Dining in style

From rule, recipe, fancy and whim — down-home and uptown the world over — complete courses in alimentary geography are laid out in linen at Pasadena’s Old Town Cooking School.

Classes take place twice a month in what partner/instructor Deanna Clark calls “the gorgeous kitchen” of the Pasadena Senior Center. Not the ordinary cooking classes of plastic utensils and paper plates, their spirit is prestigious, yet playful. “It’s like a trip to a cordon bleu plate in Paris, with fun thrown in,” said partner Deborah Swartz.

At every class, whether gourmet or comfort food lessons, the porcelain glistens, the hors d’oeuvres and entrees are select and the wine is fine, said Swartz, “And a lot of people come here just to eat.”

And talk. “And answer questions about foodie stuff,” said Clark. Questions like: Should bread be buttered entirely or bite by bite? Which fork should be used for dessert? If a cocktail olive is served without a toothpick should you — if anyone’s watching — tip the glass and let the olive fall in your mouth? How do you make good mashed potatoes? And all kinds of fun queries about special events.

When not in the school kitchen, Clark teaches blind children for the Los Angeles County Office of Education. She was trained to cook in Italy. Swartz, who studied cookery in France, is a director of a public school fundraising group.

“In our school we use the finest ingredients,” said Swartz. “We get all of our meats from Taylor’s Meat Market in Sierra Madre. The butchers trim it the way you need to have it to cook it right. And they feature USDA prime beef. We get most of our produce from farmers markets in Pasadena, South Pasadena and Santa Monica, but our tomatoes — the best, the sweetest — come from Gelson’s.”

Presentation of the best natural ingredients defines the teaching methods. There’s no struggle here in deciding between a dish’s merit as an ornament and its qualities as delicacy, said Swartz. “We emphasize both. Our salads are served in a dish and not a bowl.” Being able to see all the beautiful natural ingredients laid out on plate is like throwing open the gates of the Garden of Eden, she suggests. Teaching knife skills is a big thing too.

“Oddly,” said Swartz, “we get very few questions about strictly healthful cooking, but interest always brightens when we prepare from scratch rich French sauces like hollandaise, béarnaise and béchamel.”

And what about research? “We’re big on that too,” said Swartz. “A woman in a recent class told me her mother made something called City Chicken, a combo of pork and veal, but the recipe was lost. I found it for her in a 1940s Junior League of Pasadena cookbook.”

It made me wonder: You’ve got to think students should be grateful when they perceive what pains have been taken on their behalf.

Upcoming classes scheduled, ranging from $75 to $95 per class, are both hands-on and demonstrations. They include: Cuisine of France, Oct. 11; Chocolate from Mole to Fudge, Oct. 23; Soups, Stews and Comfort Foods, Nov. 6; Sex and the City Cocktail Party, Nov. 20; and Best Recipes 2008, Dec. 4. For details call (626) 791-0358 or visit www.oldtowncookingschool.com.

Curious about the makeup of classes, I wondered if the teachers had to contend with anyone like I was in my youth. As a child, I pulled on my mother’s apron strings but only when she had something good to lick in the mixing bowl. That done, I’d run out and play. Later, draining spaghetti through a tennis racket and frying bacon without a shirt, I was an Oedipus wreck in my bachelor kitchen. Finally, after hitting the cookbooks, I often had to run to the store in mid-recipe.

“We would have drummed into you the basic lesson of mise en plate,” said Swartz. “That’s a French term that means you must have all the ingredients necessary for a dish prepared and ready to combine up to the point of cooking.”

After Swartz said that she’d studied at cooking schools and restaurants in Provence, a truffle-rich region in southeastern France, I got silly and started singing a few bars of “Nobody Knows the Truffles I’ve Seen,” but partner Clark cut in: “I studied in Tuscany and would have helped you with the spaghetti.” She went on to explain how to prepare it al dente so that it offers just the right amount of resistance.

Swartz said most of the classes are composed of professional women who never acquired the skills that previous generations had attained in their mothers’ kitchens (or, as in some Pasadena homes, that had been the domain of servants.)

But also, “We’ve had a few young men from Caltech and other people who just love to eat,” Swartz said.

Beginning in January, the women will begin collecting recipes from local Pasadena people for a book called “One City, One Cookbook.”

Swartz and Clark agree that the school and the cookbook are not all about giving special parties, but more to enhance the everyday enjoyment of food, or perhaps facilitate the simple warm pleasure of inviting a lonely neighbor over for a nice dinner.