Meeting a Kitchen Idol…Twice!

Back in the wayback I had every intention of going to culinary school. I was graduating from college, and all I could think about was food and cooking and using my hands and food again. In the middle of my senior year I had taken an inspiring pastry class at Madeleine Kamman’s nearby restaurant/cooking school, The Modern Gourmet, and I was ready to jump from essay to entrée without looking back.

With French pastry terms rolling around in my head I started researching schools, so naturally I looked only in France. There was the estimable Cordon Bleu in Paris, of course, but I also considered Madeleine Kamman’s short summer course. Too short, not rigorous enough.  I didn’t exactly speak French (as in not at all) so I found myself very drawn to Anne Willan’s highly regarded school in Burgundy, Ecole de Cuisine La Varenne. Anne is English, though she and her husband, economist Mark Cherniavsky, had already spent years commuting back and forth between Washington, D.C. and France. I was certain to be able to understand the Queen’s English. But I didn’t meet Anne then, regrettably.

My first encounter with Anne was last week at a lecture of the Zamorano Club — Los Angeles’s “oldest organization of bibliophiles and manuscript collectors.” She was speaking about her rare cookbook collection and the forthcoming book she is writing on the subject for University of California Press. Her husband has been the principle bloodhound of the family in his hunt for rare editions of early, early cookbooks, and they have some amazing volumes. I actually got to thumb (carefully!) through a 1596 edition of a beautifully illustrated book by an Italian cook (Anne notes that the word “chef” had not yet come into use in the 1500s) named Bartolomeo Scappi. He has drawn careful pictures of his entire batterie de cuisine, and even shows how knives were stabbed into a hanging hay bale for storage (think knife block).

This picture is from my second Anne sighting, only two days later. She was speaking at the Los Angeles Public Library for the Culinary Historians of Southern California, a group I am (now!) a member of. For this lecture she took a different angle, talking about the history of the recipe rather than the books themselves.

Anne fell in love with cooking right after college, as well. She took a class at Cordon Bleu in London and was hooked. Though she had come from a well-to-do family who may have expected more from her Master’s at Cambridge, Anne relocated to Paris, where she earned the distinguished Grand Diplome from Cordon Bleu. Her experiences after that included cooking at the Chateau de Versailles for a parade of distinguished guests. She met Mark there and they began their long love affair — with each other and with France. Anne and Mark bought a beautiful chateau in Burgundy where she expanded her Ecole de Cuisine La Varenne. Anne has always written about food, and her La Varenne Pratique is a classic among books on French cuisine. After 25 years in France, though, they’ve relocated right here in Santa Monica and will soon (I hope!) open the doors to more students.

Because I’d like to be a student, after all these years. As I mentioned, I had every intention of enrolling in culinary school. What stopped me was a brief stint helping an acquaintance open a restaurant in San Francisco. I don’t remember exactly how long I worked there, but it was in dog years — each moment times seven. And my ambitious boss nearly keeled over on the J Church from the stress. This was an English restaurant with English food, and in cuisine-crazy San Francisco it was a serious mistake. No one wanted steak and kidney pie (have they ever?).

I drew this little drawing when I was in the midst of this very crazy — and I mean crazy — period.

I ended up at a desk job, working in publishing and then on to cookbook writing. I took lots of cooking classes in San Francisco, and spent hours poring over and experimenting from cookbooks, among them one of my favorites, Anne’s French Regional Cooking. I later admired her books and series for PBS called “Look and Cook.”

The other drawing, the one that followed the crazy one, was this:

I didn’t go to La Varenne France, it’s true, but I will gladly march myself right back over to Anne’s kitchen when she calls me.

Kelly McCune © 2010

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