In New York: A Degree in Desserts

By J.D. Reed

Throughout most of a sleek new office park in Elmsford, N.Y., just half an hour's drive north of New York City, a visitor imagines that harried M.B.A.s sit at their terminals poring over electronic spreadsheets. But at 525 Executive Boulevard, a more exciting menu is on call. Instead of crunching numbers, a group of men and women crunch on praline, and instead of computer screens, they stare into oven windows. A thin figure in a tall toque waves a blade. "All the time be rocking the knife," he says with a Germanic accent to an intent group of onlookers. "Never slice almonds. Rock, rock."

If one believes the popular media and listens to one's friends -- not to mention one's physician -- Americans are shunning artery-clogging desserts and nibbling lighter foods. But on Executive Boulevard, that perception is a few degrees and a few thousand calories low of the mark. Here the recipe for success is decidedly heavyweight: 140 lbs. of chocolate, 100 lbs. of milk, a bottle of kirsch, eight cooks and one world-famous pastry chef. Stir for a week and voila: doctorates in desserts from the International Pastry Arts Center.

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 at Manhattan's Four Seasons and a former White House pastry chef.

The Pastry Arts Center, which charges students $700 a weeklong course, is an arm of Country Epicure, a thriving dessert company whose bakery in Elmsford turns out a tasty upscale line of frozen cakes, pies, tarts and tortes for the restaurant and hotel trade.

In the large restaurant-style kitchen, just a few doors down the hall from Country Epicure's executive offices, the overpowering perfume of chocolate pervades the atmosphere. A pot of liquid bittersweet chocolate is ready for dipping, coating and adding to recipes. Just inhaling deeply could add something to your waistline. Eight students, most of them youthful, are busy improving their skills at a variety of arcane techniques, such as hand-dipping candy, mastering the vagaries of 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."

Kumin moves with greyhound grace through the quiet kitchen. Despite a lifetime of working with high-calorie fare, he remains admirably thin. One reason: he rarely 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 50 years ago. "In the old system," he says, "they made you get out of bed at 2 in the morning and go back to the kitchen if you had done something wrong. Now there's a regulated school system."

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.

Among his most memorable creations is modeling chocolate, which he perfected while working at the Four Seasons. It is a blend of semisweet chocolate, corn syrup and water that solidifies in any shape it has been sculptured into. The stuff tastes like a Tootsie Roll, but its durability was the key to Kumin's perfection of flourless cakes. He constructs artful boxes of modeling chocolate and fills them with rich puddings or mousses.

In 1979 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."

The students have a variety of reasons for playing around with chocolate for a week. Even though she studied at the French Culinary Institute in New York City, Pastry Chef Beth Hirsch, 32, came to Elmsford, she says, because "I've always worked in chocolate, but I needed more skills." Neal Pelcher, 29, a baker for a New Jersey supermarket chain, wants to open his own pastry shop and needs to learn classic methods. "If I can make it this way," he says, "I can do anything."

In midafternoon, Kumin calls the class together for a demonstration. The table before him looks more like one found in an art class than a restaurant. To make a chocolate figure of a geisha for the top of a cake, Kumin begins with an egg-shaped chunk of chocolate for the torso, then adds arms and legs and makes a dress from a sheet of modeling chocolate. "Men and women both make the same mistake when making a lady," Kumin says with an embarrassed smile. "They put her breasts up under her chin. Remember, the breasts go halfway between shoulders and waist."

Kumin sculptures chocolate roses with the same passionate care that he bestows on his real garden in nearby Brewster. First he rolls a cone of solid chocolate. Then, with a few deft moves of what looks like an artist's palette knife, he shapes petals from modeling chocolate. His large fingers gently wrap the leaves around the cone and suddenly a perfect rendition of a rosebud glistens in chocolate. As the students move to their own tables to practice, Kumin takes a short break for a cigarette in his tiny office. "Teaching is wonderful," he says, "but soon I need a rest. Not to retire, but to experiment. I can't get new ideas out of my armpits."

While the students roll chocolate heads and flatten rose petals, one might still ask why, when the trendiest folks seem intent on gobbling up the world's broccoli production and depleting the oceans of red fish, does mastery of chocolate remain so important? Says Hirsch: "You can read people a list of a dozen unique desserts in a restaurant and they'll say, 'What was that chocolate thing you said? I'll have that.' I don't know why, but Saturday night in America is chocolate night." Kumin and his growing legion of graduates seem intent on spreading the sweetness across the whole calendar.