"Nothing says lovin' like something from the oven," as the old
slogan says. That thought was much in mind this week in the bustling
third-floor kitchens of Evanston's Kendall College, a local training
ground for up-and-coming chefs.
For 10 of them, a big test, involving everything from guinea hens to
fancy desserts, comes Friday night at the Drake Hotel. It's a fancy
dinner for 300 people paying $150 apiece to eat, more or less, their
homework.
But what homework!
"It's been like Christmas around here, opening all these cartons,"
Kendall instructor Chris Koetke said Tuesday, directing a flow of
vittles that included--among other flown-in delicacies--smoked trout,
dried caribou, venison, milkweed pods, daisy flower buds, duck,
half-dried cranberries and "beautiful little smoked eels."
"All you guys who haven't tasted wild hare before, over here," Koetke
shouted at one point, steering a row of white-aproned students toward
a bubbling pot in a mountainous range of giant woks and stoves.
The cause of all this kitchenly commotion is an event that combines
Kendall College, two top chefs from Quebec, the local branch of a
far-flung group known as Little Brothers/Friends of the Elderly and
the vision of a wealthy French nobleman who sought to assuage a major
affliction of many seniors around the world--loneliness.
It was in 1946 that Armand Marquiset, moved by the plight of the
elderly in war-ravaged Europe, began working to lift their spirits as
well as provide them with food--and flowers.
"The greatest poverty is the lack of love," Marquiset noted, as he
carried meals he cooked to lonely and forgotten elderly people who
were no longer able to look after themselves.
His ideas spread, shaping an organization that now has thousands of
members in the United States, France, Canada, Mexico, Morocco, Spain,
Germany and Ireland, notes a report from the group's Chicago office,
at 355 N. Ashland Ave.
"Love, dignity and beauty in life are as important, often more so,
than basic physical needs," one staffer explained. "For example, when
we serve meals, we always use good silver, china and linens."
That notion--roughly translated as "you are what you eat and also how
you eat it"--struck a chord with promoters of the cuisine of Quebec,
among them the current delegate of the Quebec government to the
Midwest, Maurice Boisvert.
"Food is very important to us," he noted during a preview tasting of
Friday's menu. "You also eat well in Chicago," he added,
diplomatically. "You have very good restaurants."
There was a time when the reputation of Quebec cooking was best summed
up by a spoof cookbook called "26 Things You Can Do With Snow." That
is no longer true, noted one of the upcoming feast's celebrity chefs,
Richard Desjardins, a professor at Montreal's Institut de Tourisme et
d'Hotellerie du Quebec.
In recent years, Quebec has seen a renaissance of interest in its
native dishes. Now Chicago is about to get to know them.
"The idea is to show the range of products available from Quebec--and
to show our feelings about them," said Desjardins, as he began the
first of four sessions for the Kendall students, instructing them in
the subtleties of constructing a tourtiere du Saguenay, a deep-dish
meat pie made of pork, beef, veal, fowl, onions and potatoes.
That--and other Quebec delicacies--will be the talk of the Drake
Friday night, an event for which, Little Brother staffers noted, some
tickets are still available, at 312-455-1000.
"You can learn a lot about people by watching how they prepare their
food," said Koetke, once a chef at Les Nomades. "Food is one of the
world's unifying factors. You can always talk about food--because
everybody eats."