Courtesy of the Little Mexican Cooking School

I received a telephone call from a FOOD JOBS book reader who has just lost her job and doesn’t know what to do now. She wanted something new. She had worked as a caterer, recipe tester, food stylist, freelance magazine food writer and cookbook editor.

With these skills, I suggested she consider becoming a teacher in a cooking school. Her topic could be any one of the specialties or she could actually teach a course on FOOD JOBS!

In fact, I started out as a cooking school teacher in Greensboro, North Carolina. I demonstrated a complete meal in each class, but told little stories about the ingredients I was using. Many came more for the stories than the cooking class itself. I later expanded these tentative steps into a course that nestled comfortably beneath the umbrella of gastronomy.

If you want to teach, but not cook, maybe you would like to consider the endless and ever expanding topic, ‘Food in the News’. The advantage of offering these subjects is you can be in charge of your own material and develop your own course guide.

I’m teaching FOOD JOBS* and get a huge amount of satisfaction from the classes and the enthusiasm of the students.  The best part is that I learn something new every day.

Professional cooking schools are thriving everywhere. So are community colleges. Many high schools also include hospitality courses in their culinary curricula.

With the help of ShawGuides, my caller can easily locate a Culinary School at the Arts Institutes, Cordon Bleu cooking school or other professional, avocational cooking school or a community college wherever she wants to live. (She would like to move from her current location to a warmer climate in another part of the country.)

I sent her a sample course guide and advised her to adapt it so that a Dean of Education could see exactly what she had in mind. Her proposed syllabus should also include a brief outline for a series of six (or more) classes. Here below is such an example:

Syllabus Sample Template

CATALOG COURSE DESCRIPTION: FOOD CAREERS

This Food Careers course will introduce the extensive range of career opportunities. The classes will help participants evaluate their own unique skills and encourage them to explore the many paths open to them. There are literally hundreds of job opportunities available to today’s graduates.  They need only bend down and pick up the prospect that is most appealing.

SAMPLE APPEAL TO STUDENTS TO TAKE YOUR FOOD CAREERS COURSE

The reason you decided to acquire an education at XXX Culinary School is to find a career in the food field. There is almost nothing more important than developing a sense of direction and ultimately being in a position to choose a path that will lead to a richly rewarding life. Together, we will examine many specific fields within the hospitality industry.

It is essential to understand the factors that contribute to the success (or failure) of a food business. You will be encouraged to track economic, political and demographic trends as they impact the hospitality industry and exert a strong influence on our current and future food choices.

You will also discover the importance of thoroughly researching a company before applying for a position. You will receive practical guidance to write a result-oriented resume and cover letter, and learn how to develop positive interviewing strategies. Class discussions will include the art of negotiation and emphasize that acceptance or rejection of a specific offer is limited not only to the size of the salary or the number of benefits: there are other important matters that must be taken into consideration too.

COURSE OBJECTIVES

At the end of this course you will be in a position to define your goals and begin to take practical steps to plan your future career. You will be able to :

• Describe the difference between a job and a career

• Develop a strategy for job hunting

• Identify the advantages and disadvantages of working in each sector of the hospitality industry

• Identify the most influential publications and reliable web sites within each sector of the hospitality industry

• Identify food trends and extrapolate probable trajectories of each trend

• Evaluate the impact of changing consumer choices

• Evaluate the impact of changing economic conditions

• Compose a personal portfolio of your work

• Outline a plan to market your business and build client referrals

• Understand the vital importance of networking

• Prepare a business proposal

• Describe the steps necessary to achieve your personal career objective

• Describe the economic and demographic reasons that justify an entrepreneurial objective

• Assess the business impacts of the “green” revolution

INSTRUCTOR

Add your name here and summarize your background.

Sound easy? It still takes effort. If this course of action appeals, you still have to put yourself out there and do the heavy leg work. But once you have a focus and a goal in mind, the hard work turns into a matter of steps to follow down a virtual yellow brick road.

Please contact me if you have a question about your own career.

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An Original: Chef Instructor Jacques Pepin courtesy of United Artist/Everett

It’s one thing to be a great cook and quite another to be a great teacher.

To become a teacher the first thing to do is to take an examination…of yourself. By this, I mean, literally figure out who you really are. For instance when we buy a camera, we are really buying are memories made tangible. When we reserve a room in a hotel, we are buying a good night’s sleep.

The legendary restaurateur, Joe Baum said, “People don’t go to a restaurant to be fed, they go to be served.”

All this is a preamble to saying that a culinary teacher has to figure out just what kind of instructor to be. Do you want to be respected and loved or admired but feared? Chef instructors who choose to yell at students and belittle their clumsy efforts do so because they truly believe this is the only way to teach and to learn. Perhaps because this is the way they were treated when they themselves were young and inexperienced.

Chef instructors at professional culinary schools are responsible for training students and providing continuing education for experienced working chefs. They provide practical, hands-on instruction in cooking and also: in purchasing; cost control and budgeting; menu development; product utilization; time management; ethics and professionalism. The job entails developing a curriculum, writing lesson plans, grading homework and class assignments, administrating tests and examinations and evaluating students’ performances.

Classically trained chef instructors draw from their hard-earned experience to teach others. A minimum of five years experience working as an executive chef in a restaurant kitchen, bakery, catering company or other branch of the hospitality industry is usually mandatory. As part of the interview process, prospective instructors may be asked to prepare several dishes and demonstrate their ability to convey knowledge to students. They may have no formal academic qualifications, although people entering the field now generally do.

A successful chef instructor (like the beloved Jacques Pepin) must be able to solve problems and maintain discipline in the classroom. As with all teachers, chef instructors acknowledge that classes vary one from another. A significant indication of the chef instructor’s competency lies in his/her ability to transform the bad or bruised apples into polished chefs, not just make the already shiny ones shinier.

In other words, a good teacher combines the attributes of sainthood with the benign affection of motherhood or Attila the Hun.

As the world shrinks, the interest in different cuisines expands. We travel more easily than ever before, and while all this movement has created a cross-pollination of food cultures, it also has spurred interest in learning about “authentic” cooking customs. Destination cooking schools and culinary tours for food lovers are a growing business. Schools are thriving in France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and China and Japan and many other countries.

As the advertisement says, You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s rye bread.

A chef can teach the foods of the Americas anywhere in the world; even on a cruise ship where passengers are treated to cooking demonstrations while sailing the oceans blue. Once docked, a chef may be engaged to conduct a culinary tour of the region.

Another opportunity for a chef instructor is to conduct a culinary walking tour. One such program in Manhattan limits the class to 20 people. The fee also includes lunch and is $65 per person.

Avocational classes remain the most popular cooking lessons in the country. Not everyone interested in food has the time or inclination to go to a professional cooking school, so the next best thing is to take a few classes. Some avocational culinary schools teach a wide array of topics and attract the same students, class after class. They also offer a few professional level classes as well. Their students may go on to work as caterers, cooks in gourmet stores, food writers, travel tour guides, food stylists, personal chefs and private cooks. Others just go home and throw fabulous dinner parties.

People who teach cooking have a passion for it. They love the creativity, the give-and-take of the class, and the interest their students bring to every session. They get their ideas from any number of sources and they shape them into cohesive classes. Not everyone who teaches cooking is brilliant at it, but those who are usually cultivate a loyal following.

Cooking school teachers must keep up with the times. Last year’s pasta class will be this year’s whole-grain class. A course on roasting morphs into one on slow food cooking. The public is fickle and tastes change.

For occasional work, both Sur La Table and Williams-Sonoma stores offer hugely popular cooking classes conducted by chefs and cookbook authors. Historic sites and homes like Williamsburg and some museums offer cooking classes too. Then there are chefs with an academic background who may consider teaching a class on such topics of as Shakespeare in Love (with food).

Darra Goldstein, a professor at Williams College, says she decided to offer a new course to pique student interest. She named it “Topics in Russian Culture: Feasting and Fasting in Russian History.” It is designed to teach Russian culture through the prism of food. In the 200-odd-year history of the College, this was a groundbreaking course. The college had never before listed a regular class in food studies.

She says, “Because I also wanted my students to experience food as pleasure, I supplemented the class meetings with extracurricular events. We celebrated the Russian pre-Lenten Butter Festival with an all-you-can-eat blini dinner and went on a mushroom hunt, for which the students prepared by reading Tolstoy’s evocative passage on mushrooms from Anna Karenina. We were thrilled to find an abundant patch of morels!”

The seminar concluded with a four-course Russian feast. Each student researched and prepared a traditional dish, and the results were impressive. In addition to the familiar borscht and pirozhki, they enjoyed a 19th-century cold beverage made from pounded pistachios, homemade kvass (an effervescent drink made from fermented black bread), eggplant caviar, a large pie with four different fillings straight out of Gogol’s Dead Souls, and varenki, Ukrainian sour-cherry dumplings.

Clearly a chef instructor or a cooking school teacher can choose to teach and travel along many paths.

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