Recipe for unity

Tired of cooking meatloaf every Monday, or boring yourself and your family with spaghetti every Saturday?

Deborah Swartz and Deanna Clarke have felt your pain and for the past three years have been offering a great solution to culinary doldrums with the Old Town Cooking School in Pasadena.
Proud “foodies” who started cooking together a decade ago for an educational fundraiser benefiting the Luther Burbank School in Pasadena, Swartz and Clarke have parlayed their passion for gastronomy into a successful sidelight to their careers as schoolteachers. Those years in the classroom have paid off for the dynamic duo, honing techniques that they claim put them head and shoulders above most other cooking instructors.

“We were on the board of an education foundation called ‘Effort’ at Luther Burbank, and we had no money for catering so we cooked for 200 people at a fundraiser,” recalls Swartz. “That was the start, almost 10 years ago, and we decided we like cooking so much that when people kept asking us to cook for them or teach them we decided three years ago to do the classes.”

In preparation for starting the classes, the two spent an entire year touring cooking schools all over the nation, watching how classes were taught and what types of lessons were offered. The process ultimately helped them define their niche, according to Clarke.

“We decided our strength is that we’re home cooks. Chefs can keep a menu the same for a couple months in a season, but home cooks have to make something different every day and they’re on a budget,” says Clarke. “We were interested in helping people learn more about cooking at home, eating greens at home. We’re very green-oriented and slow-food-oriented.”

The pair’s most popular courses teach how to cook ethnic foods, ranging from Italian Tuscan to Mediterranean and French, with other past courses having included Thai and Vietnamese dishes as well. But they believe in covering all the bases and have taught people how to grill and cook both Southern food and American “comfort food.”

“Anything we can learn to cook or have cooked we can teach. If you would say anything about our menus, we try to be practical or gourmet,” explains Swartz. “We’re not using Betty Crocker, very product-driven, and teach people how to use foreign markets and imported produce for healthier eating. We’re very pro-small business. We get people to frequent mom and pop stores and farmers’ markets because that’s what we do.”

Indeed, Swartz and Clarke — both members of the International Association of Culinary Professionals — have taken their quest for fresh food so far that one evening they cooked enough live Maine lobsters to feed their entire class. Recalling it as “a feat of engineering,” Swartz also notes that the experience taught participants about the value of importing live product in from its origin.

Another memorable class occurred at the prestigious Raymond Restaurant in Pasadena, where star Chef Chris Felippa joined the teaching twosome. But overall, Clarke believes that their approach stands out from other classes in two major ways.

“In our demo classes, we cook an entire meal and then we eat an entire meal together. Not paper plates with morsels, but a full buffet meal with wine,” says Clarke. “We want people to leave thinking they’ve learned something, so we don’t only give out menus and recipes. We also do a wine lesson or a cheese lesson and teach people how good types affect good-tasting food.”

In addition, the pair gives out an entire booklet to students, complete with the recipes and menus they just learned, as well as additional notes. They say that most other classes offered only hand-outs with little information aside from the recipes that were taught.

Swartz and Clarke’s ambitions also stretch into cyberspace, where the duo launched www.youaskthecooks.com. The site is designed to offer visitors advice on how to shop and what to shop for before preparing gourmet meals and guides them through any steps in the process on which they might be ill-informed.

“You know the Butterball hotline?” says Swartz. “This is the everyday hotline, but it’s on email. There’s a fee-based approach to supplying people with answers, but it’s very personalized and very inexpensive.”

Ultimately, the two hope that their biggest local impact will come from a cookbook concept that they conceived and hope to draw community support for. With the guiding principle of “One City, One Cookbook,” the goal is to team up with numerous other community organizations to benefit education in Pasadena.

“The first planning meeting is Sept. 3,” says Swartz. “We’re partnering with libraries, the [Pasadena] Senior Center, the historical museum and people like that, so we’re hoping this will draw some strong support communitywide. Everyone is united by a love of food, and now we’ve got to channel that energy into some great causes.” 

The Old Town Cooking School teaches classes at the Pasadena Senior Center. The next class is at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 28, and covers summer meals from farm markets, featuring ‘The Santa Monica Farmers’ Market Cookbook.” The fee is $75. For more information, call (626) 791-0358 or visit www.oldtowncookingschool.com.