Homework

Jazz musicians call it woodshedding. It's a ritual of the art: you go underground for a spell, working out your chops, forging a new style. Then you come out to play.

Similar phenomena transpire in the other arts, no doubt. A painter locks herself in the studio to reinvent herself, her work, her oeuvre; another travels to the Continent to study the masters. A classical pianist hibernates in some dingy basement long enough to work through a new repertoire. A professor takes a sabbatical, tunneling from archive to archive in search of new research.

Chefs do this too, but mostly, it seems (from what I've read), when they get fired. Cooking school alone doesn't guarantee the makings of a true chef; to keep your job, or to get a better one, you need to put in some hard time working for a Master. Mario Batali will forever mine his year of kitchen-work in Italy for techniques and anecdotes alike; Bill Buford continues this lineage in Heat, his memoir about working for Batali.

Such apprenticeships are so fully woven into the mythos of chefdom that we have television shows dedicated to them. Programs like "Top chef," which I sometimes watch, and "Hell's Kitchen," which I don't, stage this career transformation as a survival game. The shows promise to catapult run-of-the-mill sous-chefs, caterers, and upstart "executive chefs" into the ranks of the successful restaurateurs. As a marketing ploy, it's good bet. A number of former contestants have opened restaurants, and their efforts have been welcomed by a hearty clientèle.

But is a game show any substitute for real apprenticeship? One could argue that the game show format, with its art-school panel judgments and celebrity-studded collective tastings— not to mention its arbitrary barrage of "challenges" — in fact offers something that culinary woodshedding doesn't. Judgment; teamwork; conflict. A constant pressure to invent.

Of course, being forced to invent is not the same thing as forcing oneself to invent. Woodshedding, it seems to me, involves a separation from the sphere of commerce, even at the expense of making a living. That's why it's called the woodshed, after all. Shouldn't the demand for invention, change, and development emanate from the art itself, rather than from the marketplace? Or is this asking too much of a practical art?

And besides, woodshedding is also very much about practice, unlike the serial format of the game shows: there's no invention without endless repetition and rehearsal. Mastery of form comes first. Only then comes the deformation of mastery. Herein lies the appeal of Batali's travels on the Continent: he didn't just make gnocci for the "quick fire challenge." He made it night after night. It was work that felt, no doubt, like work.

The thought of apprenticing oneself to a chef is daunting precisely for this reason. It heeds woodshedding's abandonment of the marketplace, yet renders its laboriousness all the more visible. When you apprentice for a chef, you do it for free, providing the chef allows you to work in the first place. Gone, however, is the image of a solitary musician or artist toiling away into the wee hours. To apprentice in a kitchen is to enter into the fray. It's more a firebox than a woodshed.

There is, of course, another option, that of the test kitchen. This is the road taken by the likes of Julie Powell, author of the blog that became Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. There's no need to beg for unpaid work, no need to perform for a paying clientèle, and no need to endure the mind-numbing stress of a busy professional kitchen. Under these conditions, apprenticeship becomes a formal problem that begins and ends at home.

Rather than yoking your art to someone else's professionalism, that is, you can develop your skills as an amateur. But there's a problem here: amateurs do not woodshed. There's no retreat from the sphere of commerce, after all. And there's no vow of poverty.

So let's call it homework, instead.

And I've got plenty of homework piled up. April was the cruelest month.

My first assignment will be to read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemna, which has been sitting on my bedside table since dear S.W. sent it to me some weeks ago. It's due for a good reading.

My second assignment concerns a somewhat longer-term project. This afternoon, we signed up for a CSA farm subscription from a nearby organic farm. Starting in early June, we will receive a box of produce every week for 22 weeks. We don't even have to go to the farm to pick it up; they will deliver it to us, as they have another client in our town.

A summer filled with homework assignments! I've been imagining this, indeed, as my own version of "top chef," only without the celebrity judges and bickering fellow contestants. Quick: invent a three course meal comprised entirely from kale! Find a way to administer ten pounds of cabbage!

The best thing is that I can't be sent home for failing to satisfy the demands of the assignment. I'm home already!