Yes! — It is possible to spend hundreds of hours in the classroom and thousands of dollars as a student in a professional culinary school and, upon graduation, have not even the faintest glimmering of an idea about a future career.

Meet Ms. Puzzled.

I tried and tried to delve into the recesses of Ms. P’s heart to help her arrive at a possible career path. Not a flicker of interest in any of my ideas lit her fire. In despair, I suggested she take a look at the list of 150 professions at the beginning of my book, FOOD JOBS. I asked her to cross off every option that didn’t interest her.

When next we met, she declared: “Ice Cream!”

Hmmm! Have you noticed that when you go on vacation, there is always one store that has a line outside? It’s the ice cream shop.

The Soda Fountain by Norman Rockwell

Maybe it is nostalgia for a Norman Rockwell ice cream parlor with its green marble counter, the brass foot rail and two kids perched on swiveling stools sipping a soda with two straws. Maybe it’s a longing for homemade, hand churned ice cream. Maybe its simply almost everyone loves ice cream.

Here’s another fascinating fact: Each American consumes a yearly average of 23.2 quarts of ice cream, ice milk, sherbet, ices and other commercially produced frozen dairy products.

Ice cream worldwide sales are anticipated to reach $65 billion this year. The category is dominated by Nestlé which owns Haagen Dazs and Dreyers. Unilever owns Breyers and Ben & Jerry’s, and Baskin-Robbins is a unit of Dunkin Brands.

So Ms. P has decided to open a small ice cream shop at the seaside.

She did some research yet she is much more interested in Heston Blumenthal’s idea of bacon and egg ice cream. But what got her totally lit up was a web site posting about Chin Chin‘s that bills itself as Europe’s first nitro ice cream parlor, “Chin Chin is half confectionery, half mad science lab.”

Now Ms. P is dreaming of  opening her own place; one that will combine the past and the future of ice cream, and a couple of eye-catching flavor names.

When it comes to food names, Ben & Jerry takes the prize for originality. The company employs a Primal Ice Cream Therapist whose task it is to dream up new flavors. This is no laughing matter.

When the chocolate chip cookie dough flavor was launched in 1991, it was a breakthrough in the ice cream business, and Wavy Gravy and Cherry Garcia launched the enterprise into the stratosphere which just proves what Ben & Jerry said all along: “The ‘90s are the ‘60s standing on your head and we are all the same person trying to shake hands with ourselves.”

The next step is to read The Perfect Scoop: Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, and Sweet Accompaniments by David Leibowitz.

Then, she must dream up a name for the business and speak to the bank. She could offer to the loan officer the  information that the average number of licks to polish off a single scoop ice cream cone is approximately 50. That should clinch the deal.

Finally I whispered a word of warning for Ms. P., who has morphed into Ms. Determined: when the tourists go home and the school bell rings and Jack Frost nips, it may be necessary to switch from Ice Cream to candy apples, hot cider and warm winter soups with homemade bread and hand churned butter.

Or she could locate her store in a location where the sun shines every day.

Baking At Home with The Culinary Institute of America

A few years ago all the great bread was baked in France. In the United States artisan bread bakers were a rare breed. Now we can choose among potato bread and sourdough, whole-grain and semolina, pepper bread and bread flecked with sun-dried tomatoes, olives, herbs and seeds.

All these breads are also appearing in boutique bakeries and in bountiful baskets, handed around to guests in restaurants.

Some chefs are baking their own signature breads and bread sticks as long as your arm and as skinny as a California waiter’s ponytail. Irresistibly, the appetite is seduced with a choice of grainy yellow cornbread, muffins, fresh from the oven.

On upscale tables, too, are feather-light, lily-white biscuits, sweet muffins with carrots and cranberries, or raisins and walnuts, along with hot scones flecked with melting morsels of white and dark chocolate. Soft focaccia, buttery brioches, crusty baguettes, crackling croissants, and hearty, healthy seven-grain breads.

Bread has become the icing on the cake.

There are surely many wonderfully satisfying culinary careers but being a bread baker rises to the top of the evolutionary ladder. Many professional culinary schools offer hands-on courses and many offer classes for hobbyists. There are even baking guilds to join such as The Bread Bakers Guild of America and bread baking competitive teams to root for.

Whole Grain Breads by Peter Reinhart

Among the best of the best bread cookbooks are Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor and The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread by Peter Reinhart and Ron Manville. The ever-reliable, fanatically-accurate Rose Levy Beranbaum compiled her recipes in The Bread Bible.

As an aside here, I published Rose Beranbaum’s first cookbook, Romantic and Classic Cakes. Her manuscript subsequently evolved into The Cake Bible. At the time, she asked me what I thought of the title.

I was horrified. I told her any religious person would be shocked! — shocked! at the idea of linking the Bible with a cake. Every nonreligious person wouldn’t even think of buying any book that had the word Bible in the title.

Once again this proves how often I am wrong!

Mad Hatter Tea Party

You’ll undoubtedly remember the Mad Hatter’s tea party?

“There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter and the Doormouse were having tea at it: The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it.

`No room! No room!’ they cried out when they saw Alice coming.

`There’s plenty of room!’ said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table.”

(Having seats, gaining and losing seats is another matter of considerable importance, even today in these high stress political times.)

And by the way, I recently learned that hatters became quite mad after inhaling fumes from chemicals that were used in the hat-making process.

Thus, another element of controversy is introduced into the tea party equation.

“Teas, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities, will always be the favorite beverage of the intellectual.” said Thomas De Quincy in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, an autobiographical account written in 1821 about his opium and alcohol addiction.

Now we are becoming addicted to tea.

Tea cafes are opening everywhere.

Tea parties are booming.

Sell a customer a glass of iced tea for $1.50. Then offer a “free” refill. The guest will be delighted! Wow!! Free tea!!!

No wonder: both hot and iced tea are experiencing a renaissance in North America. Even Starbucks, the quintessentially coffee purveyor, offers a wide range of Tazo® Teas including tea lattes.

Iced tea accounts for a dramatic increase in the total tea drinking partly because it has developed a profile as a healthy, inexpensive, low calorie drink that  can challenge  the popularity of carbonated sodas.

And look at the profit to be made!

What is the average cost of preparing a glass of iced tea? 3 cents? You do the math.

(The slice of lemon must be calculated separately as it will probably cost more than the tea.)

Sell a few hundred glasses of iced tea in a year, and you’ll rake in enough to pay for many bottles of gin.

Hot tea service in a restaurant is even more astonishingly profitable than iced tea, particularly when there is s modicum of ceremony involved. This involves an investment in charming tea pots, and delicate porcelain cups and saucers, maybe milk jugs; certainly sugar bowls that contain tiny sugar cubes and silver tongs to transport the sugar into the cup of tea.

Here are some sample words to seduce the senses that I’ve stolen from an actual tea menu whose provenance I regret to have forgotten:

• “African Nectar” African Rooibos Leaves Teeming With Tropical Fruit and Blossoms, Antioxidant Rich.
• “Orange Jasmine,” A Rich Dark Brew of Black Tea Teeming with Notes of Orange, Vanilla, Bergamot and Jasmine.

Among the many tea-related jobs to be found are: tea importer, tea broker, tea auctioneer and tea taster.

A table-top consultant is a specialist who scours showrooms for six or more tea service samples to present to the chef or restaurant owner who selects and places the order for the preferred style. The consultant schlepper then returns the samples.

Clearly fortunes are to be made by reading the tea leaves correctly.