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75th National American Culinary Federation Convention
This year's 75th Anniversary of the National American Culinary Federation (ACF) Convention was held in Orlando, Florida. Our own Willie Jemison was one of the attendees. "The wealth of knowledge, the networking and the compassion shared by fellow chefs was in great abundance and will always be remembered," says Willie. "I was fortunate enough to meet and have photograph opportunities with distinguished presidents of our national federations; they included representatives from Ireland, Italy, Costa Rica, Chile and Germany. I also met our own president, Mr. Edward Leonard, CMC AAU."
Some of the highlights at this year's conference included:
ACF's 2004 Honorees
A forum on a school nutrition program which was sponsored by the Florida nutrition programs;
A National Mentoring Program
A National Competition focusing on Pastry and Desserts
Meeting Mr. Stanley 'Doc' Jensen, CEC, CCE, AAC of Holtsville, NY who won the Hermann G. Rusch Chef's Achievement Award for 2004.
Willie also had an opportunity to meet, Ms. Dennie Streeter, the winner of the Chef Professionalism Award; Chef Jason Wallace, founder of the Black Culinary Alliance, who was really impressed with the Wallace Academy logo and was a part of an Afro American forum which enabled him to share his views.
There was food galore, with a special emphasis on desserts this year. There was competitions for everyone.
Willie hopes to attend the 2005 National Convention in San Antonio, TX, July 28 - August 3 2005. Willie also plans to compete in some of the national and regional competitions at this convention.
Chef Jason Wallace
Edward Leonard, ACF President
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Food Trivia Perilously Close to Usefulness
By WILLIAM GRIMES
There's a word for creatures who feed on oak leaves. It is querciverous. This piece of information is absolutely useless,
which makes it the perfect candidate for inclusion in "Schott's Food & Drink Miscellany." In this compact volume,
arranged in no particular order, one finds the names of the last four turkeys to be granted a presidential pardon on
Thanksgiving (Jerry, Liberty, Katie and Stars), Robert Burns's "Address to the Haggis" and the complete lyrics to the
original Chiquita banana song.
Like its predecessor, "Schott's Original Miscellany" (2003), the book is pointedly pointless, intentionally aimless and
endlessly entertaining.
It is gratifying to learn that humble pie is no mere expression. There really was such a thing, a dish made with venison
offal, or humbles, a word that derived from the French word for deer entrails, nombles. Mr. Schott thoughtfully includes
a 17th-century recipe, which sounds delicious, much more appealing than a restaurant's roast camel "English style," one
of several dishes served on Christmas at Voisin in 1870, when Paris was under siege.
The zoo at the Jardin des Plantes sold off the animals it could no longer feed, and enterprising chefs rose to the
challenge. At Voisin, diners feasted on stuffed ass's head, elephant soup, wolf haunch in venison sauce and a truffled
antelope terrine. The wines were appropriate.
Anyone curious to know what elephant soup tastes like will be disappointed, but Mr. Schott does include a list of exotic
creatures and their reputed flavors. Bat, it seems, tastes like partridge, the Nephila spider tastes like a potato, and termites
taste like lettuce. A valuable footnote explains why Portuguese settlers in Africa were allowed to eat hippopotamus (tastes
like beef) during Lent. Because it spends so much time in the water, the hippo was judged to be a fish.
The sin of gluttony, by the way, turns out to be a lot more complicated than overeating. As Thomas Aquinas parsed
it, gluttony has five forms, each with its own Latin designation. In addition to overeating (nimis), one could transgress
by eating too soon (praepropere), too expensively (laute), too eagerly (ardenter) or too daintily (studiose).
It is impossible
to know where Homer Simpson fits into the scheme.
Mr. Schott has made a study of the stimuli that have elicited a drooling "Mmmmm" from Homer. These include
doughnuts, free goo, unprocessed fish sticks and hog fat. This bit is funny in itself, and doubly funny coming as it does
after a literate tour of mid-19th-century English drinking terms.
The word miscellany has an antiquarian ring to it, suggesting a fusty rooting around in history's attic. Mr. Schott does
a little of that, but his approach, placing ridiculously unrelated data side by side, makes him a close cousin to the
compilers of the Harper's Index and its many offshoots.
Mr. Schott does cheat a bit this time around. For one thing, he seems to think that smoking qualifies as a form of
eating or drinking, so he makes room for the color nomenclature used by Cuban cigar makers to indicate the lightness
of the tobacco and instructions on how to blow smoke rings. A detailed table of wages for various classes of servant in
1825 makes fascinating reading but has nothing to do with the book's title, nor do most of the English idioms using the
word water.
At times the book comes perilously close to being a useful reference work, which violates
the whole spirit of the enterprise. The various tables of weights and measures, standard
cocktail recipes, temperature charts and vintage guides take valuable space away from
absurdities like Mr. Schott's illustrated treatise on how to organize a tub of popcorn.
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