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Rose
Magazine, Fall Issue 2009
Old Town Cooking School was featured in Rose
Magazine starting on page 42.
Dining in style
Old Town Cooking School puts the fun back in eating at home
By Dan O'Heron 10/02/2008,
Pasadena
Weekly
 From
rule, recipe, fancy and whim — down-home and uptown the
world over — complete courses in alimentary geography
are laid out in linen at Pasadena’s Old Town Cooking
School.
Classes take place twice a
month in what partner/instructor Deanna Clark calls “the
gorgeous kitchen” of the Pasadena Senior Center. Not
the ordinary cooking classes of plastic utensils and paper
plates, their spirit is prestigious, yet playful. “It’s
like a trip to a cordon bleu plate in Paris, with fun thrown
in,” said partner Deborah Swartz.
At every class, whether gourmet
or comfort food lessons, the porcelain glistens, the hors
d’oeuvres and entrees are select and the wine is fine,
said Swartz, “And a lot of people come here just to eat.”
And talk. “And answer
questions about foodie stuff,” said Clark. Questions
like: Should bread be buttered entirely or bite by bite? Which
fork should be used for dessert? If a cocktail olive is served
without a toothpick should you — if anyone’s watching
— tip the glass and let the olive fall in your mouth?
How do you make good mashed potatoes? And all kinds of fun
queries about special events.
When not in the school kitchen,
Clark teaches blind children for the Los Angeles County Office
of Education. She was trained to cook in Italy. Swartz, who
studied cookery in France, is a director of a public school
fundraising group.
“In our school we use
the finest ingredients,” said Swartz. “We get all
of our meats from Taylor’s Meat Market in Sierra Madre.
The butchers trim it the way you need to have it to cook it
right. And they feature USDA prime beef. We get most of our
produce from farmers markets in Pasadena, South Pasadena and
Santa Monica, but our tomatoes — the best, the sweetest
— come from Gelson’s.”
Presentation of the best natural
ingredients defines the teaching methods. There’s no
struggle here in deciding between a dish’s merit as an
ornament and its qualities as delicacy, said Swartz. “We
emphasize both. Our salads are served in a dish and not a
bowl.” Being able to see all the beautiful natural ingredients
laid out on plate is like throwing open the gates of the Garden
of Eden, she suggests. Teaching knife skills is a big thing
too.
“Oddly,” said Swartz,
“we get very few questions about strictly healthful cooking,
but interest always brightens when we prepare from scratch
rich French sauces like hollandaise, béarnaise and
béchamel.”
And what about research? “We’re
big on that too,” said Swartz. “A woman in a recent
class told me her mother made something called City Chicken,
a combo of pork and veal, but the recipe was lost. I found
it for her in a 1940s Junior League of Pasadena cookbook.”
It made me wonder: You’ve
got to think students should be grateful when they perceive
what pains have been taken on their behalf.
Upcoming classes scheduled,
ranging from $75 to $95 per class, are both hands-on and demonstrations.
They include: Cuisine of France, Oct. 11; Chocolate from Mole
to Fudge, Oct. 23; Soups, Stews and Comfort Foods, Nov. 6;
Sex and the City Cocktail Party, Nov. 20; and Best Recipes
2008, Dec. 4. For details call (626) 791-0358 or visit www.oldtowncookingschool.com.
Curious about the makeup of
classes, I wondered if the teachers had to contend with anyone
like I was in my youth. As a child, I pulled on my mother’s
apron strings but only when she had something good to lick
in the mixing bowl. That done, I’d run out and play.
Later, draining spaghetti through a tennis racket and frying
bacon without a shirt, I was an Oedipus wreck in my bachelor
kitchen. Finally, after hitting the cookbooks, I often had
to run to the store in mid-recipe.
“We would have drummed
into you the basic lesson of mise en plate,” said Swartz.
“That’s a French term that means you must have all
the ingredients necessary for a dish prepared and ready to
combine up to the point of cooking.”
After Swartz said that she’d
studied at cooking schools and restaurants in Provence, a
truffle-rich region in southeastern France, I got silly and
started singing a few bars of “Nobody Knows the Truffles
I’ve Seen,” but partner Clark cut in: “I studied
in Tuscany and would have helped you with the spaghetti.”
She went on to explain how to prepare it al dente so that
it offers just the right amount of resistance.
Swartz said most of the classes
are composed of professional women who never acquired the
skills that previous generations had attained in their mothers’
kitchens (or, as in some Pasadena homes, that had been the
domain of servants.)
But also, “We’ve
had a few young men from Caltech and other people who just
love to eat,” Swartz said.
Beginning in January, the women
will begin collecting recipes from local Pasadena people for
a book called “One City, One Cookbook.”
Swartz and Clark agree that
the school and the cookbook are not all about giving special
parties, but more to enhance the everyday enjoyment of food,
or perhaps facilitate the simple warm pleasure of inviting
a lonely neighbor over for a nice dinner.
Read
more from the original Pasadena Weekly article -->
Larry
Wilson: Let's get cooking on new city project
Article Launched: Pasadena
Star News, 08/16/2008 11:26:28 PM PDT
 One
City, One Story? Yeah, we're up and running again here in
the late summer, with a long list of books the committee compiled
over iced teas and Albarino in Pasadena boss librarian Jan
Sanders' serene oak-paneled offices this month, to be culled
down to a short list of five possibilities just after Labor
Day. We'll all read that same book and celebrate the author
in the new year, as ever.
But Pasadena bon vivant
and Old Town Cooking School maestra Deb Swartz
has a related and yet actually entirely different idea: One
City, One Cookbook.
Everyone who hears the idea
gets it, and pronto.
There have been versions of
such a cookbook before, surely - the Junior League's Pasadena
Prefers and California Sizzles are on thousands of kitchen
bookshelfs here.
But Deb's idea is different.
She wants a book that truly represents the massive diversity
of Pasadena and the communities surrounding it. She wants
to look at 1,000 good cooks' best recipes, ones that reflect
their roots and their soul, or the old country, or this new
culinary country we're creating out West. Recipes that both
say Pasadena and yet aren't more deviled eggs and gin fizzes
- not that there's anything wrong with a lunch made up of
just that.
Read
more from the original Pasadena Star News source -->
Recipe
for unity
Deborah Swartz
and Deanna Clarke use ‘One City, One Cookbook’ to
bring Pasadena together
By Carl Kozlowski 08/14/2008
Tired of cooking meatloaf every
Monday, or boring yourself and your family with spaghetti
every Saturday?
Deborah Swartz and Deanna Clarke
have felt your pain and for the past three years have been
offering a great solution to culinary doldrums with the Old
Town Cooking School in Pasadena.
Proud “foodies” who started cooking together a decade
ago for an educational fundraiser benefiting the Luther Burbank
School in Pasadena, Swartz and Clarke have parlayed their
passion for gastronomy into a successful sidelight to their
careers as schoolteachers. Those years in the classroom have
paid off for the dynamic duo, honing techniques that they
claim put them head and shoulders above most other cooking
instructors.
Read
more from the original Pasadena Weekly source -->
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