Word: chefs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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From all over the U.S., restaurant and hotel dessert chefs and pastry-shop bakers come to this unusual little school to refine their confectionary skills. The curriculum includes seminars devoted to such succulent topics as breads and doughs, sugar, cake decorating and, during this week, the complex and artful world of chocolate. The presiding guru is Herr Doktor Albert Kumin, 76, the Swiss dessert genius. Although he has never published a cookbook, in the rarefied world of professional chefs Kumin is regarded as a viscount of chocolate, a prince of pastry. He is the creator of the dessert menu...
...white chocolate and constructing elaborate chocolate figures, including rabbits, pyramids and even shoes, for buffet- table centerpieces. All have been drawn to Elmsford by the same thing. Says Liz Viggiano, 32, who dropped out of a graduate physiology program at the University of Florida to become a pastry chef: "I came here because of Albert's reputation...
...stops for lunch. In Kumin's world of mixtures, textures and boiling points, hands are sensitive instruments. With the touch of a finger, he can tell the temperature of chocolate to within 2 degrees. Although his English is pretty good, Kumin might not understand the concept of the temperamental chef. He is usually as sweet as milk chocolate, yet no pushover like the Pillsbury doughboy. He stops on his rounds to correct a technique with gentle humor, nod his approval of a creamy filling and assess a student's attitude. Things have changed since Kumin's European apprenticeship began some...
Kumin's fascination with sugar and chocolate began early. Growing up in Switzerland, he tarried before the windows of bakery shops on the way to school. After a thorough indoctrination in exacting Swiss hotel kitchens, Kumin arrived in North America in 1948. He became pastry chef at Montreal's Ritz-Carleton. In 1958 he was hired by Restaurant Associates, the Manhattan- based concern that operated the Four Seasons and the Forum of the Twelve Caesars...
...Kumin became pastry chef at the Carter White House. "Politics? Who cares?" says Kumin with a shrug. "It was really a very good restaurant kitchen." He does remember, with just a pinch of vanity, that Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin doted on his praline mousse during talks with the President at Camp David. In 1980 Kumin came to Country Epicure, where four years ago he helped open the school. Kumin feels the position has all the right ingredients. "I cannot take my knowledge along," he says. "So I want to leave what I know...