Chef offers college prep

Karen Egbert could just picture it. Her 19-year-old son, a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, moves into his first apartment, exhausts his cooking repertoire (scrambled eggs, grilled cheese, tiramisu) in the first week and begins a steady diet of deadly delivery food.

What's a mother to do?

Egbert figured that her son, Noah Kraft, was a perfect candidate for a chef 's help.

Stephanie Ruth was thinking along the same lines and wrote to us about her college-age daughter.

A class was coming together. Had it been fall, the session would have transpired at CulinAerie, a cooking school in Washington, D.C., that hadn't yet opened. Instead, the D.C. home kitchen of chef Susan Holt, one of the school's two founders, had to stand in. (The other founder is Susan Watterson; she and Holt are alumnae of and former instructors at L'Academie de Cuisine in Maryland.)

By the time the lesson took place, Ruth's older daughter had left town for the summer, but her 17-year-old, Ali, a high school senior, was thrilled to take her place.

Holt put together what Ali described afterward as "a cooking lesson that focused on a set of very doable recipes with a whole lot of tips, history and science thrown into the mix." The students eagerly scanned the curriculum, making sure the basic food groups were represented:

Pasta? Check! Chocolate? Check! Cheese? Check!

As in: linguine with shrimp and garlic; raspberries, ganache and shortbread in phyllo purses; and grilled fontina and prosciutto sandwiches.

They might not sound particularly healthful, but Holt is all about moderation, keeping good fats in the diet and not robbing Peter to pay Paul.

"I don't believe in scrimping by not eating something and then going overboard by eating a box of Snackwells," she insisted. Besides, also on the list were tomato, cucumber and pepper salad; vegetable couscous; and two simple fish dishes.

She started off with the cucumber salad, which gave her the opportunity to talk about knives and how to use them correctly, and how to deal with various vegetables.

"I suck at this," Kraft said as they worked on peppers. Ali's pieces were sticking together.

Holt encouraged them, teaching them how to avoid "the accordion effect" that results when the knife doesn't cut all the way through a vegetable. "Use the entire blade," she said.

As many chefs do, Holt maintained that the most crucial lesson she'd impart would be the importance of seasoning. To her, there was no debate over salt use, and she stated unequivocally that "salt is your friend."

So is sugar. Both condiments, Holt said, draw moisture out of anything they touch and can guard against bacterial growth, which is why they are often main ingredients in preserved foods.

Along the way, Holt touched on myriad subjects: how to turn garlic and salt into a purée with a knife; why the starch in refrigerated potatoes turns to sugar; when to stop cooking processes and let residual heat take over; why unsalted butter is better. She even elaborated on how to fill food storage containers with leftovers and how to ladle soup into bowls without making a mess.

It took more than an hour to get through the cucumber salad, but then Holt hit her stride, guiding Kraft and Ali through the preparation of ganache (hot cream whisked into chopped bittersweet chocolate), shrimp linguine and oven-toasted sandwiches oozing with fontina cheese.

Holt was unabashed in her use of butter, rolling her eyes to begrudgingly concede, when asked, that olive oil could sometimes take its place.

But even butter didn't help much to mitigate the difficulties that past-their-prime sheets of phyllo dough presented as they stuck together stubbornly. Holt turned it into a lesson about dealing with a disaster.

"Use what you can and throw the rest of it away," she said.

But because her efforts had yielded only one usable purse, she came up with another idea, one probably more practical for college students than the original plan: "Don't even use the phyllo. Just take the shortbread, top it with ganache and raspberries, and garnish with ice cream."

The day ended on a lighter note. Holt showed Kraft and Ali how to: make an Indian-spiced vegetable couscous; oven-steam a fillet of ultrafresh red drum in an aluminum foil packet with aromatic herbs, lemon juice and olive oil; and sear salmon fillets in a smoking cast-iron skillet.