usual bright-eyed and bushy-tailed college crowd to the city, we’re also seeing a new wave of students line up for more culinary educations, as the corporate world’s pay cuts, layoffs, and skyrocketing unemployment rates inspire fantasies of trading the cubicle for the kitchen. There are at least five professional cooking programs in the Boston area, and enrollment is up about 42 percent at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Cambridge. But not all such students end up in restaurant kitchens. Netta Davis, a lecturer in Boston University’s gastronomy program, is among those who’ve pursued their passion via a culinary degree. We checked in with this local foodie-philosopher to find out what whet her appetite for learning.

How did you end up in food? As a kid, when I got in trouble with my mother, which was often, I used to hang out in the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, surrounded by all these cookbooks. I was a little obsessed.... When I see a movie, I always focus on the food scenes. Now, I teach a class in Food and Film.

Did you go to cooking school right away? No. It never occurred to me. I was an arts administrator, and then there were budget cuts, and I lost my job. I was in my 30s, and I had to think about what I wanted to do. I knew it had to do with food — and with writing about food. So, I enrolled in the BU program with lots of good ideas and no skills. The rest of the students wanted to be professional chefs. I was hopeless. When Jacques Pépin came in to teach us knife skills, I aged him 10 years in three days. I thought he was going to fillet me! Here’s how bad I was: your culinary degree could read “Distinction in Theory and Practice” or “Distinction in Practice.” My degree just read “In Theory.”

Were you discouraged? It was pretty clear that I wasn’t cut out to be a chef. But I was cut out to think about food. Julia Child and Jacques Pépin both sat me down — they were both teaching at BU then — and said, “You know, Netta, you cannot work in a professional kitchen.” Julia encouraged me to enter the new graduate program at BU and hired me to work in her office. I archived her recipes. Then I ended up sort of pioneering a new academic field: the theory and methodology of cooking. It’s a crossover of history and anthropology. Here’s the thing: other than being born and dying, eating is the one culturally significant act that every single human has to do.

Does this have anything to do with becoming a chef? There are a lot of options for a culinary career. Working in a professional kitchen is only one of them. I teach theory and practice — starting with an intellectual concept and teaching it with your hands in a bowl. On Tuesdays we’re in the classroom, and on Thursdays we’re hands-on in the kitchen.

What’s the worst kind of student for a cooking program? I don’t think of “worst” in terms of having no skill. The worst is someone who thinks they know everything and doesn’t have to listen to me. They are alone at their stoves. For example, when I say to use one hot pepper, they assume that more pepper is trendier. Then it takes them days to get the burn out from under their fingernails. (Hint: Use milk. That’s what the Aztecs did.)