The first time Jill Prescott tried to saute shrimp, the recipe called for clarified butter. She followed the instructions exactly, or so she thought. “Of course, I had margarine,” she says with a laugh. “You ever try clarifying water and chemicals? I turned up the heat high, and it started spattering all over the place. I almost burned down the house. I could never figure out why I couldn’t do it. I thought butter and margarine were the same thing.”
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Prescott’s transformation began in 1976 with a gift of cooking classes at Carson Pirie Scott from her husband at the time. Her teacher there was Richard Grausman, then the U.S. representative for Le Cordon Bleu cooking school. Prescott drove to Chicago five days a week from Waukesha, Wisconsin, to take his class–that’s seven hours of driving a day. On her way home each night she’d stop at the grocers he recommended, then redo that day’s lesson in her own kitchen, often cooking till six o’clock the next morning. “I wanted to cook everything right now,” she says. “I was so excited. Sometimes my husband would wake up to pork and prunes at 3 AM.”
She packed up her belongings and left her husband and four children–all under the age of 12–for three months to study at La Varenne, a Parisian culinary school, in 1986 (the school has since moved to Burgundy). There she learned the fundamentals of French cooking: using the best ingredients and traditional techniques to make sophisticated but unpretentious dishes. “All the pieces of the puzzle were solved for me in Paris,” she says. “If you’re a runner, you can’t run in flip-flops. It’s the same with cooking: you need to have the right tools and ingredients.”
Last year Prescott applied for a spot in the Merchandise Mart’s new aggregation of high-end home-design businesses, Luxe Home. The space she got is 7,000 square feet, the largest facility in the country dedicated to amateur cooks. “The prep room alone is the size of my entire first cooking school,” she says. The new place has four kitchens and will offer 700 to 1,000 classes a year. That’s two or three separate classes every day, on such subjects as classic French cuisine, pastry, seafood, bread, and pasta. They’re offered in one-day, weekend, or one-week programs, all designed specifically for recreational chefs. “She’s created a school that doesn’t presently exist for the average food enthusiast,” says Grausman. “She’s bringing very high standards, professional standards, to a nonprofessional group. There’s very little education available today to the amateur chef.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Rob Warner.
