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Food Lab Confidential

Fast Times at Statler High

Shut up about your bio lab. I don’t care about your CS class, and I really don’t sympathize with you when you bitch about your problem sets. There is one thing every hotelie will experience that strikes the kind of fear into our hearts that only something involving knives, fire and horrendous paper hats can: cooking lab.

I know what you’re thinking. “Oh my god, this girl cannot seriously be complaining about a cooking lab when the rest of Cornell is doing fluid mechanics.” Well, yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing. You see, last year, I took a hairy little beast of a class entitled “HA236: Culinary Theory and Practice.” Doesn’t sound too rough to you, right? Cook a little, eat a little, talk a little? Well, I’d like to say that I didn’t want to take 236 because of the horror stories I’d heard from upperclassmen, but mostly it was because I was told I had to remove my talons (fabulous acrylic nails) for the semester. Health hazard, schmazard. I considered successful pancakes to be a culinary triumph and planned to keep Betty Crocker as my lifelong sous-chef. I was at peace with that and ready to move on with my life, but the requirements for my Bachelor’s degree were not.

Looking back now, I’ll admit that I’ve learned more from this class than from any other. If you’re not part of the Statler 800, I highly recommend you take the baby version of the class for non-hotelies (HA 290). It’s definitely the most practical class I’ve ever taken and will come in handy when I live alone in a crappy Manhattan walk-up trying to peddle my freelance articles to Travel + Leisure and am forced to work as a line cook for an egotistical jackass like Anthony Bourdain just to have enough cash to buy eyeliner and support my Tasti D-Lite addiction. But I digress.

HA 236 is not Muffins 101. We’re talking foodborne illnesses (Campylobacter jejuni is my personal fave), the Mother Sauces and all their illegitimate children, and even some very valuable life lessons such as why it is important to ask what you are putting in your mouth before you do so. There were two lectures a week talking about the “theory” and then we would get to put them into “practice” in a 3-hour cooking lab. In my case, lab was on Thursday mornings, just early enough that the fear of tardiness would induce that terrific dream-laden airplane-sleep the night before. Cooking started promptly at 8:30 and I can assure you that nothing is more delicious than your own shrimp tempura at 10 a.m. (except maybe a handful of compost soaked in vodka). Think early-morning Iron Chef hosted by a German man evocative of Chef from the Muppets.

You have to demonstrate the proper cooking techniques and safety measures and present your dishes at a certain time; I’ve seen a raw steak on the presentation table because the timer ran out before the student had a chance to cook it. Intense. The whole 3 hours, unless you dig the whole stress-that-simultaneously-makes-you-pee-your-pants-and-your-head-explode sort of thing, can be somewhat of a nightmare. With the time crunch and the people looking over your shoulder and the fact that it’s perfectly possible that while you were busy sauteeing your vegetables your dessert turned into a 4-alarm fire, it’s really about keeping your shit together under pressure — a skill that is absolutely crucial to the success of any foodservice operation.

And it is a skill that I do not possess. The following incidents, in no particular order, have traumatized me forever:

• The Ceramic Massacre. Like every other class in the Hotel School ever, 236 requires a group project. Over the course of the semester, our group was to design and eventually execute a 3-4 course dinner menu. On the day of our “execution” (how apropos), the only non-walking-disaster in our group went into the back to wash a dish and slipped on the wet floor, shattering the plate he was holding and cutting the hell out of his arm. Actually, this was kind of awesome because the instructors were busy calling the paramedics and didn’t have time to notice how much the meal we served sucked.

• The Soup Lab. I learned that soup can be thickened by adding a cornstarch mixture. The soup I served, though I maintain that it tasted delicious, actually had the consistency of soft serve ice cream.

• The Calamari Incident. I served this delicious calamari, okay? Well, apparently, you’re supposed to remove these creepy little bone-like membranes from inside the squiddies (who knew?) and failure to do so results in an “unpleasant eating experience.” Sorry, tasters.

• Chicken Mutilation. I can’t even handle the sound of cracking my own knuckles. I’d actually rather go to the gyno 50 times next week than butcher a chicken ever again.

• Caramel. Who the hell messes up caramel? Evidently, water, sugar and heat do not a delicious caramel sauce make. Frustrated after 45 minutes of watching my mixture boil and not thicken or resemble anything besides water with sugar in it, I turned the heat off and defaulted to decorating my dessert with powdered sugar. 10 minutes later, my original mixture had cooled and was now a 2-pound block of pot-destroying horror.

And that, my friends, is why I have no sympathy for you when you cry about your stochastic calculus. Hole yourselves up in Carpenter with your problem sets and continue ragging on the Hotel School as much as your little hearts desire. Just like you, we have treacherous classes. Ours even demand the sacrifice of our fabulous acrylic nails and the risk of cutting our unmanicured fingers off. We’re called Statler High because of our small size and tight-knight student body, not because of the perceived lack of rigor in our curriculum.

To my fellow HA 236 survivors at Statler High: keep on keepin’ on, you culinary warriors.

Jenna Bromberg is a junior in the School of Hotel Administration. She can be contactd at jkb34@cornell.edu. Fast Times at Statler High appears alternate Fridays.

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