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Books

Books About Chefs and Cooking

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  NEW! The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef's Craft For Every Kitchen

  An "indispensable compendium of cooking information for both professional and amateur cooks .... precise, unpretentious,unencumbered"—booklistmore >

  
  
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  The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America

  A first-person account of an actual culinary education as it's taught at the most prominent cooking school in the United States.more >

  

  The Making of a Chef

  The Making of a Chef is a dramatic narrative of an actual culinary education as it's taught at the most prominent cooking school in the United States, the Culinary Institute of America. The story begins in a class called Skill Development, where students learn to make stocks, to hold a knife, to cut an onion, to make soups and sauces, and to perform basic cooking preparations--how to sauté, panfry, braise, poach, and how to work with vegetables and starches. The story ends in the American Bounty restaurant. But it's not just about learning to cook; it's also about the nature and spirit of being a professional cook and the people who enter the profession.

  The most amazing thing,though. It changed who I was, how I thought and moved. I had expected to be a participant in the classes for the purposes of observation. Instead, I got caught up in the battlefield of the kitchen and loved it. Learning to be a professional cook is not like learning to drive a car or build a cabinet. It's like being dropped down into a foreign country. You must become fluent in a new language, reexamine your values, melt into a different culture, and learn a range of new skills that almost always center on the way the physical world works. It's a physical place.

  In a good culinary program, you learn how to make a hollandaise, how to butcher meat, wait tables, make an omelet, set a station for service, but you also learn about yourself and the kind of person you are. If you're open to that kind of thing.

  
  
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  The Soul of a Chef: The Pursuit of Perfection

  True stories about the life of the professional chef, via three very different American chefs in three very different cooking environments.more >

  

  The Soul of a Chef

  When I finished the manuscript of the Making of a Chef, I couldn't stop cooking or thinking about cooking and the work of the professional chef. There was so much more to know. Learning to cook, then writing a book with the same urgency and speed of a kitchen crew slammed on Saturday night, left me famished for real work and real kitchens, not the ideal world of teaching kitchens.

  My first step was to finagle a magazine assignment to return to the CIA to watch a very difficult, at times bizarre, cooking test, called the Certified Master Chef exam, where seven chefs cooked in various styles for 10 days under intense scrutiny and evaluation. I thought the article would be a stopgap between finishing one book and starting the next. In fact, this was the start of the next, because I discovered that the test was based on a provocative, perhaps presumptuous, claim: that there is an objective truth to great cooking, that the greatness or lack thereof could be measured and translated into a numerical score, as certain as the temperature on a meat thermometer.

  This single claim provoked a million questions, but ultimately it led me to seek the ultimate reason for the importance of great cooking. What is great cooking? Why is it so important? Why has cooking become so important in American culture that in the span of a decade, chefs had been turned in the public's eye from blue-collar wretches to glittering celebrities accorded almost shamanistic knowledge?

  The book is divided into three parts, each describing one chef: Brian Polcyn, chef-owner of Five Lakes Grill outside Detroit taking the CMC exam; Michael Symon, chef-owner of Lola Bistro and Wine Bar in Cleveland, at his restaurant; and Thomas Keller, chef-owner of The French Laundry, among the most celebrated chefs in the world, at work in his restaurant.

  What I eventually came to understand is that great food and great cooking isn't really about either of those things, though that's where it begins. Great cooking, in the end, has such power because it allows us to connect with our past, our future, and all of humanity, if we let. I believe that America's insatiable appetite for food and cooking know-how is really the beginning of a spiritual quest for the bigger things: a search for meaning, order and beauty in an apparently chaotic and alienating universe. I'm completely serious.

  In the book, I scrutinize three professional cooking situations, and in writing about them, came to these conclusions. The final step of the journey was given to me when Thomas Keller, chef of the French Laundry, invited me out to his restaurant in the Napa Valley and asked me to hang around, ask questions, observe, and then write stories about the French Laundry. Keller gave me the key to understanding what this whole phenomenon is all about, and why it is so important.

  
  
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  The Reach of a Chef: Professional Cooking in the Age of Celebrity

  The third in a trilogy exploring the work of the professional chef, The Reach of a Chef: Beyond the Kitchen picks up where...more >

  

  The Reach of a Chef: Beyond the Kitchen (2006)

  The book is an attempt to get my arms around the expanding nature of the chef in America and what it means to be one today. The chef in the age of celebrity, the chef in the midst of a restaurant-as-theater bonanza, the chef in the middle of an American food revolution. Chefs today can do amazing things—from cooking great food to helping farmers raise it to improving school lunches for kids—but there are also chefs who expect adoration is due them simply for walking into a room with a chef coat on. We simultaneously adore and denigrate Rachael and Emeril, television icons—why? How did we become such a food neurotic country—cherishing carbs then fearing them (and just as we learned how to bake decent bread in this country). We are a fat country, so what do we do to lose weight? We embrace a high-protein, high-fat diet! We gorge on high-calorie, low-nutrition, sodium-saturated fast food. We've debased our hogs and polluted our chickens by breeding them in factories.

  One of the great things chefs are doing is pointing the way toward the foods that matter, that are good for us—naturally raised animals, wild fish, freshly grown produce. That's a good thing. But chefs are also leaving their kitchens in big numbers, expanding their businesses beyond actually cooking and serving food. They smell the lucre and are looking for its source. Is this good or bad? The best have gotten to where they are by working their butts off for years and now they want some rewards. Nothing wrong with that. But what happens when you abandon the work that made you what you are, and what's the result for the rest of us?

  The landscape has changed dramatically since I entered the Culinary Institute of America as a journalist in 1996. To describe some of those changes, I returned to the CIA to see if transformations there reflected changes in the industry (they did, in surprising ways). I returned to the kitchens of chefs I'd written about years ago to see how they were leveraging the cultural shifts in America to elevate their own work. And of course I found new kitchens to hang out in and new chefs to watch and listen to.

  Why did I care so much? That was another thing I wanted to figure out. Much of the reason for writing a book is to answer your own questions. I'd fallen into this work of cooking and writing about it by accident and it had changed the direction of my life. What was it about this work that was so transformative? Why was it so compelling? Why had the country gone chef crazy? What is it about this work, the work of the chef? Who were the great ones out there, what made them great, and where were they headed?

  
  

Cookbooks

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  Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn

  "One of the most intriguing and important cookbooks to be published this year [2005]," according to Publisher's Weekly.more >

  

  Charcuterie

  I conceived this book, and asked my friend, chef Brian Polcyn, to join me, in order to explore a great culinary specialty, one devoted to preservation but which remains meaningful in this age of refrigeration and freezing because food made using its techniques--fresh, smoked, and dried sausages, hams, cured salmon, pork rilletes, duck confit--tastes so good. I didn't know enough about it and there weren't many good books on the subject and almost none written for the home cook. I wanted more home cooks to feel comfortable making a pate, I wanted to write about how one perfects the sausage, I wanted to expand the reaches of the confit.

  The book covers a range of techniques via scores of recipes, from how to make your own bacon at home to exquisite sauces that accompany charcuterie, from the very old fashioned preparations such as the pate en croute (pate backed in a crust) to more modern applications of the charcutier's craft such as vegetable rillettes, to the pinnacle of the craft, the dry-cured sausage.

  My partner in this book, who not only had become a good friend after I'd written about him in Soul of a Chef, he'd also become an instructor of charcuterie near his restaurant, Five Lakes Grill, in Milford, Michigan. We're both really passionate about this stuff, and with my acumen at articulating food passions, and Brian's cooking experience, culinary excellence and extraordinary palate, we've tried to create a book that's as meaningful to the ambitious home cook as to the professional chef who wants to perfect his own charcuterie technique.

  From the Book's Jacket

  At his first taste of duck confit a decade ago, food writer Michael Ruhlman felt himself inspired by a new passion. He was permanently hooked by the amazing taste of duck that been salted for hours then poached gently in its own fat and finally submerged in that fat and left to "ripen." He began to explore the technique, and as his enthusiasm grew, he asked a chef friend, a teacher and an expert in the ways of preservation why now, given that we can "preserve" food in a fridge or freezer or in a Cryovack, why was confit, why was charcuterie -- a culinary specialty largely defined by preservation methods -- still relevant? The chef looked it him as if he were an idiot and said, "Taste, of course." Derived from the French words flesh (chair) and cooked (cuit), the term charcuterie designated shops in 15th century France that sold products made from pork.

  As Ruhlman's fascination with confit flowered, he connected with Brian Polcyn, an artisan chef from the Midwest, owner of Five Lakes Grill near Detroit and a butchery instructor as well. Polcyn had been surrounded by charcuterie his whole life. "My Polish grandma made Kielbasa every Christmas and Easter," he told Ruhlman. An expert butcher, skilled with a smoker, and a walking dictionary of charcuterie recipes classic and modern, Polcyn had become a true master of the art of charcuterie.

  In Charcuterie, he and Michael have created the only comprehensive book on the subject, thereby filling an enormous gap in our understanding of cooking. They have included all the classic charcuterie recipes --duck confit, sausages, prosciutto, pancetta, pate de campagne, knackwurst, and many more. They have also expanded traditional concepts by offering contemporary recipes such as hot and cold smoked salmon, foie gras and sweetbread sausage, and grilled vegetable terrine. No longer the domain of elite chefs, Charcuterie gives the modern beginner cook recipes such as Maryland crab, scallop, and saffron terrine, Da Bomb breakfast sausage (no casing required), herb-brined smoked turkey breast, and spicy smoked almonds.

  Charcuterie is thoroughly and instructively illustrated with more than 75 detailed line drawings that guide the reader through techniques, such as making sausage and pate, and display the equipment and cuts of meat or fish used in the recipes.

  Michael Ruhlman is one of the most highly regarded food writers today, having co-authored The French Laundry Cookbook with Thomas Keller and authored the best-selling Soul of a Chef, which won an International Association of Culinary Professionals award. He has also won a James Beard Foundation award for magazine food writing. He has written for Gourmet, Saveur, Food Arts, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

  Brian Polcyn is nationally recognized as an authority on the technique of charcuterie. He has been featured in the New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Bon Appetit, Gourmet, and Wine Spectator. Polcyn teaches butchery and charcuterie at Schoolcraft College in Livonia, Michigan, and is the chef-owner of Five Lakes Grill in Milford, Michigan, where he can be found cooking in the kitchen almost every night.

  From the Foreword by Thomas Keller, chef/owner of The French Laundry and Per Se Restaurants

  "Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn not only describe in detail the various stages of making a sausage but they isolate the key steps and techniques that can elevate a good sausage to a great one. They also give what amounts to a primer in the key points of dry-curing sausages and whole cuts of meat, a segment of charcuterie that's really in its infancy here in America.

  "This book reminds me what a hopeful time it is for cooking in this country. In fact, this may be the most exciting time ever to be a cook and a chef in America. And Charcuterie is a perfect example of why."

  Praise for Charcuterie:

  "Good charcuterie recipes are rarely shared and are often kept as closely guarded as family secrets. As a young cook in Moissac, France, I had to spy and even participate in the killing of my neighbor's pig just to get his pate recipe. In Charcuterie, Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn demystify all of this and share with us the best techniques to cure, smoke and preserve meat in the tradition of the best charcutiers out there."
  -Eric Ripert, chef/co-owner of Le Bernardin Restaurant, New York

  "Michael Ruhlman is probably the greatest living writer on the subject of chefs--and on the business of preparing good food. Brian Polcyn a fine and talented chef and with this book, they are doing God's work: making the noble art of charcuterie accessible and easily understood. Charcuterie is an important and definitive work which deserves to stand proudly and forever in every serious cook's kitchen."
  -Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential

  "At last one of western civilization's most ignored crafts is getting proper, make that brilliant, treatment. Never has the art of charcuterie been handled this thoroughly for the home cook. Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn have drawn together the science, the hand craft and the fabulous tastes of this great celebration of the pig. Bravo for a new classic."
  -Lynne Rossetto Kasper, host of American Public Media's national radio series, The Splendid Table®

  "When prepared with skill, charcuterie is amazingly delicious and always satisfying. Until now, the craft of charcuterie -- be it curing, salting or cooking -- has been an art form restricted to a few masters. With their Charcuterie, Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn have opened the door for home cooks everywhere to experience the thrill of making charcuterie."
  -Mario Batali, chef/owner of Babbo Restaurant, New York

  "Charcuterie is a masterwork. It is brilliantly conceived and composed, embracing each aspect of the craft in depth, and with rigor and affection. Happily, cooking with fresh, seasonal, local ingredients is advanced everywhere in cookbooks today, but we have long needed a comprehensive work on the vital traditions of preserving and transforming those same products. Michael and Brian have risen to that challenge. Charcuterie surpasses my most extravagant hopes for what such a book could be. It will inspire droves of cooks. If it doesn't tell you everything you need to know about making charcuterie it certainly establishes a gold standard for how to say it. Bravo!"
  -Judy Rodgers, author of The Zuni Café Cookbook

  "Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's very appealing Charcuterie catches the wave of emerging awareness in America of this age-old craft. Chock full of sound practical advice and a wide range of recipes that cross cultures and traditions, Charcuterie provides an open window on the delicious possibilities available to the home cook and professional chef alike."
  -Paul Bertolli, author of Cooking By Hand

  
  
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  Bouchon Thomas Keller and Jeffrey Cerciello with Susie Heller and Michael Ruhlman

  This cookbook explores classic bistro dishes and what makes them so good, with beautiful photography by Deborah Jones.more >

  

  Bouchon

  Thomas Keller's Yountville bistro, Bouchon, is probably my favorite restaurant in the country, the kind of place I could eat at on a daily basis and never tire of it (same goes for its offshoot in Vegas; it's an oasis of sanity above the moronic inferno). Part of the reason I'd never tire of it is because it serves perfect--perfect--French bistro fare, my favorite cuisine hands down. The chef at Bouchon in Yountville is Jeffrey Cerciello, and the recipes in this book are the ones he cooks at the restaurant. I've never had an imperfect bite during the dozen times I've eaten there.

  These recipes explore what makes, say, one onion soup perfect and another not. What are the critical points in any given dish that elevate it toward perfection? Bouchon promises to be my favorite cookbook to use for this very reason. Keller's description of what a proper quiche is has helped me to understand how America trashed one of the great French dishes before it even understood what it might be.

  The cookbook also explores, via my uncommonly elegant essays, the elements of the bistro, a style of restaurant so popular it has been embraced throughout the world, and has been imitated so often as to make the very word bistro nearly obsolete, as well important cooking techniques and thoughts on this style of food, via chef Keller's passion for them. The black and white and color photography was done once again by the incomparable Deborah Jones in Lyon, Paris and California (she also did the French Laundry Cookbook photography). Susie Heller documented, then developed, then wrote, then tested every recipe and once again has done a job that is masterful in its clarity. The recipes remain exacting, the price of the pursuit of perfection, but for my money there are none better out there. My favorites are the trotters and the quiche--world changing as far as I'm concerned.

  
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  A Return to Cooking with Eric Ripert

  A lavish production that's both a cookbook and the story of a cook who became a chef who longed to become a cook again.more >

  

  A Return to Cooking

  In the spring of 2000, a young talented and hugely successful chef named Eric Ripert, executive chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, a four-star restaurant in Manhattan, asked me to join an experiment. He wanted, he explained, to explore cooking and art, the nature of creativity, of people cooking and eating together as a group. A painter, a Colombian artist, Valentino Cortazar, would be joining us, as would an Israeli husband-wife photographer team, too. They would explore their art through food and cooking. We would travel to four locations during appropriate seasons (Sag Harbor, Vermont, Puerto Rico and Napa, summer through spring). Eric, with the help of his assistant Andrea Glick, would cook what he could find in local stores and markets, cook as he wished, in home kitchens using ingredients of the locale and the of season, to return to his nature as a cook. And, he instructed, I would write whatever I wished. He all but demanded that I write poetry. This experiment was about the creative act, about cooking, about eating, about the nature of art. Honest to God--the guy was serious. Who could refuse?

  I personally was very nervous about this book's publication, such a strange creation. There had never been a book that successfully married paintings and food and story and recipes. But I'm really proud of it as well. First, it's beautiful. The images of Tammar and Shimon Rothstein are compassionate and exquisite. The art--this is a book filled with Valentino's paintings created during the cooking--is extraordinary, passionate, and rich, an exploration of the people and objects of cooking (see valentinocortazar.com). And beyond that, there's Eric's cooking, which justifies his reputation. He's got finesse. He's a graceful cook. I don't know where the grace comes from, but he radiates it. He's a smart cook and an observant craftsman, so this book is also about the craft of cooking.

  
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  The French Laundry Cookbook Thomas Keller with Susie Heller and Michael Ruhlman

  A monster of a celebrity-chef coffee table cookbook that defies everything one thinks of when we think of such objects.more >

  

  The French Laundry Cookbook

  This is a monster of a celebrity-chef coffee table cookbook that defies everything one thinks of when we think of such objects. First, it's been a terrific commercial success--generating a second, third and fourth printings in its first six months. It's been a critical success and has earned some of most respected culinary awards in the business. It's a coffee table book that's compulsively readable (I'm biased, of course, but some people have said that it reads like a novel, and one writer suggested it deserved consideration for a Pulitzer, if Pulitzers were given for such things). And it's a celebrity chef book that provides beginning fundamentals in equal measure to advanced technique; it's a great teaching cookbook, too.

  The French Laundry Cookbook's chief importance, though, in my mind is that it is an accurate documentary of one of the country's great restaurants, how it is run, the food it creates, and the kind of work and intelligence that a chef must bring to the pursuit of an American restaurant that ranks with the great three-star restaurants of Europe. Its recipes, all tested and written by Susie Heller, the woman who put this whole book project together, are exact documents of the way the French Laundry creates dishes. There are no short cuts or ingredients left out. The photography, by Deborah Jones, a San Francisco photographer of extraordinary compassion, is rich and exquisite, capturing both the daily life of the restaurant as well as the artfulness of the ingredients themselves, not to mention the finished presentations.

  Ultimately, the book attempts to describe the mind of one smart man who has devoted a quarter-century of his life toward a single purpose: becoming a great chef.

  

General Nonfiction

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  House: A Memoir

  A memoir about house and home and staying put in a vagabond culture.more >

  

  House: A Memoir

  When my wife and I bought a century old house in a suburb of my beloved city, I knew I had to write about it. The experience of purchasing a home place, among the most common events in an adult's life, felt more cataclysmic than, well, buying a house ought to feel. Second to childbirth on the seismic charts of human emotion. Suspicious of any prolonged navel-gazing, I didn't intend a memoir. I began the story as a novel. I sent seventy-five pages to my agent who said, "I can't sell this as a novel, but I can as a memoir."

  So I started over and what I discovered was that a house was inseparable from, and in many ways shaped by, the terrain on which it lived. This particular terrain was not just compelling to me, it was alive with ghosts of the past. The explosion of the suburbs in the late 18th and early 19th century was told in microcosm just outside my door. The families that had lived in this house told their own stories, all but forced themselves upon us, were still here. The contractors and real estate agents and house inspectors who moved through this structure added their own stories. And of course, the upper stratum of the narrative--the story of my family's life in the new structure, first as castaways on the third floor while the renovation was completed, and then as a miniature army of four advancing room by room, taking over foreign territory one front at a time and making it ours.

  House: A Memoir is an attempt to order and make sense of all these stories.

  It's also an answer to all the people who ask me why I still live in Cleveland. I never doubted the urge but I'd never explored the reason or understood the importance of living out my adult life in the place where I spent my childhood and adolescence, an increasing rarity in our vagabond culture. House: A Memoir is a love song to home, to the controversial notion of the suburb in America, to living where you grew up, to the history of this country and to the most contentious story of all, how we're using place in America.

  
  
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  Walk on Water: Inside an Elite Pediatric Surgical Unit

  A dramatic narrative of the life of a surgical team specializing in the repair of babies' and children's malformed hearts.more >

  

  Walk On Water/h3>

  I've always been fascinated by people who are intensely engaged in their work--teachers, chefs, boat builders, primarily craftsmen, people who work with their hands. When a friend told me about a surgeon at a hospital not far from my house who operated on babies' hearts every day and was world-renowned for the skill with which he did the work, I was attentive but uninspired. There are a lot of world-class surgeons in all kinds of specialties (many at the hospital in question, the Cleveland Clinic), plastic surgeons, brain surgeons. So this guy, a man named Roger Mee, happened to be really good at fixing babies hearts. So what?

  My friend then said the three words that engaged the gears: he said, "What a job."

  This single claim provoked a million questions, but ultimately it led me to seek the ultimate reason for the importance of great cooking. What is great cooking? Why is it so important? Why has cooking become so important in American culture that in the span of a decade, chefs had been turned in the public's eye from blue-collar wretches to glittering celebrities accorded almost shamanistic knowledge?

  Phrased that way, in terms of routine work, the idea of watching a man who was best in the world at refashioning babies hearts, some no bigger than a walnut, a man who did this work daily, this I was interested in. I'd seen how the pressures of the professional kitchen physically and spiritually changed the lives of professional chefs. How did the work of heart surgery on babies, how did the craft itself, the required skills and the effects of the stress, work on a man? Who do you become when you operate on babies hearts every day for 25 years? This I wanted to pursue.

  And so I began by showing up in a pediatric ICU in October 2000 for 8 a.m. rounds and didn't leave for more than a year. I became a part of this intimate group, thanks to their generosity and openness, surgeons, cardiologists, intensivists, residents, interns, nurses, O.R. assistants, perfusionists, anesthesiologists, technicians, and I got to know the families who found themselves tragically, often unexpectedly, in their midst. The story follows Dr. Mee and the others involved in this tiny but remarkable medical specialty through actual cases, O.R. dramas, the personalities involved which typically are what one might describe euphemistically as "intense." The story also describes the history of heart surgery, ethical dilemmas cardiologists must face in what is a politically fraught world of referrals, and an exploration of the craft of surgery generally.

  A glimpse into the life and lives of a children's heart center reveals a brutal world with flashes of beauty and elegance, a place where it's all but impossible to avoid reflecting on what our life means, what we value and why.

  
  
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  Wooden Boats: In Pursuit of the Perfect Craft at an American Boatyard

  An intimate chronicle of life at a plank-on-frame boatyard and an exploration of the significance of wooden boats.more >

  

  Wooden Boats

  Wooden Boats is an intimate chronicle of the life of, and lives within, a wooden boat yard, a yard that builds only traditional wooden boats. The initial impulse for the story was the construction of Rebecca, a 60-foot modern pleasure schooner, and Elisa Lee, a 32-foot workboat-style yacht. But what quickly takes over as the main focus is the lives of the boat builders and the broader significance of the idea of wooden boats.

  Wooden boats evoke passions--adoration, love, anger, awe--with a power that far exceeds their actual worth and intended function. These boats--planks bent around frames, fastened with bronze--fire the blood and exhilarate the mind in a way that few objects do. The best are as refined as a Stradivarius and also rugged and powerful enough to withstand harrowing deep-water voyages. Though fiberglass is all but ubiquitous in the boat building industry, a handful of yards continue to build these vessels. Not only are these vessels a marvel in themselves, beautiful to behold and to sail, they may also have something to teach us. And not just the little things. Wooden boat guru, founding publisher and editor of WoodenBoat magazine, Jon Wilson claims nothing less than this: "I think wooden boats have something to teach us about our place on the planet."

  But Wooden Boats explores more than an idea. It also shows, through a year-in-the-life narrative and actual sailing adventures, what happens when men and women forswear our cheap materialistic culture and spend their lives in pursuit of something more lasting and satisfying than personal comfort.

  Working with wood, building wooden boats, changes who you are.

  
  
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  Boys Themselves: A Return to Single-Sex Education

  A chronicle of one year at a contemporary boys' school in that's less about gender in schools than it is an old-fashioned school story.more >

  

  Boys Themselves

  "In Boys Themselves," wrote Beth Gutcheon in the New York Times Book Review, "his first book, he follows a diverse handful of students and a couple of standout teachers as a novelist would, to establish major characters, and the crises and themes of the year develop like plot lines."

  I wrote this book, an intimate narrative of a year at an all-boy school outside Cleveland, at a time when anything all male was considered to be wrong, possibly illegal and probably dangerous. It was really just an excuse to write a school story, a story set in a fascinating and very human environment.

  My first step was to finagle a magazine assignment to return to the CIA to watch a very difficult, at times bizarre, cooking test, called the Certified Master Chef exam, where seven chefs cooked in various styles for 10 days under intense scrutiny and evaluation. I thought the article would be a stopgap between finishing one book and starting the next. In fact, this was the start of the next, because I discovered that the test was based on a provocative, perhaps presumptuous, claim: that there is an objective truth to great cooking, that the greatness or lack thereof could be measured and translated into a numerical score, as certain as the temperature on a meat thermometer.

  "There is a harmful premise here and this is that males are by their very nature toxic," says Richard Hawley. "Schools are not good because they are composed of boys. But a good school could not be better composed." "I see boys' schools at their best as an antidote to much of what has gone wrong with Western culture in the aftermath of this century's appallingly destructive wars and dislocations."

  These words were spoken by the new headmaster of a private boys' day school on the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio, called University School, the high school I'd graduated from. The new headmaster was saying some provocative, maybe preposterous, things about all-boy schools at a time when such schools were converting to co-ed or dying out all over the country.