Read an Excerpt

Part One

Certified Master Chef Exam (or the Objective Truth of Great Cooking)

Chapter One

Chef Dieter Doppelfeld leads the way to kitchen station four, followed by two men in lab coats with clipboards. Brian Polcyn stands before these men attentive but at ease in a paper toque and chef's whites. He has set his stainless steel table with cutting board, slicing knife, bain-marie insert filled with hot water, and latex gloves.

The day before the Certified Master Chef examination began I arrived at the office of Tom Peer, food and beverage director at the Culinary Institute of America, the nation's most prominent cooking school. Peer was for years the executive chef at the Duquesne Club in Pittsburgh, and he was now the certification chairman for the American Culinary Federation, a trade organization representing tens of thousands of chefs. Peer oversaw the master chef certification program.

This grueling cooking test, simply the idea of it, had completely captivated me, and it would become for me the beginning of a two-year immersion in the work of the American chef and professional cooking. But for a long while I couldn't get to the core of my fascination with the CMC exam. I asked Peer and Doppelfeld why they thought this test was important. Doppelfeld explained that this profession, the profession of chef in America, was relatively young. For most of its history the United States imported great chefs; we did not train our own because we didn't have anyone to do the training; the country didn't even have a cuisine it could call its own or any kind of tradition to speak of, beyond the home ec-style teachings of Fannie Farmer, perhaps, or the worldwide impact of McDonald's-style fast food. Yet in the past fifty years, most noticeably in the past two decades, the culinary scene had exploded. Cooks had become chefs, and chefs had become celebrities. Food magazines proliferated. National and local radio shows devoted to food filled the air on weekends. An entire television network was created to broadcast food and cooking shows twenty-four hours a day. Restaurants were becoming as famous as Broadway shows. And the work itself-once the labor of the lower classes-had become fashionable. Parents, once proud to say that their child had entered law school, now boasted that their child was in culinary school. An industry that was still young, huge and growing ($336 billion in overall food service sales in 1998, $376 billion expected in 2000) needed recognized standards of uncompromised excellence, standards that were acknowledged by everyone. The Certified Master Chef exam aimed to create exactly that.

—Reprinted from The Soul of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman by permission of Viking Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Ruhlman. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.