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end-product seemed to be future employees at a Hilton or Restaurant Associates corporate dining facility. A lot of time was spent on food destined for the steam table. Sauces were thickened with roux. Escoffier's heavy, breaded, soubised, glaceed and over-sauced dinosaur dishes were the ideal. Everything, it was implied, must come with appropriate starch, protein, vegetable. Nouvelle cuisine was practically unheard of. Reductions? No way. Infusions? Uh-uh. We're talking two years of cauliflower in mornay sauce, saddle of veal Orloff, lobster thermidor, institutional favorites like chicken Hawaiian, grilled ham steak with pineapple ring and old-style lumbering classics like beef Wellington. The chef/instructors were largely, it seemed, burn-outs from the industry: bleary-eyed Swiss, Austrian and French ex-cronies, all ginblossoms and spite-along with some motivated veterans of major hotel chains, for whom food was all about cost per unit.
    But it was fun. Pulled sugar, pastillage work, chaud-froids, ice-carving. You don't see a lot of that in the real world, and there were some really talented, very experienced old-school Euro-geezers at CIA who passed on to their adoring students the last of a dying style. Charcuterie class was informative and this old style was well suited to learning about galantines and ballottines and socles and pates, rillettes, sausage-making and aspic work. Meat class was fun; learning the fundamentals of butchering, I found for the first time that constant proximity to meat seems to inspire black humor in humans. My meat instructor would make hand puppets out of veal breast and his lamb demo/sexual puppet show was legendary. I have since found that almost everybody in the meat business is funny-just as almost everyone in the fish business is not.
    They'd let us practice our knife work on whole legs of beef, my novice butcher class-mates and I absolutely destroying thousands of pounds of meat; we were the culinary version of the Manson Family. Fortunately, the mutilated remains of our efforts were-as was all food at CIA-simply passed along to another class, where it was braised, stewed or made into soup or grinding meat. . before ending up on our tables for dinner. They had figured out this equation really well. All students were either cooking for other students, serving other students or being fed by other students-a perfect food cycle, as we devoured our mistakes and our successes alike.
    There were also two restaurants open to the general public, but a few fundamentals were in order before the school trusted us with inflicting our limited skills on the populace.
    Vegetable Cookery was a much-feared class. The terrifying Chef Bagna was in charge, and he made the simple preparing of vegetables a rigorous program on a par with Parris Island. He was an Italian Swiss, but liked to use a German accent for effect, slipping quietly up behind students mid-task, and screaming questions at the top of his lungs.
    'Recite for me . schnell! How to make pommes dauphinoise!!' Chef Bagna would then helpfully provide misleading and incorrect clues, 'Zen you add ze onions, ya?' He would wait for his flustered victim to fall into his trap, and then shriek, 'Nein! Nein! Zere is no onions in ze potatoes dauphinoise!' He was a bully, a bit of a sadist and a showman. But the man knew his vegetables, and he knew what pressure was. Anyone who couldn't take Chef Bagna's ranting was not going to make in the outside world, much less make it through the penultimate CIA class: Chef Bernard's 'E Room'.
    Another class, Oriental Cookery, as I believe it was then called, was pretty funny. The instructor, a capable Chinese guy, was responsible for teaching us the fundamentals of both Chinese and Japanese cooking. The Chinese portion of the class was terrific. When it came time to fill us in on the tastes of Japan, however, our teacher was more interested in giving us an extended lecture on the Rape of Nanking. His loathing of the