Soul Kitchen

The peculiar simile still hangs in the air as Ruhlman turns to his Boos cutting board and begins transforming garlic cloves into the finest possible dice for later use in the chicken au jus. His hands are trembling violently.

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Ask Ruhlman to pinpoint the origins of his passion, and the conversation quickly turns to his days at Duke University and his friend and mentor, Reynolds Price. A noted novelist, poet, playwright, and longtime professor of English, Price first encountered Ruhlman in the early 1980s, when the sophomore signed up for his creative writing class.

"I began teaching at Duke in 1958, and in all those years, only 15 or 20 young people have come along who were gifted enough to become writers," Price says by phone from his home in Raleigh, North Carolina. "Of those, only two or three have gone on to do so, and Michael is one of them. Most of the rest of them just couldn't take the solitude."

Not that Price initially figured Ruhlman for a success. "At the time, he simply looked like a drastic hippie. His hair was long, his clothes were disheveled, and he had this enormously intense and serious demeanor. We called him 'Mad Dog' -- you know, if he bites you, you're going to need some shots. But he certainly could write. He did good work, right from the start."

After Duke, Ruhlman landed a position as newsroom copyboy at The New York Times and kicked around New York for a few years before moving on to Florida. When he finally returned to Cleveland in 1991, it was with a wife, photographer Donna Turner; a job offer from Northern Ohio Live; and an idea for a book inspired by his experiences at University School, a private academy for boys in Hunting Valley.

His research for the book was painstaking and found him spending virtually every day of the 1993-'94 school year on the campus, a grown man among boys, "attending classes, talking with students and teachers, and generally hanging out."

Ruhlman's immersion paid off: When the book, Boys Themselves, was finally published in 1996, it not only garnered positive critical attention from The New York Times Book Review and Publisher's Weekly; it served as validation for Ruhlman's "crazy notion" that maybe he could make his living this way. Perhaps most important, it defined the elements of what would become his MO: exhaustive research, acute observation, first-person reporting, and heartfelt, almost dreamlike prose.

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My goal [in deciding to attend the CIA] was both humble and presumptuous: I wanted to learn how to put myself in the service of the potato. This was to me the key phrase, "in the service of," the axis, the unmoving shaft, of a statement with many ramifications. Is great cooking really art? Are chefs artists? . . . Also, I love to eat potatoes.

-- The Making of a Chef

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In retrospect, Ruhlman's decision -- to "impersonate" a culinary student, with his true identity as an author known only to the school's top administrators -- was inspired. "Actually, even at the time, I was amazed that no one had thought to do it before," he admits, as his kitchen starts to fill with smoke from the sizzling chicken. "It seemed so obvious. In fact, I didn't want to talk about the project to anyone beforehand, mainly because I was worried that someone else would do it before I did."

(While he reminisces, he keeps one eye on a clock. An hour has expired, so he suspends the conversation to remove the perfectly roasted chicken from the oven, then places it on a cutting board and begins deglazing the pan with water and a splash of Crane Lake. "Let the chicken rest for at least 10 minutes," he intones. "That's very important. The juices are close to the surface after roasting, so let the chicken relax and the juices redistribute themselves into the meat." Meantime, his mashed potatoes, warming in a pan on the stove top, begin to scorch.)

At the time, Ruhlman contends, he had no idea that his CIA studies and the subsequent book would set him on the path toward his calling as a food writer. "Going in, I just thought, 'Hey, this might be cool. I'll pick up some cooking tips, write about it, and then move on to my next book, whatever that may be.'"

He undertook a life-altering experience instead.

"One of the things I had learned from Reynolds [Price] was to always look outward and not to write about yourself. And that was something I always tried to do, until The Making of a Chef. But somehow, learning to be a professional chef was all about changing who I was inside. I couldn't write about the process without writing about myself and about the changes that were going on within me."

In the book, he likens the transformation from struggling novice to skilled professional to stepping onto an airport's pedestrian conveyor belts: "You are walking just as fast as you were, but, suddenly, space and time fly over you at double the rate and with ease."