Bob del Grosso, a slender forty-one-year-old with a narrow face and dark
features harkening back to his family's roots in Italy, taught Introduction to
Gastronomy to everyone who entered the Culinary Institute of America. His resume
was filled with Connecticut restaurants: line cook at the Black Goose Grill in
Darien; chef at the Lakeville Cafe; at Le Coq Hardi Restaurant in Stamford, he
was, variously, charcutier, first cook, sous chef, and finally executive chef.
Del Grosso was also a trained micropaleontologist, with a master's from CUNY at
Queens College. A booming oil industry had ensured plenty of jobs in his field,
but as he was considering a Ph.D. in micropaleontology in the early 1980s, the
oil bubble burst and his future grew cloudy. He gradually became so anxious
about what he would do, he couldn't sleep and took to pacing. One morning he
fell asleep on the living room floor. When dawn came, he was awakened by a beam
of light in his eyes. "I had an epiphany," he told me. "I thought, 'I can cook!"

Del Grosso taught in what appeared to he an old-fashioned lecture
classroom--with posters of fish, vegetables, and pasta shapes taped to the wall,
an extended blackboard, long curved multileveled rows of permanent seating. When
he began teaching the course he was amazed to find out how few people even knew
what gastronomy was. "Astronomers know what astronomy is," he said. "Physicists
know what physics is. But people who claim to be "astronomers, or gastronomes,
don't know what gastronomy is." Del Grosso stood before the rows of seats and
talked questioned the students, paused, squeezing his chin thoughtfully, a near
caricature of Ed Sullivan, in what seemed an endless digression on food. The
course did have an agenda and schedule, beginning with the notion of etiquette,
and moved from there to the history of the chef in French cuisine, into nouvelle
cuisine, followed by the contemporary scene, Alice Waters, and the cheffarmer
connection. One class was devoted to the question "What is food?" and the final
class addressed the ethics of food production.

"Let's identify the process of nouvelle cuisine," he would say to his class.
"Not an easy thing to do. My belief is that you must cook to the essence. Think
of nouvelle cuisine as Socratic cooking. How many of you have read Plato?" About
a half dozen hands rose in a class of thirty-six. Del Grosso briefly mentioned
The Republic, the allegory of the cave, and the notion of Platonic forms. "There
is a perfect form of the salad," he said. "Say you're a Socratic cook and you
want to make a hamburger. You would begin the process by posing a question:
'What is a hamburger?'" He posed this to the class. One intrepid student
offered, "A round patty of ground beef put between toasted buns." Del Grosso
clarified: "Round? Let's call it disc-shaped." A lively discussion of the
hamburger followed. The point, del Grosso said, was to get them thinking
critically about food. Many of the students had little education beyond high
school, and many, whether from the armed services of the United States or having
worked only in kitchens were not used to this sort of thinking. "A chef should
be Socratic," del Grosso continued, "questioning everything, including the
placement of the silverware. Cooking to the essence," he said with a flourish.
"'What are you, beef?' Cook to your answer. It's a very different way to cook.
It requires a lot of thinking. I'm not going to encourage you to cook this way
all the time becauce I don't. Imagine if every time you cooked an egg, you had
to ask. 'What is an egg?' But it's useful to do so every now and then."

This course aimed to introduce the students to the culture upon which the school
was based--and that culture had its roots in classical French cuisine. But his
was a class, by design, of rambling. Del Grosso would expound for fifteen
minutes on Celebration, the Walt Disney Company's planned town. And when a
student mentioned the word "confit, he stopped the discussion of Gault and
Millau, the journalists who coined the term "nouvelle cuisine," to ask if
everyone knew the word "confit." Sensing that not everyone did, he began with
the meaning of confit, and confitures, the history of confit, its purpose of
preservation, and concluded with a small discourse on how he personally prepares
confit de canard.

After describing his dry marinade and the cooking of the confit, del Grosso
explained that he stores the duck legs, submerged in their congealed fat, for at
least two weeks, preferably in glass jars, but plastic will do if you're in a
restaurant kitchen and don't want glass jars all over the place. After two
weeks, he would simply remove the legs from the fat, wipe them off, pass them
under a broiler or salamander to crisp up the skin and heat the meat some. He
would then serve them with potatoes that had been fried in clarified butter,
along with deep-fried parsley. "Have you had deep-fried parsley?" he asked. He
closed his eyes and said, "It's a miracle.