“I don’t want to become a chef,” Ada Martinez writes, “I need to be a chef. Cooking brings passion and meaning to my life. When creating a meal, I am at complete ease. When I’m in the kitchen I am in my zone. When people eat what I’ve made and enjoy it, oh my goodness, the pride that comes over me!” Ada’s voice on the page, sure and clear, brims with pleasure. As a student at the FSTA, she’s on the road to a calling for which she was born.

Ada, like many of her classmates, uses this first writing assignment to speak from the heart. She connects food to passion and creativity. She displays her drive and a hint of inner discipline. “It’s like nothing else matters,” she writes, “but the food I’m creating.” Unlike most of her classmates, Ada doesn’t mention family members who may have influenced her or that her husband is a graduate of the FSTA. She doesn’t mention how old she was when she first started cooking (she’s now in her 30’s) or the importance of earning a living. In her essay, Ada stays with the essentials: the pure dream of cooking to feed and delight others.

Edsel Myrie credits his divorced mother with his determination to become “a great chef.” With four young children at home and a long working day, she turned Edsel, her oldest, into “Mr. Mom.” She showed him everything she knew, including desserts. Cooking, Edsel writes, became second nature to him. It made him self-sufficient and also “helped with the ladies.” Now he’s ready to develop from a good family cook into a Great Chef - - “and to get those big bucks for doing something I love doing.”

In a similar vein, Terrill Harris writes about his father. “What really inspired me was my pops. He taught me always to be open to new tastes. I will try just about anything. I love to create new flavors.”

“I knew I wanted to be a chef since I was twelve,” Shareef Andrews writes. He remembers standing in the kitchen watching his grandmother make barbecued ox tails with rice and cabbage. “Man, I miss that smell floating through the house. Even when I picked up a new interest, like being in the N.B.A.” he continues, “I always envisioned myself cooking in my own restaurant.” Shareef ends on a realistic note. “Even if I never bring those dreams to fruition, I would still be satisfied to cook in someone else’s kitchen.”

CaTrina Atkins, rich in ambitions, begins her essay with a quote from the humorist, Erma Bombeck: “It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.” CaTrina is showing hers when she writes: ”The world has had its Julia Childs, Jacques Pepin and Wolfgang Peck . . . I want to give them a chance to have a CaTrina, too. Maybe one day I can even go to the school of my dreams, The French Culinary Institute in New York.”

Giving to needy others is a recurrent theme among FSTA students. John Cierzo writes about wanting “to be a blessing” to my church, the homeless, the elderly, the poor and the hungry.

Nevertheless, charity, for many aspiring chefs, begins at home. This free program, this chance to learn to cook professionally, is first and foremost for them. After being incarcerated while young and then getting into trouble as an adult, Edward Fitzgerald (pseudonym) writes, “I realize that it’s time to become a man . . .I would like to start my own culinary school along with a soup kitchen to prove to myself that I can actually finish something in my life without quitting first.” For Edward and a number of his classmates, there’s an urgency to show family and friends that “I can do something with my life . . . better myself.”

Many FSTA students, with experience in a family kitchen, exude confidence in their essays. Loretta Williams knows better. “Just because you are in the kitchen does not mean you know what you are doing,” she writes. Loretta explains that as a young teen, under the watchful eyes of her grandparents, she learned to make Sunday dinner: fried chicken, fried fish, string beans, rice, mashed potatoes, cakes with frosting and Kool-Aid. Years later and newly married, she was assigned the turkey for the family’s Thanksgiving. She was scared to death, so scared, she writes, “that that I had forgotten something so simple to do: preparing a recipe.” Her turkey, she admits, tasted “like a football.” Failure can be inspiring, Loretta adds. “This failure was.” Loretta explains that she went on to work as a cook’s assistant and then as a private cook. Looking ahead, she writes, “I’m not here just to have a job. I want a career . . . and I want to perfect my baking skills.”

*           *           *

As each new class gets underway, this is how it begins: with a celebration of culinary heroes; with acknowledgements of debts to others and personal failures; with dreams of the breadwinner as artist and entrepreneur; with cooking linked to nurture, creativity, compassion and self-development; with fantasies of glory in the kitchen; with innocence and with unexpected wisdom.

Stay tuned.  

Doris Friedensohn

7 March 2009