The important thing is to continue to create our own unique signature and pass it along to others who will appreciate and respect the work of those who created cockerel crowing weather vanes, sculptures, teapots and tabletop and kitchen utensils.

Here’s an example of a simple gift for a friend: Fill a rubber (medical) glove with Hershey’s kisses. Attach a note with the words:

“I’d like to give you a hand.”

(ICDT!) (I Can Do That!)

Windows on the World iconic logo

The Windows on the World collection of restaurants and bars – WOW – sitting aloft 107 stories in the sky took a virtual village to create and maintain. Developed under the visionary leadership of restaurateur Joe Baum and his partners, here are a few facts that made “Windows” hum.

• Windows sat 1,314 feet high in the sky; 1,274 feet above mean sea level.
• Over 2,450 food items were ordered every week.
• 2,000 bottles of beer were on hand at any give time in the Greatest Bar on Earth.
• There were over 20,000 bottles of wine in the cellar. (If you laid their corks end to end, the corks would measure 3,333 feet.)
• 700 wines from around the world made it to Windows’ wine list.
• The Greatest Bar on Earth featured 16 different kinds of vodka.
• Over 27,000 bottles of champagne would be sold in one year (imbibed with 51 lbs. of caviar per week!)
• 1,000 calls or more were made to the Reservations office every day.
• There was always a seat in the house — in one of the 2,500 chairs.
• 3,600 eggs were bought every week (that’s a lot of chickens).
• 700 lbs. of shrimp were consumed every week.
• It took a lot of cooks to cook up all of that shrimp and caviar — 52, to be exact.
• A rose by any other name would smell as sweet — 3,000 flowers were ordered every week!
• The dishwashers would clean 3,000 forks a day.
• Windows’ panorama of color included 145 different shades of paint, 19 fabric wall coverings and 11 custom carpets.
• The oldest member of the staff was born in 1921; the youngest in 1978.
• Windows had the Manhattan’s youngest sommelier — 25 years old.
• There were more than 500 people employed at Windows on the World, speaking 25 different languages.
• The beaded glass curtain on the 107th floor contained 430,000 imported glass beads on 1,178 strands of steel cable.
• On a clear day, you could see 90 miles in every direction from the 107th floor.
• In high winds, the tower could sway 11 inches.

With a heavy sigh she confessed all she likes to do is to make decorative flowers for cakes. “Who’s going to pay me to do that for eight hours a day?” she whispered.

She now has a high-paying job.

She works for a caterer whose venue is a botanical garden.

She creates decorative flowers for eight hours a day.

She matches the flowers on wedding cakes to the seasonal flowers in bridal bouquets.

I had asked her what she wanted to do when she graduates. I complicated the question by asking her not what she likes to do but what she loves to do.

In response to what she clearly thought was a dumb question, she answered: “I love to go shopping.” Everyone in the class laughed but I thought this was a really useful piece of information.

I told her about a former colleague at Windows on the World restaurant who is a tabletop consultant. She scours manufacturers’ showrooms for the latest designs of china, glassware and distinctive serving plates for several upscale restaurants. My student now does the same thing. She works part-time as a tabletop counselor and the rest of her time as a prop stylist for a food photographer.

She goes shopping everyday.

When a chef wants a tagine or a mandoline or any other piece of specialized equipment, she knows exactly what it is and can lay her hands on it immediately. She finds the cobalt blue plate for serving the smoked salmon and the lavender dish for the chocolate cake.

She found her “bliss” — her perfect food job.

The food & art of an artichoke

I love being a food essayist, and especially like it when I’m asked to read my essays aloud.

This happened recently when WAMC, Northeast Public Radio, invited me to be part of a series of broadcasts entitled Mixed Ingredients, which was made possible through the support of the New York Council for the Humanities.

Below is the essay I offered. If you prefer, you can hear it for yourself and listen to the other contributors’ works too. I begin by saying:

Art and design sell everything we touch.

We are delighted by the curve of a wine glass and the innovative artistry of a wine label.

Lavish sums are spent not only on what food goes on a restaurant plate, but on the plate itself, perhaps a lovely cobalt blue glass plate on which to serve the rosy pink smoked salmon, or the rustic pottery casserole for the beef stew, the perfect lavender-colored plate on which to display the chocolate cake or the pristine white porcelain pot for the mint tea.

Even the display and presentation of the food itself can be considered visual art.

Daring chefs are presenting their food on twigs and wires and other wildly creative forms. Working with sculptors and jewelers, they are inventing new artistic ways to serve — and even eat — their food.

Anyone who has attended a banquet or sailed on an ocean liner will gasp at the creativity of food and ice carvings. And visitors to the TV Food Network are astonished to see the breathtaking constructions of cake designers and chocolatiers.

It was The Four Seasons restaurant in New York that permanently changed the way we now view fine dining restaurants.

When it opened in 1959, the Four Seasons became the inspiration for the modern American restaurant. It was one of the purest examples of an idea transformed into vibrant reality.

The planning for the restaurant consumed two and a half years, and cost four and a half million dollars — a mighty heap of money in the 1950s. At that time the average price of a car was $2,200 dollars. Gasoline was 30¢ a gallon, and the average annual income was considerably less than $6,000.

This was the first restaurant to employ famous architects and graphic designers. Philip Johnson, the architect for New York’s famous Seagram Building, designed the space and graphic designers of the stature of Mies van der Rohe and Eero Saarinen were invited to join the planning team. Their work has endured and can still be admired today.

The Four Seasons was a pioneer in many ways: it was the first restaurant to purchase fine art to grace the space. Dubious New Yorkers scoffed at the idea of hanging Picasso, Miro and Chagall paintings on the walls of a mere restaurant.

Now art and design are essential elements that contribute to the success of grand restaurants, bustling bistros and even comfortable cafés like Panera.

Under the steady rain of goods and services we know as the consumer culture, the graphic designer is the invisible force in nearly every transaction between producer and purchaser. His is the persuasive hand responsible for the design that says to the buyer: “Look at me, remember me, trust me, want me, and buy me — NOW!”

We spend more in a well-designed supermarket, and often choose our food on the basis of the attractiveness of its packaging.

Brilliant design even plays a persuasive role in packaging for fast food restaurants, soda cans, bottled water, many specialty foods and even dog and cat food.

The art director is a trained specialist in color, texture, form and function, who creates the look and feel of magazines, newspapers, cookbooks and menus.

You need only to step into a gallery, craft shop or museum to discover that artists have been working for centuries to turn food into art in the form of decorative Faberge eggs, and distinctive serving dishes.

Jewelers, potters, glass blowers and craftspeople use every media from clay to precious metals and gemstones to render food into images to admire and to use.

Food is art for everything from shopping bags to Christmas tree ornaments and greetings cards. Commercial designers and manufacturers produce a dazzling array of kitchen equipment and elegant, useful tools for cooks.

Still life paintings depict the last supper, a recent hunting expedition, a silver bowl of ripe fruit, a table laden with a simple loaf of crusty bread, cheese and a goblet of wine, or an entire meal consisting of ham, pheasant, figs, cheese and cherries.

Here are feasts to last for gastronomic eternity in the form of fine and everlasting art.

Menu from La Fonda Del Sol, 1960

The exacting dedication to detail that went into every one of legendary Joe Baum’s fantasies was poured into the building of La Fonda Del Sol, a restaurant that involved several junkets throughout Latin America.

At La Fonda, fashion designers draped the waiters in ponchos, serapes, and high-heeled matador boots.

For the dining room, color was used as architecture. The room’s sun-drenched adobe walls set off vibrant purple and orange banquettes.

Recesses in the walls were stocked with hundreds of Latin American dolls, small toys, and figurines made of Ecuadorian, Brazilian, and Argentinean festival breads.

La Fonda Del Sol open kitchen, 1960

For the first time, Joe added an open kitchen, which lent vitality and energy to the room.

Rows of chefs tended spits and grills laden with suckling pigs, legs of lamb, sides of beef, and whole turkeys that turned slowly and aromatically over beds of glowing coals. Cauldrons of soup simmered to the beat of the marimba and mariachi bands and, later in the evening, to the haunting strains of a classical guitar.

Food was center stage, but when the new chef offered the señor a traditional South American dish of stewed tripe with rice, Joe leapt from his chair and shouted at him, “Forget it! No one’s gonna eat this shit.”

The entire staff at La Fonda was from Latin America. They infused the restaurant with a sense of excitement and gaiety, also reflected in the advertising campaign, featuring a mustachioed hombre with eyes closed and head on the table, making  various wise-guy pronouncements such as:

“No. no. stupido, we said, ‘Fiesta at La Fonda del Sol, not Siesta.’”

Or, “We are not responsible for articles lost or exchanged on the premises, nor for deals and bargains struck during meal periods.”

And, “There is to be no dancing on the tables after midnight and if you go home with someone other than the person you came with, it is no fault of the management.”

Genius! Pure Genius!

One way to relive this experience is by visiting the glorious archives of the New York Public Library’s Menu Collection in person or strolling online at Cooked Books, Rebecca Federman’s wonderful blog.

The first was a brown egg in an egg cup.  The top had been removed and inside was a miniature souffle.

The second egg was not an egg at all but was also nestled into an egg cup.

The chef had molded an outer part of white vanilla ice cream and inside, “the yoke” was a passion fruit sorbet.

The third egg was also a pretend one.  It was a “fried” egg in which the white was formed from white chocolate and “yolk” was an apricot mousse.

I can foresee the time when someone who throws an egg at a politician will be arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon

There is a precedent for everything.  There was another time, long ago when eating an omelet became a death sentence.  It happened in France, during the Revolution when the former President of the Consitutent Assembly was on the run.  Gripped by pangs of hunger, exhausted and scared, he threw caution to the wind and decided to stop at an inn for a meal.  Unwisely he asked the cook to make him a 12-egg omelet.  Times were bad then all over France, so it took no great genius to realize that this was the fugitive president.  The cooks  betrayed him and the mob hanged him.  Hence the dilhemma; you are hanged if you do and hand you are hanged if you don’t — eat eggs, that is.

As for eggy food jobs, how about these:

Barbara Dale-Avant, an employee of Atlantic Food Inc.’s cooked-egg division, in Hemingway, South Carolina, holds the record for number of hard-boiled eggs peeled per minute.  Her best total was 48, which means that she dawdled away exactly 1 1/4 seconds on each egg.  And her boss, Wilbur Ivey, is not a man to tolerate bits of shell among the eggs, which are shipped to East Coast restaurants.  To get these perfect results, he is willing to allow 3 seconds per egg, but that’s only when peelers are first starting to peel on the job.

“A real clumsy person couldn’t do this,” remarked one of Avant’s peelers, somewhat unnecessarily.  Another confided that the members of the six-woman team (who together once peeled 10,000 eggs in an eight-hour shift,) sometimes throw eggs at each other, recreationally, although Mr. Ivey does not entirely approve.  On the other hand, he is clearly no spoilsport, as he is credited with devising the initiation rite for new egg-peeler: he slips a raw egg into a recruit’s first batch.

Howard Hillman made omelettes.  He made omelettes at conventions, at parties, and wherever two or three or many more people were gathered together all over the country.  There was a time when Howard Hillman was making omelettes everywhere you went.  He made tomato and cheese omelettes, mushroom omelettes, banana and nut omelettes, omelettes of every kind, large and small, with or without crowd participation.  Howard Hillman became the Omelette Emperor of the Western Hemisphere.  He had a skill that many others possess. The difference between Howard Hillman and everyone else is that he took his talent and marketed the dickens out of  his talent.

I am the matchmaker.

I want to know what each student loves (not what he or she likes) to do.

With a little bit of luck, I can suggest ways in which they can marry their hobby or unique skills with their culinary knowledge as they seek a long and fruitful career.

I’m astonished to discover how many budding chefs yearn to own a truck. A truck that serves every kind of food from cupcakes and rice pudding to Korean barbecue.

Today I talked about the calendar. The US Tennis Open is coming up. So is the World Series. A sports fan may want to cook at the private dining room of a sports franchise or become a private chef for an athlete.

Dancing with the Stars employs a personal chef for each competition. Personal chef jobs are on the rise. It is one of the best jobs for an entrepreneur who can start a business without requiring a capital investment.

I spoke about jobs in art and design; photographer, food stylist, kitchen designer, and special event cake designer. Create a wedding cake in oil and acrylic paint to frame and preserve for ever and ever (or as long as the marriage lasts.) become a chef in a museum, create a food exhibit, become a lecturer on the topic of food in fine art? Become a recipe developer for Panera or Starbucks (or Dunkin D’s.)

Tasting is a good and well paying job. Taste ice cream, coffee, tea, olive oil. Chew gum. No kidding. Nestle is one of the companies that employs chewing gum tasters. There are real jobs that require super taster to… well…taste…all day. .

How about becoming an ethicist, a futurist or a trend tracker?

Or work on Wall Street analyzing food companies?

Or work for a food foundation or as a humanitarian or lobbyist or inspector to trace the source of contaminated food.

Here are just a few ideas for working in the food media: investigative journalist, vegetarian columnist, historian, folklorist (why do so many Jews go out for Chinese dinner on Sundays?)  The late Professor Alan Dundes examined this question with his students who also study the allure of violent sports, holiday traditions and even the mystique of the vampire.

Said Dundes: “As a psychoanalytic folklorist, my professional goals are to make sense of nonsense, find a rationale for the irrational and seek to make the unconscious conscious.”

How about taking up a career as a food memoir writer, biographer, commentator, geographer (do you know what a food geographer does?) trade magazine reporter, supermarket observer, radio host, (I’d like this job myself,) essayist, restaurant reviewer, food book reviewer (not only cookbooks but also food books dealing with politics, profiles of food companies etc.), catalog writer, TV star, ingredient shopper for TV star, TV producer, obituary writer for former food celebrities. Preparer of last meals in the federal penitentiary leading to a possible book contract for Meals to Die For.

I had only three minutes to describe my food jobs class so I didn’t have time to even mention careers in education, farming, science and technology or rare, unusual and extraordinary culinary careers so instead, I’ll get around to them in this blog. Please come back soon.

And.

Have a nice day (as they say at the bank!)

Styling food so that the camera “loves” it requires considerable skill: knowledge of foods, an eye for detail and infinite patience. As with movie making, several “takes” may be needed before the final shot becomes a keeper.

The task of the food stylist is to make the food look irresistible for the cameras—close up or far away. He or she works with photographers to produce ads for magazines, newspapers, and television commercials, and gorgeous-looking meals for Hollywood movies and in-store produce videos. Food stylists are also called in to prepare recipes for cookbook photography and “beauty shots” for television shows.

In this pursuit of perfection, a food stylist may have to slice several pounds of Swiss cheese in order to find one geometrically perfect slice. It is the stylist’s artistry in combination with the photographer’s skill that makes a professional photograph outstanding and arouses the desire of the consumer to get her hands on the food — immediately! She may roast four or more turkeys hoping the photographer will capture the bird while all the hot air beneath the skin is still puffing its “cheeks.” And the stylist is expected to create miracles when the photographer says “go”: to make a soufflé look like a castle in the air – and stop its collapse as it is taken from the oven.

Most importantly, food stylists can fib but they cannot lie. For instance, the only artifice that is permitted is in styling and photographing ice cream. Because it would melt under the hot lights, it is permitted to fabricate ice cream from Crisco, mashed potatoes and food coloring.

(Apparently this rule doesn’t seem to be in force in fast food joints where the real squishy, drippy burger looks nothing like the backlit beauty we see in the photograph!)

Getting Paid

Like photographers, stylists bill their clients by the day. In large cities, these day rates can be significant. Very often stylists and photographers team up to offer clients a complete package that includes the work of a prop (or background) stylist too. These alliances usually are casual partnerships that wax and wane as the job do.

Getting Started

No officially sanctioned licensing is required for becoming a food stylist but having a solid foundation of cooking is important, and a degree from a professional cooking school is invaluable. It is also helpful to keep current with the new technologies, attend art and photography classes. But perhaps the best way to break into the field is to intern with an established stylist to learn what it takes.

Learning From A Pro: Dolores Custer, Food Stylist Extraordinaire

A longtime and well-established food stylist, Dolores Custer’s work is widely admired. Her own experience speaks to the many opportunities that are available in the field. She has a master’s degree in food and nutrition, and she is recognized as the ultimate authority on making food look fabulous for the camera.

Custer has worked with food magazines, advertising agencies and public relations firms in addition to many of the largest companies in the United States. Her talents are in demand for television, feature films, and major food companies.

She says, “The best thing that a beginner can do is to assist good food stylists. Put together a portfolio of your work to promote yourself and apply for an intern or junior assistant position with an established professional.” That’s how she got her start.

“About three months before I graduated from NYUSteinhardt, we were told that a film crew wanted to rent the test kitchens to shoot some shots for the Lamb Council, and they needed someone to help the person who was preparing the food. I volunteered and met my first Food Stylist!

I had been unsure of what I wanted to do with my degree, but when I learned about this career (which I previously knew NOTHING about), I knew it was for me. I worked with three food stylists before I graduated, and when I did graduate, one of them asked me to come work with her full time. What a wonderful opportunity, I later discovered.”

Custer reveals that most stylists must pay their dues. “There is a lot to learn and the best way is to assist someone who is good at it.”

Custer also advises that it’s important to live where the work is and to develop an adaptable freelance personality. “One of the things I like best about the freelance world of food styling is that there are no typical days,” says Custer. “Each day is different from the next. We shoot in every conceivable environment and work with many different foods. One day we may prepare a picnic for a TV commercial and the next day we are spreading the client’s frosting on a single cupcake.“

Delores Custer always seems to be teaching somewhere, so it’s good to follow her teaching schedule online, and for the announcement of her forthcoming book that is sure to be a winner. And The Mississippi University for Women offers a one-week food styling program for college credit. www.muw.edu. There even is the International Conference on Food Styling and Photography that is devoted to the topic.

Some topics call for more than one posting, and this is one such topic. There is too much information to digest in one sitting. This is part one of a two-part discussion. I’ll be talking about food styling for food bloggers next.

Executive Chef Alfred Portale, Gotham Bar & Grill

There are those who invent clocks and others who tell the time. There are architects who design buildings and folks who paint them. There are artisans who make violins and artists who composers of concertos.

We tend to think of artistic creativity as springing from the minds of dancers and painters and musicians, but plumbers, electricians and vacuum cleaner engineers also invent novel solutions to problems. They are creative geniuses too.

We all know chefs who acquire or are endowed with exceptional ability. Some are intellectual giants. Some are blessed with intuitive talent.

If we tried to make a list of influential chefs, it would reach from Lucullus who drew his last breath in 56 B.C. and trace a glorious gastronomic path through the prism of Apicius who took his first breath in 25 B.C. We’d mention Taillevent 1310 – 1395, and Rabelais who tirelessly described sixty ways to cook an egg.

In his treatise Gargantua, Rabelais wrote, “Drink always and you shall never die,” though unfortunately he did — in 1553.

We’d add to our list, Catherine de’ Medici, who arrived from Italy as a tiny betrothed 14 year-old and became the Queen of France. She changed the culinary landscape by introducing the French court to truffles, Parmesan cheese, artichokes, quenelles, roast duckling with orange sauce and pasta — lots and lots of pasta.

It has been observed there wouldn’t have been a Renaissance without pasta, because hungry men growl, and with rumbling tummies, foment revolutions whereas the well-fed sing happy songs and bequeath everlasting beauty. With a bellyful of spaghetti, a person can contemplate creation itself.

It was Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher who lived from 341 B.C. to 270 B.C. who wisely declared, “The beginning and root of all good is to make the stomach happy; wisdom and learning are founded on that.”

By Gum! If only those old Greeks still ruled the world we would all be living in Paradise instead of dwelling in perpetual poverty.

Do you remember the dictum of King Henri IV, patron of that venerable inn, La Tour d’Argent? He pronounced his monarchy philosophy thusly, “If God allows me to live, and I will see that there is not a single laborer in my kingdom who does not have a chicken in his pot every Sunday.” And that pronouncement was made in the mid-1500s before the Colonel fried his very first KFC.

As we march through the menus of time we stumble across Colbert, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Minister of Finance who served the Sun King, Louis, 14th. He approved France’s purchase of Quebec and Louisiana even though according to writer Daniel Rogov, author of Rogues, Writers & Whores, Dining with the Rich & Famous, “he could see no way to convince the savages that inhabit those lands to buy our fashionable frocks.” However, Colbert did see the colonies as a source for enriching the French larder, (though the future presence of McDonald’s in the Musée du Louvre was surely not what he had in mind).

Parmentier was the person who persuaded Parisians to set aside their fear of potatoes. This feat of conversion from fear of crisp spuds prompted Chef Curnonsky’s description of French fries as being among “the most spiritual creations of Parisian genius.” The original French fries are thought to have been first consumed beneath the bridges of Paris during the French Revolution and were known as Pommes Pont-Neuf.

Thus we stride through the first stirrings of culinary creationism and evolve from Sauce Béarnaise to Green Goddess Dressing, from Poulet Demi Deuil with a fine Bordeaux to Chicken Nuggets with Diet Coke. We have traveled far and with increasing width from Sachertorte to Twinkies.

Each stage in the devolution of our culinary journey takes us to new heights: from the 17th century’s influence of La Varenne, we stride through gastronomy to honor: Brillat-Savarin, Marcel Boulestin, Antonin Carême, Choron, Dugléré, Nicolas Appert, (who invented canning), to Auguste Escoffier; Alain Chapel; Alain Ducasse and Alain Senderens to  Ferdinand Point; Guy Savoy and Gordon Ramsay; Chef Boyardee and Rachael Ray’s discovery of 365 ways to use leftover hot dogs.

We can all agree that Alfred Portale, a former jewelry designer and top of his class graduate of the CIA, is among the most inventive and highly acclaimed chefs of our time. As too are Ferran Adria, Grant Achatz, Heston Blumenthal, Thomas Keller and a host of others who have ascended into the exalted pantheon of kitchen deities.

What distinguishes these creamers of crops is their ability to think creatively: so not salt and predictable pepper but salt on caramel. Not those four seasons but twelve seasons in a year.

It is said: “No one is born with taste. Taste must be acquired not only by tasting but by learning and reading in dozens of disciplines and by experimenting and perfecting and making choices; choices about the right ingredients are of no greater or less importance than choosing the right words to describe your purpose.”

It is one thing to name an item on the menu fish eggs and astonishingly more profitable to whisper the word caviar. To say liver of a fat duck is less enticing than Fat Duck’s Foie (gras).  Or pâté rather than cold  meat loaf. Pommes frites go better with steak than Freedom Fries, a dish of revenge best served cold.

Robert F. Kennedy wrote, “Some dream of things that are and ask, Why? Others dream of things that never were and ask, Why not?” Nonconformists and risk takers possess the ability to paint toothache in fondant or describe the seductive smell of sizzling onions.

Creativity is a skill that can be developed. It is based on the fundamentals of technical knowledge and soaring imagination. Leonardo da Vinci had to understand the elements of anatomy in order to paint the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper; Picasso had to understand the fundamentals of art before creating his own cubistic artistry.

Every great chef starts to climb the ladder of stardom only after fully understanding the pure ecstasy of a well-constructed consommé. It is this grasp of complex simplicity that separates the sous from the celeb.

It takes a certain kind of intellect to think of serving a beefsteak tomato with a steak knife. To say “I love!” in a different way.

To invent a new dish is to pay homage to all who cooked before us and all the consumers who declared the chef to be an artist.