Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14259 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.com
Journalist Michael Ruhlman talked his way into the CIA: the Culinary Institute of America, the Harvard of cooking schools. It had something to do with potatoes a grand-uncle had eaten deacades earlier, how the man could remember them so well for so long, buried as they had been in the middle of an elegant meal. Ruhlman wanted to learn how to cook potatoes like that--like an art--and the CIA seemed the place to go. The fun part of this book is that we all get to go along for the ride without having to endure the trauma of cooking school.

Ever wonder what goes on in a busy kitchen, why your meal comes late or shows up poorly cooked? The temptation is to blame the waiter, but there are a world of cooks behind those swinging doors, and Ruhlman marches you right into it. It's a world where, when everything is going right, time halts and consciousness expands. And when a few things go wrong, the earth begins to wobble on its axis. Ruhlamn has the writerly skills to make the education of a chef a visceral experience.

From School Library Journal
YAAThe Culinary Institute of America is known as "the Harvard of cooking schools" and many of this country's best-known chefs are graduates. Ruhlman enrolled as a student with the intention of writing this book, which begins as a chronicle of the intense, high-pressure grind of classes and cooking. However, it turns into an engrossing personal account as, his every effort critiqued, the author determines to become a student and not just impersonate one. YAs will enjoy Ruhlman's anecdotes about his instructors and his classmatesYsome of whom are still in their teens. The appendix offers a chart showing the course work for associate degrees. This will appeal to anyone aspiring to a career as a chef as well as to those interested in food preparation, presentation, and the restaurant industry in America.APatricia Noonan, Prince William Public Library, VA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
After reading this title, boot camp and law school will seem like child's play. Ruhlman enrolled in the prestigious and expensive Culinary Institute of America (CIA) to get both material for a book and a culinary education. However, the drive and commitment required from day one, the demand for speed and precision, the pressure and perfectionism of the job?all hilariously and touchingly told?immediately erase his writer's detachment. But the tale goes beyond Ruhlman's anecdotes; he describes the curriculum with objective detail, so the reader also learns how a chef makes a flawless stock (and repairs a flawed one at a moment's notice), organizes the cooking station, prepares gourmet meals for crowds, and attains excellence and recognition. The short chart at the end shows the course work for the CIA's associate degrees. An enjoyable read, recommended for most collections and required for aspiring great chefs.?Wendy Miller, Lexington P.L., Ky.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Insightful and Entertaining
I really enjoyed this book.

What I expected was an inside-the-walls report about an interesting institution, its students, and its instructors. To be sure, the book is that. But it is more. The core of the book, I think, is the epiphany, or series of epiphanies, that Ruhlman has on and after a day he considers missing class because of a snowstorm. The book's major themes orbit that formative experience and are held by its gravity. Some of these are deep, thought-provoking, and ultimately unanswerable matters; for example, the cook's version of the nature v. nurture debate - are cooks born or created? Some are a bit more CIA-specific; Rulman's thesis that the overarching dogma of the place is perfection is both beautifully explained and illustrated by vignettes (for example, the running obsession with the proper roux for brown sauce).

To me, though, the book is at its finest in using the snowstorm core to explain the essence of a cook. Ruhlman finds the concept difficult to reduce to words. One important aspect, though, seems to be captured albeit imperfectly by the hackneyed concept of "the zone." (Ruhlman doesn't use this term.) There are occasions - not many - when I have been in "the zone." I am not a cook, but I have had times - at school, at work, and with some hobbies - when I have faced monumental tasks, with seemingly not enough time, and where my attention has been entirely engaged and neither failure or tardiness is an option; where the completion of each task along the way offers no time for reflection, satisfaction, or rest but instead is merely the predicate for moving, as efficiently as possible, to the next.

What I remember most about these occasions is the decompression period when the project is complete. The transition, almost literally, from focused vision to a fuller field of vision. I can recall, for example, one such occasion where, when my work was finally done in the late evening, I noticed a complete and completely uneaten lunch that I had somehow secured in the midst of the task, but could not remember how. It sat no more than 2 feet from me throughout, untouched and, indeed, unseen, until the pinpoint focus broadened and peripheral vision returned. For a brief time my senses are alive. I see, sense, and interact with the world differently. And then, too quickly, I return to my normal state - well outside "the zone" with my attention scattered in different directions.

Surgeons or professional athletes, who similarly live in and out of the zone, probably can already relate. For the rest of us, Ruhlman's book is a dramatic success and accessible to non-cooks like me precisely because we all, no doubt, have had similar experiences to varying degrees. What Ruhlman helps us see is that CIA students, and cooks, live almost perpetually in these states - in "the zone," then the exhausted but exhilarating hyper-aware state that follows, immediately back into the zone, and on and on. While many cooks-turned-writers such as Anthony Bourdain and Marco Pierre White have attempted to describe similar states, they paint with too broad and imperfect a brush - typically resorting to incomplete concepts like "adrenaline junkie." Ruhlman - a writer turned cook - however, nails it in a much more satisfying exploration of the question and in so doing makes his book amazingly accessibly to anyone and, indeed, transcendent.

Well written, dragged a bit at times, but learned so very much
Well if you are not a foodie I would suggest reducing the review by 3 stars and finding something else to read, but if you are a foodie this book was excellent. A nice fairly complete telling of what it is like to go through the Culinary Institute which is something I always wanted to do but either didn't have the time nor wish to commit so much of it. I am always playing in the kitchen and I got a ton of direction from this book as to the why of what I often do without knowing it (of course if that is all you are looking for there is McGee). Even little things that I picked up were great, for example, my wife hates wet sandwich bread, here in America we eat a lot of sandwiches so this small thing is a big problem. In the book they make mention of how the CIA club sandwich always puts cheese on the bread to create a barrier, so simple but something that never dawned on me, sounds silly but now I know how to make my sandwiches and her happy at the same time, thats worth a lot more than the price of the book right there.

Disappointing & Misleading
Ruhlman tries very hard to be neither a culinary student nor a journalist, so he ends up being a sort of half-baked memoirist. On the one hand, this book is worth reading in order to get a behind-the-scenes of some of what it's like to train at the CIA, but on the other hand, Ruhlman's lack of writerly discipline makes the book exasperatingly low on information.

There's far too much hero-worship on his part of dominant male figures at the school; it seems that Ruhlman is powerfully drawn to aggressive, angry, powerful, and/or graceful men, and his account of the CIA is overshadowed by his need to be accepted by and mythologize male chefs like Adam (a passionate, withdrawn student), the school's president, his Skills teacher, and other male teachers. Worst of all, the women at the school are given short-shrift by Ruhlman, presented as either needy figures of fun or neurotic screwups who get put in their place by a man. This read less like accurate reporting and more like the bias of a writer who isn't as interested in the women he meets.

I wouldn't have minded if Ruhlman had acknowledged the effect these men had on him and his need to be accepted by them and had written honestly about that, but he hid behind his so-called account of training at the CIA and his creation of what he describes as the nature of people who are born to cook. In actuality, he skipped most of the school's curriculum and was given special treatment by the staff.

Overall, a disappointing and frustrating read.