Spring 2002

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Carved Runes in a Clearing

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Feature

SIDEBAR: Just mention refreshments HRTA wouldn't be HRTA without eats

Patricia Wright

NEVER TOO MANY COOKS: Frank Lattuca '64S, '81G in the Chenoweth lab kitchen with the bustling students of the Quantity Food Production class. (photo by Ben Barnhart) “NOW, WE'RE NOT TEACHING Culinary arts here,” cautions Frank Lattuca ’64S, ’81G, in his extra- earnest manner – eyes even wider, eyebrows even more elevated than usual under his thick, swept-back gray hair. “If we thought we were doing that in a 14-week course, people from chefdom would seriously chuckle.” No, students in Frank Lattuca’s HRTA (Hotel, Restaurant, and Travel Administration at UMass, which he joined as a young faculty member in 1975 and has chaired since 1996) are not aspirants to ranks of chefdom. They do aspire to the ranks of management in the “hospitality industry,” and as Lattuca notes, nothing is more central to that industry than food. “Food always brings people in,” he says. “You want people, you mention refreshments.” Which is why there’s such a whole lot of cooking going on in the vicinity of Flint Lab, the small brick building sandwiched between Stockbridge Hall and the parking garage on the UMass campus. Chefs or no chefs, it’s essential that the hoteliers, restaurateurs, and travelissimos of the future know their food and drink. Thus, every HRTA student takes HRTA 150, Food Production Management, a two-semester course covering “basic principles of food fabrication and production.” In two hours of lecture and three hours of lab per week, students are drilled in culinary terminology, product identification, quality standards, nutritional cooking theory and applied preparation techniques. “I taught it myself for – gosh – 10 years,” says Lattuca. “We’d have 16 students, four each working in a unit with a stove, refrigerator, and sink. You know, because of the times we live in, students don’t always even recognize vegetables in their raw state. By the time we finished, they knew an onion from a leek!” A 200-level course called Food Service Management is also required for all HRTA majors. As students move through the curriculum, the more food-oriented among them are peppered with additional opportunities to get into issues of comestibles, and into the kitchen. The class with the greatest glamour potential is probably Catering and Banquet Management, which is featured in the accompanying article, “Beautiful Soups.” There students may get a chance to run themselves ragged in the service of a demanding food stylist, or – as did last fall’s class for a luncheon honoring the founders of the Capetown-based Amy Biehl Foundation – create a multi-course luncheon of entirely South African dishes. The most widely praised HRTA practicum, though, may be the misleadingly bleak-sounding Quantity Food Production class taught by Judy Flohr ’96G. There, on a series of weekdays throughout the academic year, teams of students, plan, prepare, and serve multi-course lunches open by reservation to campus and community members in the sweet, eight-table “Howard Johnson Room” of Chenoweth Lab. “I just loved it when I taught that,” says Lattuca. “The lecture components would be menu planning, costing, scheduling, figuring out how you convert a recipe to serve 25 – but then comes the real world; then comes the labs, where in three or four hours you’ve actually got to prepare and serve and evaluate that meal for all those people. “You know, the first few labs, the students would come in kinda nervous – ‘People are going to be coming in an hour, are we going to be ready’ – but you just say, ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got a plan.’ And they follow the plan. “The nice thing about a course like that is that they get immediate feedback,” says Lattuca. “It’s like a performance – you prepare, you perform, people react.” When the students get praise for what they’ve done – when the waitpeople come back into the kitchen saying, “Hey they like it, they’re complementing the salad or the entrée or whatever” – Lattucca sees students “just wanting to outdo themselves,” he says. “Those kids – their eyes – I get goosebumps!”

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Beautiful Soup

SIDEBAR: Just mention refreshments

JUST MENTION REFRESHMENTS: larger image

SOUPS: more images