When I was in high school one of my after school and summer jobs was working in the Rice Hotel and the hospitality industry with the wacky people and the hustle bustle atmosphere was very appealing. When it was college time in my life, I chose Oklahoma State University to attend the Hotel and Restaurant School.
In 1968 the only hotel school in the region was at Oklahoma State University and it was brand new. Michigan University and Cornell University were the only other schools that I was aware of that offered hotel and restaurant education but they were both too far away. All three of these university’s hotel and restaurant programs were predominantly focused on the hotel side of the industry with a quick run past the restaurant teaching. If you wanted to focus on the food side of the hospitality industry there was and still is one school, The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, just up the Hudson River from New York City. It was a trade school not a college. It still is.
Chefs began to get a lot of public and media attention and were being elevated to a celebrity status about ten years after I went to school, it was “The magic white coat” effect. This attention to chefs and the magic they created with food began in the late 1970’s, until then the only upscale American cuisine was Steak & Ale Restaurant. You could find fancy dining via French, Italian, Mexican etc. but nothing American. The American food revolution was about to arise.
A year after we had opened Hudson’s on the Bend, Gert Rausch and I were looking for a way to create more income. Gert had been doing cooking schools at his restaurant, The Courtyard Restaurant (Lamar and 12th in Austin) on and off for years as the public interest in food preparation was increasing.
We started our first cooking school at Hudson’s in 1987. They were offered on Sunday mornings once a month and the performances were in our kitchen at the restaurant. We had to do a thorough top to bottom cleaning at closing time on the Saturday night prior to cooking school to be ready for our guests. I had this reoccurring nightmare that I would arrive on Sunday morning and the kitchen had not been performance level cleaned, luckily that nightmare never happened. Our cooking school format was strictly observation with the opportunity to ask questions however not hands on for the guests. Each guest was given a booklet with all of the recipes of the day and a pencil so they could ask questions and take notes. The hot line in the kitchen physically blocked their view so to say the least it was not an ideal set up. The pass-through window to the dishwasher area was very close to the hot line and we used to refer to it to our guests as the “Magic Window”, where dishes and pots and pans went in dirty and magically came out clean. At every class at least one of our students wanted to know where they could get a “Magic Window”.
I was always promoting the health benefits of using local honey, saying that the bees were making honey from the same pollen that was making you sneeze and it is a cure for allergies to ingest the local pollen. One student was taking copious and thorough notes and looked up long enough from his note taking to ask “where do you purchase low cal honey?”.
At the conclusion of each class the students went out to the dining room in the restaurant and we served them the four-course meal that they had just observed in our demonstration. We could pack a maximum of twenty guests/students into the kitchen space and our monthly registration was always maxed out which was cozy but stressful to say the least.
We advertised our cooking classes on our nightly menus and we got a surprising response, filling the class to its maximum potential every month. People wanted to be part of Hudson’s and watch us cook and be able to replicate our dishes in their own kitchens and it was of great interest to them to observe how our minds worked in relation to food and entertaining.
We created a unique and strong cocktail for every class and we greeted them at the door with our beverage of the month, it was always fun to observe a group that generally were sober types become first time day drinkers.
Culinary class evolved organically at Hudson’s, as all things did. The cooking schools were beneficial to the restaurant on many levels and they set us apart from all of the other restaurants. These classes became a great way to develop positive word of mouth advertising, and because the guests were up close and personal with the chefs, they became fiercely loyal guests, and we used this platform to develop and test new menu ideas for our menu at the restaurant.
For an item to make to the cooking school platform it had to meet several criteria, it had to make it past me and the chef, it had to sound tasty in order to draw in the crowd and it had to have the ability to be cooked in a restaurant kitchen. Each recipe that was taught at cooking school went through a pretty thorough process before it was ready to exhibit. We generally did not count and measure when we cooked but in order to share a recipe to the general public, we had to have those measurements. We would cook the recipe determining and making notes of measurements so that the recipes could be written for the guest recipe booklet. If needed we would rewrite the recipe. For each recipe we would measure out each of the ingredients and put on a tray in readiness for show time, Mise en place (French pronunciation mi zen plas) is a French culinary phrase which means “putting in place”. We would prepare the recipes in front of the guests and then cook the recipes again for the group of 20 for feeding them. By the time all was said and done we cooked the items three times and worked all of the bugs out, it was chef approved and customer approved and ready for the nightly menu.
Cooking School also wrote the two cookbooks, “Cooking Fearlessly” and “Fired Up” but that’s another story.
Cooking school really evolved and met its full potential when I built the house on Hudson Bend Road. Our maximum limit went from 20 to 40, so there was that. I built an outdoor kitchen complete with bleachers and a view, the backdrop behind the chefs while cooking was a stunning view of Lake Travis so if we got boring there was the glistening of the lake just beyond our heads. If it rained, we would set the school up inside the house and the indoor kitchen layout was equally well planned out for a performance situation. My home and cooking school were a mere two-minute drive from Hudson’s on the Bend Restaurant so we would send the guests to the restaurant at the conclusion of the cooking school and there they were seated in a private room to finish their evening with the fabulous 4 course meal we had just demonstrated.
Our cooking schools became an interesting way for local companies to entertain their business clients. What started off as a serious business get together got a big ole serving of loosey goosey and fun once we started our cooking show. Throughout the years the chefs and I all got really comfortable with performing and we served a little food with a lot of stand-up comedy.
I always had a “the show must go on” attitude and over the years I noticed a unique phenomenon, if I did not feel great at the onset (sick, hungover) I always felt better once I began cooking school. I assumed that it was a divine sign that cooking school was truly my passion and the proper direction for my life.
One of our most frequent groups was the pharmaceutical companies who would invite doctors to a cooking school and they would present information to the doctors regarding their drug du jour during the dining portion in hopes of future prescriptions prescribed. I used to screw with the drug companies when they sold mood drugs (benzodiazepines), I would tell the group of captive doctors that I would bite a jalapeño if I was down or blue because it was proven that heat (capsaicin) in hot peppers released the natural feel good drug serotonin. The drug salesman didn’t like it, but the doctors did. The drug companies quickly found out the only way to get good attendance was to have us entertain their clients with food and BS.
Merrill Lynch, law firms, banks and many others businesses brought their clients regularly to be entertained and well fed and some even learned a few culinary tricks.
It was a gold mine; new clientele was being introduced to Hudson’s and it was not only free advertising it was profitable advertising. The guests really got a kick out of coming to my house and seeing my world up close and very personal, it really created a special bond between me and my patrons.
If you were to compare our cooking school performance format to football play by play announcers, I was the color commentator and the other chefs explained and demonstrated the recipes. This was all happening in the time when interest in food preparation was at its peak, just add bottomless wine glasses to the crowd and you can entertain anyone.
What no one really knew, I was actually the one learning the very most at the cooking schools because I was surrounded by well-trained chefs that were assembling the recipes and through the years, I learned so much from every chef that entered my life. The majority of the executive chefs at the restaurant came to Hudson’s via the Culinary Institute of America.
They were all very well trained and taught me a lot. You can never learn too much about food. Many thanks to Jay, Becky, Robert and Kelly.
The recipe below is one of my favorite desserts, Tina Turner Mousse. It was named after Tina not only because she is deliciously talented, but she has world famous legs of fudge.
The trick with this dessert is to have the fudge the correct viscosity or thickness. If the fudge is too thin you will know because the legs of fudge will run down the glass and not be opaque. Whisk in more cocoa until the consistency is somewhere between yogurt and heavy cream. Add more cream if it’s too thick. A two-ounce ladle filled with warm liquid fudge can be poured into a 10 oz. wineglass. Once the liquid fudge is in the wine glass tilt the glass sideways to allow the warm fudge to run down the glass forming the leg. Return the fudge to the bottom of the glass. Rotate the glass and repeat until you have three or four legs, it depends on the size of the bowl in your glass. This can be done 3-4 days in advance and store the glasses in the refrigerator. If you have extra fudge it will also hold for weeks in the refrigerator and it’s great on a spoon at midnight.
Below you will find the recipe for hot fudge. I have found that extra fudge is great on top of ice cream.
Fudge for Legs
Ingredients
2 cups of cream
½ stick of butter
1 cup light brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
¼ teaspoon sea salt
2 cups cocoa (sifted)
Method
In a heavy bottomed sauce pan simmer cream and butter.
Add both sugars and simmer.
Remove from the heat.
Whisk in salt and cocoa ½ cup at a time.
Keep fudge warm while you make the legs in the glasses.
Cover the prepared wine glasses with food film if legs are formed days ahead.
Chambord mousse
Ingredients
½ cup Chambord
4 ounces dark chocolate (chips)
2 cups cream
½ cup granulated sugar
1-pint fresh raspberries
Method
Melt chocolate in a stainless bowl above simmering water.
Whip the cream to soft peaks in a chilled bowl.
Add the sugar.
Then stream whisk in the Chambord (raspberry liquor).
Slowly stream whisk in the room temperature chocolate.
Load mousse into a pastry bag with a large circular tip.
Fill fudge leg prepared wine glass ½ full with the mousse.
Garnish with fresh raspberries.
Cover with food wrap and place in refrigerator.
Serve cold and enjoy