There’s a style of food writing that has proliferated in recent years, a sort of precious, overdone prose that makes me want to scratch my eyeballs out. I love eating food and I love making it. The former I don’t need help with. The latter I do, but I would prefer as little background chatter as possible. I’m trying not to cut my thumb off here.

The Elements of Cooking, Michael Ruhlman’s smart, clear and deceptively concise treatise on food and cooking, is a welcome relief from this trend, and an instant addition to the shortlist of books that are genuinely useful to the amateur cook.

It resembles one of those 19th-century books on early American cookery, with no pictures, drawings or diagrams of any kind. It’s broken into two sections: a grouped series of short essays on the fundamentals (stock, salt, eggs and a few other things) and a comprehensive glossary of food and cooking terms. The book succeeds, in part, because of this hard-to-categorize format: not cookbook, not memoir, not science book, but a unique mixture.

The glossary, which consists mostly of short paragraphs about everything from deep-frying to espagnole sauce to cross contamination, is superbly done. It’s a good reminder that even if you’ve been cooking awhile, there are likely to be many basic rules or concepts you’ve never properly learned. Mr. Ruhlman is skilled at explaining even esoteric matters simply and clearly: You wouldn’t dream of poaching a pork chop—but do you know why? Mr. Ruhlman will tell you, promptly and without pretense.

He cites two primary sources of inspiration for his book: The Elements of Style, which you probably own, and On Food and Cooking, which you probably don’t, unless you already spend a fair amount of time in the kitchen. It’s by Harold McGee, and it explains the basic science of food and cooking in fascinating yet exhausting detail. I happen to own it, and though I don’t question its importance or usefulness, it rarely comes down from my shelf; I’ve always been daunted by its sheer size and scope. Mr. Ruhlman has distilled Mr. McGee’s teachings into a volume and format the amateur cook will find easy to absorb.

As for his other, more literary inspiration, Mr. Ruhlman has done his homework. Flashes of the dry, prescriptive wit of that classic show up here: “Avoid inexpensive nonstick pans and the people who sell them”; “As a rule, any tool that has only one use should be avoided”; and so on. Mr. Ruhlman’s writing is beautifully simple and clean, and generally a pleasure to read.

The essays drift periodically, but never intolerably, into foodie-ese, and the author has a weakness for superlatives—knowing how to salt properly is “the greatest skill” a chef can possess; veal stock is “the essential”; Mr. McGee’s is “the most important book about food and cooking ever written, probably in any language, probably that ever will be.” All true? Perhaps. But the superlative’s power decreases in direct proportion to the frequency of its use.

Michael Ruhlman plainly intends for Elements of Cooking to be a staple of the amateur home cook’s bookshelf, wedged somewhere in between The Joy of Cooking and Marcella Hazan. It has earned its spot.

Jesse Wegman is managing editor of The Observer. He can be reached at jwegman@observer.com.

Mr. Ruhlman is the author of several books about food and the restaurant industry, including The Making of a Chef (1997) and The Soul of a Chef (2000), in which he led readers into the kitchen by telling of his time attending classes at the Culinary Institute of America and writing about the lives of top cooks. But much has changed in the decade since Mr. Ruhlman became an initiate. The best chefs, once content to spend 16 hours a day chopping shallots, have become bona fide middlebrow celebrities, and diners are more likely to see them on television than at their own restaurants. Las Vegas, the very symbol of sin, has become a culinary “Gomorrah.” Even Thomas Keller, whose restaurant the French Laundry helped revolutionize American cuisine, has changed tracks. Mr. Keller, Mr. Ruhlman’s hero and collaborator (they’ve written two cookbooks together) and a living saint if there ever was one, left the Napa Valley for Las Vegas, New York and the ambiguous commercial world, lending his name to signature lines of knives and porcelain. “The chef has left the kitchen,” Mr. Ruhlman says. What he really means is that the priest has left the altar.

The Reach of a Chef is divided into five parts, each revisiting subjects from previous books. Mr. Ruhlman returns to the Culinary Institute of America, where he finds an unnervingly touchy-feely atmosphere. (“I expected it to be really hard core,” one student tells him. “I’ve been a little disappointed.”) He dines at the restaurant of Mr. Keller’s protégé, now schooled in the cutting-edge techniques of the New Gastronomy, and finds himself spritzing the taste of shrimp cocktail into his mouth. He meets a woman who’s driven five hours to see Food Network star Rachael Ray, whose singular talent is to turn pantry staples into a decent dinner in under 30 minutes. He watches in awe as Masayoshi Takayama, perhaps the last great chef of the “artist-monk” tradition, slices a piece of mackerel. And, throughout, he returns to Mr. Keller, whose strange path from cook to brand name stands for the trajectory of the industry as a whole.

Mr. Ruhlman’s loyalty lies with the great chef who’s vulnerable to a fickle public unable to recognize the profound difference between a Thomas Keller and a Britney Spears, between pure genius and commercialism. “Are we in danger of burning out on chefs,” Mr. Ruhlman asks, “of suddenly turning on them, shouting that they have no clothes on, and dumping them in favor of the latest pop idol or sports giant?” The peril in the transformation of chef from maestro-cook to brand manager, as Mr. Ruhlman sees it, is not so much to the diner as it is to the chef’s soul. “I’m losing my balance,” Mr. Keller confesses. If a man spends more time hawking porcelain than chopping shallots, is he still a chef? What exactly is a chef, anyway?

To Mr. Ruhlman, that’s an existential question, and it motivates his book. He doesn’t begrudge these chefs their wealth and fame. After all, he thinks they’ve earned it after torturously long days of intense, demanding work. And, as he points out, the days when the star chef touched every plate are long gone. He even tries to suggest that the branding of the chef is good for the average diner. “Few in the industry doubt that one of the ultimate effects of the celebrity-chef phenomenon is in part an increased awareness among Americans of where their food comes from, an awareness that has resulted in an increased availability at our grocery stores of organic or sustainably farmed produce, farm-raised chickens, and grass-fed beef,” he writes.

Still, he wanders through the once-familiar landscape with the slightly bewildered air of Rip Van Winkle. Is shrimp still shrimp if it’s found in a mouth spritzer? Is the future of cuisine really Rachael Ray’s “meatza” with cornbread-mix crust? (“I can’t watch Ray’s shows without grinding my teeth,” he writes.) Does Wolfgang Puck have more in common with Ronald McDonald than with Alain Ducasse? Is Alain Ducasse himself still a great chef? And—that question again—what exactly is a chef these days? “I’m not a chef anymore,” Mr. Keller tells Mr. Ruhlman. “And it breaks my heart.”

It breaks Mr. Ruhlman’s heart too. He writes as someone who cares deeply, not only about how finely the foie gras terrine is sliced, but also about the state of the church. He is, quite simply, an exuberant fan of the chefs he writes about—and yet he also wants to claim for them an enduring place in popular culture. The result is sometimes awkward. Covering territory that once seemed sure, Mr. Ruhlman, like Mr. Keller, loses his balance.

The narrative is an engaging and sprawling tour of the industry, concerned with everything from how to cut carrots properly to the economics of running a four-star kitchen. Michael Ruhlman writes with brio, passionately recounting every detail of every meal—and, seemingly, every conversation—in relaxed prose peppered with “gonna”s and “gotta”s and energetic punctuation (“flaxseed?!”). The ostentatiously casual style can grate, but his generosity is infectious. He loves his subject, and it’s impossible to begrudge his enthusiasm. His faith in the restaurant industry may be shaken, but his faith in great food, and great cooks, is not. And the onion, with its mystical powers, he reminds us, is not going anywhere: “We’ve all got to eat.”

Louisa Thomas is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.

4th of July, Asbury Park: A
History of the Promised Land,
by Daniel Wolff. Bloomsbury, 278 pages, $24.95

In
July of 2001, author Michael Ruhlman (The
Soul of a Chef, Walk on Water)
and his wife, photographer Donna Turner-Ruhlman, entered a large, century-old
house on a quiet, curling street of soaring trees and equally dignified old
houses in Mr. Ruhlman's native city of Cleveland, Ohio, and found themselves
possessed by “full-blown houselust.” They wanted it: Not the three-story,
arts-and-crafts-inflected structure as they first saw it—dilapidated, attached
to a “telephone book” of code violations—but as they imagined it once was and
could be again; improved, even, with modern changes and additions. As Mr.
Ruhlman recollects in House: A Memoir,
his lovely, small narrative built of linked essays, the couple's fantasies of
what the house could be induced them to lay out sums well beyond their means to
purchase and rehabilitate it. They savored the craftsman's details, the
Edwardian solidity, the zigzagging staircase and the countrylike setting within
the city of Cleveland—a neighborhood that, as Mr. Ruhlman discovered in the
course of considerable research, was one of America's first suburbs.

As
anyone who has ever made substantial changes to an older house could have
predicted, the Ruhlmans and their two small children got much more than they
bargained for, both in terms of the daily exasperations of dealing with the
contractors and in terms of cash outlay for the work, which far exceeded the
original estimates. The project also put considerable stress on their
marriage—already a delicately negotiated arrangement, with Ms. Turner-Ruhlman
having given up her vocation to raise the children and create a home in which
her husband could pursue his own full-time career as a writer according to his
personal requirements of an exacting routine and quiet surroundings. (While the
renovation was in progress, in fact, he worked in his father's house, a short
drive away. His wife supervised the workmen, looked after the younger child
when the elder was in school, and also painted all the rooms.)

The
Ruhlmans' story ends on a boisterously happy note; however, their renovation
adventures are not the real subject of the book. On his website (www.ruhlman.com), the author explains that
House was begun as a novel and then converted into a memoir: It's a report that
looks beyond the events it chronicles and, in its chapter-long essays, attempts
to analyze—or at least recognize—a group of interrelated issues that have
implications for America as a whole. What was the original promise of the
suburb when it was invented as the 19th century drew to a close? How does a
suburb differ in its effect on the city from the more recently developed
“exurbs” or “edge cities”? Can the open-road, light-out-for-the-territory reinvention
of self—so much a part of the American character—ever be reconciled with the
larger human need for a sense of security, reliable community and rooted family
rhythms? And if it can't, what are the implications for the quality of life we
bequeath to the future?

Along
with these ponderings come hints of resignation with options foreclosed, hints
of nostalgia for unreflective happiness. Mr. Ruhlman is a seasoned writer, with
a journalistic expertise honed over numerous books of reporting. In House, he plumbs what he calls his
“sycamore heart … a deep, spiritual contentedness, a sense of immortality”—and
yet he manages to keep us guessing as to whether that “contentedness” will be
shared by the people he loves. The last scene is pure Frank Capra, though so carefully
worded that within the ending are seeds of another, less exuberant beginning.

Cleveland,
where the Ruhlmans have committed their resources and their emotional capital,
has been in the news recently as “the poorest city in the country,” based on the
results of the 2000 United States Census, which determined that just over 31
percent of the city's population falls below the poverty line (owing largely to
jobs lost in the steel industry and manufacturing). A close runner-up, though,
is Asbury Park, N.J., where the census shows that a fraction less than 30
percent of families live below poverty line, with a little more than 21 percent
of households earning under $10,000 yearly.

The
vast majority of those households, as Daniel Wolff explains in his page-turning
yet also fastidiously documented 4th of
July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land, are African-American,
and they've endured the broken promises of the whites in power ever since 1870,
when the New York Methodist brush manufacturer James A. Bradley took his
“colored man,” the former slave John Baker, to a wooded part of the Jersey
Shore, near Red Bank, to investigate some parcels of beachfront that Bradley
had purchased back in New York, sight unseen. Bradley later described this trip
as “our Robinson Crusoe life,” and in the course of it he enjoyed a revelation:
He could combine commercial real-estate development with religious devotion by
building a strictly regulated vacation spot where members of the church might
convene in the salutary sea air. (The city would be named for Francis Asbury, a
well-known 18th-century Methodist preacher.)

After
some resistance, Baker also reported that “delight has come into my soul,” and
from there to the emergence of Asbury Park superstar Bruce Springsteen 100
years later, the story of the city has essentially been the story of how
Baker's people were consistently excluded from partaking of the best that
Methodism had to offer while being exploited as servants in the very Bradley
establishments that excluded them. By 1924—Asbury Park's heyday as a watering
hole for middle-class whites—it was also a favorite spot for proselytizing and
the odd lynching of Negroes by the Ku Klux Klan: As Mr. Wolff reminds us, at
that time New Jersey was the home of some 60,000 Klansmen, “more than Alabama,
or Louisiana, and just behind the state of Georgia.” Thanks to spectacular
corruption as well—among elected officials, real-estate developers and, it
seems, every other small businessman on the boardwalk—the town began to slide
into deterioration during the 1930's. Riots in the 1970's sealed the doom of
much of its real estate, and although it's still trying to reinvent itself as a
leisure destination, Mr. Wolff isn't optimistic.

The
one thing that the city fathers never tried—investing in the West Side, where
most of the black population has always lived—is still untried. Baker is still
being left to care for the horses after the long trip while Bradley goes off to
a hotel for lunch.

Daniel
Wolff is known as a chronicler of popular culture, with music a specialty (You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke).
4th of July—whose chapters are
ingeniously organized around celebrations of the national holiday during the
times of Bradley, of Asbury resident Stephen Crane, of the Klan's mighty years,
and of other watershed events—tenderly intertwines a summary history of
American popular music, black and white, with the history of racism in the
city, a braiding that gives strength to the recurrent suggestion that the story
of Asbury Park—now significant to most Americans because it's the backstory of
Bruce Springsteen's songs—is also the story of America in a larger sense.

Mindy Aloff, whose book
reviews have appeared in The
New York Times, The Forward and The Threepenny Review, teaches a course in the personal essay to
freshmen at Barnard College.

4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land, by Daniel Wolff. Bloomsbury, 278 pages, $24.95

In July of 2001, author Michael Ruhlman ( The Soul of a Chef, Walk on Water) and his wife, photographer Donna Turner-Ruhlman, entered a large, century-old house on a quiet, curling street of soaring trees and equally dignified old houses in Mr. Ruhlman's native city of Cleveland, Ohio, and found themselves possessed by "full-blown houselust." They wanted it: Not the three-story, arts-and-crafts-inflected structure as they first saw it-dilapidated, attached to a "telephone book" of code violations-but as they imagined it once was and could be again; improved, even, with modern changes and additions. As Mr. Ruhlman recollects in House: A Memoir, his lovely, small narrative built of linked essays, the couple's fantasies of what the house could be induced them to lay out sums well beyond their means to purchase and rehabilitate it. They savored the craftsman's details, the Edwardian solidity, the zigzagging staircase and the countrylike setting within the city of Cleveland-a neighborhood that, as Mr. Ruhlman discovered in the course of considerable research, was one of America's first suburbs.

As anyone who has ever made substantial changes to an older house could have predicted, the Ruhlmans and their two small children got much more than they bargained for, both in terms of the daily exasperations of dealing with the contractors and in terms of cash outlay for the work, which far exceeded the original estimates. The project also put considerable stress on their marriage-already a delicately negotiated arrangement, with Ms. Turner-Ruhlman having given up her vocation to raise the children and create a home in which her husband could pursue his own full-time career as a writer according to his personal requirements of an exacting routine and quiet surroundings. (While the renovation was in progress, in fact, he worked in his father's house, a short drive away. His wife supervised the workmen, looked after the younger child when the elder was in school, and also painted all the rooms.)

The Ruhlmans' story ends on a boisterously happy note; however, their renovation adventures are not the real subject of the book. On his website (www.ruhlman.com), the author explains that House was begun as a novel and then converted into a memoir: It's a report that looks beyond the events it chronicles and, in its chapter-long essays, attempts to analyze-or at least recognize-a group of interrelated issues that have implications for America as a whole. What was the original promise of the suburb when it was invented as the 19th century drew to a close? How does a suburb differ in its effect on the city from the more recently developed "exurbs" or "edge cities"? Can the open-road, light-out-for-the-territory reinvention of self-so much a part of the American character-ever be reconciled with the larger human need for a sense of security, reliable community and rooted family rhythms? And if it can't, what are the implications for the quality of life we bequeath to the future?

Along with these ponderings come hints of resignation with options foreclosed, hints of nostalgia for unreflective happiness. Mr. Ruhlman is a seasoned writer, with a journalistic expertise honed over numerous books of reporting. In House, he plumbs what he calls his "sycamore heart … a deep, spiritual contentedness, a sense of immortality"-and yet he manages to keep us guessing as to whether that "contentedness" will be shared by the people he loves. The last scene is pure Frank Capra, though so carefully worded that within the ending are seeds of another, less exuberant beginning.

Cleveland, where the Ruhlmans have committed their resources and their emotional capital, has been in the news recently as "the poorest city in the country," based on the results of the 2000 United States Census, which determined that just over 31 percent of the city's population falls below the poverty line (owing largely to jobs lost in the steel industry and manufacturing). A close runner-up, though, is Asbury Park, N.J., where the census shows that a fraction less than 30 percent of families live below poverty line, with a little more than 21 percent of households earning under $10,000 yearly.

The vast majority of those households, as Daniel Wolff explains in his page-turning yet also fastidiously documented 4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land, are African-American, and they've endured the broken promises of the whites in power ever since 1870, when the New York Methodist brush manufacturer James A. Bradley took his "colored man," the former slave John Baker, to a wooded part of the Jersey Shore, near Red Bank, to investigate some parcels of beachfront that Bradley had purchased back in New York, sight unseen. Bradley later described this trip as "our Robinson Crusoe life," and in the course of it he enjoyed a revelation: He could combine commercial real-estate development with religious devotion by building a strictly regulated vacation spot where members of the church might convene in the salutary sea air. (The city would be named for Francis Asbury, a well-known 18th-century Methodist preacher.)

After some resistance, Baker also reported that "delight has come into my soul," and from there to the emergence of Asbury Park superstar Bruce Springsteen 100 years later, the story of the city has essentially been the story of how Baker's people were consistently excluded from partaking of the best that Methodism had to offer while being exploited as servants in the very Bradley establishments that excluded them. By 1924-Asbury Park's heyday as a watering hole for middle-class whites-it was also a favorite spot for proselytizing and the odd lynching of Negroes by the Ku Klux Klan: As Mr. Wolff reminds us, at that time New Jersey was the home of some 60,000 Klansmen, "more than Alabama, or Louisiana, and just behind the state of Georgia." Thanks to spectacular corruption as well-among elected officials, real-estate developers and, it seems, every other small businessman on the boardwalk-the town began to slide into deterioration during the 1930's. Riots in the 1970's sealed the doom of much of its real estate, and although it's still trying to reinvent itself as a leisure destination, Mr. Wolff isn't optimistic.

The one thing that the city fathers never tried-investing in the West Side, where most of the black population has always lived-is still untried. Baker is still being left to care for the horses after the long trip while Bradley goes off to a hotel for lunch.

Daniel Wolff is known as a chronicler of popular culture, with music a specialty ( You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke). 4th of July-whose chapters are ingeniously organized around celebrations of the national holiday during the times of Bradley, of Asbury resident Stephen Crane, of the Klan's mighty years, and of other watershed events-tenderly intertwines a summary history of American popular music, black and white, with the history of racism in the city, a braiding that gives strength to the recurrent suggestion that the story of Asbury Park-now significant to most Americans because it's the backstory of Bruce Springsteen's songs-is also the story of America in a larger sense.

Mindy Aloff, whose book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Forward and The Threepenny Review, teaches a course in the personal essay to freshmen at Barnard College.

It would be hard to imagine journalism more precisely and intelligently practiced than that of Michael Ruhlman in this arresting investigation of surgery on congenital heart defects and the men who perform it at the Cleveland Clinic. His gaze throughout the book is steady, unflinching and wide-eyed. He has taken a highly specialized, technologically sophisticated subject, mastered it and made it his own so as to transmit it to the reader in easily understandable terms.

This is not a book for timid souls. From the first page, we're standing at the operating table upon which a tiny infant is lying, his chest open and heart exposed to reveal that his great vessels-the aorta and the pulmonary artery-are fatally transposed. They must be switched without kinking a coronary artery. To heighten the drama, the author writes in a punched-out, jet-propelled prose, describing the course of the dangerous surgery in the historical present tense, which brings us right up to the event as it's taking place. The author makes it perfectly clear: Whenever an infant is lying on an operating table with its chest open, disaster is only a breath away. The reader is both observer and emotional participant. One's own pulse is apt to speed up, go wild.

They are a breed apart, the passionate men who perform these operations. They're shaped by their work; they become what they do. To the terrified parents of the infant patients, they are a manifestation of divine grace on earth. And in the taut, breath-held silence of the operating room, there is something like a sacramental presence. This, despite the blasphemies and obscenities with which their speech is laced and their tension relieved. To one another, they're rivals, trusted colleagues, idols and fellow-travelers in uncharted territory. Above all, they share a concern for their tiny patients. Here is one of them trying to explain what it's all about, and getting tongue-tied: "Everything's a big deal. Everything's got to be perfect. You can't work in this … you can't do that. You just can't." Why not? "Because this is a kid, this is your kid. It's not a Yugo here, this is somebody's kid. Nothing is good enough. It's got to be perfect. There's no compromise." It all comes down to the patient.

And so they are demigods-arrogant, egotistical, obsessive-compulsive, "difficult," unforgiving of mistakes, sentimental and utterly humane. It's impossible in a brief review to do justice to the entire cast of characters in this surgical enterprise or to convey the excitement and drama of their operations. The "star" of the clinic is Roger Mee, a New Zealander who just happens to have the world's best success and survival rates in the most difficult of congenital-heart-defect repairs. He's a legendary figure, both worshipped and feared by his residents. In marked contrast to his aura, his stature is modest: He stands just under 5-foot-6; "his dark tweed jacket is buttoned over a solid gut that adores an egg-bratwurst-and-potato breakfast". Dr. Mee's secretary also marvels: " This short bald guy who scratches his belly! " she comments affectionately. With the families of the infants, Dr. Mee is unfailingly straightforward. Given a choice between grim and hopeful in tone, he always chooses grim-this despite his complete self-confidence. There are those patients whose hearts are beyond repair and whose only chance for survival is a heart transplantation. For these surgeons, when a donor heart becomes available, they rush to the site, obtain and conserve the heart, then bring it to the operating room where the recipient is waiting. One of these surgeons is dubbed "The Farmer" because he loves harvesting hearts. "It's so life-affirming," he says.

Of equal fascination to Dr. Mee is his long-time physician's assistant, Mike Fackelmann. "Roger's my guy", he says, then qualifies: "We're not buddies." Inside the O.R., he too is supremely confident, observant and silent unless there is a reason to warn the operating surgeon to "stay away from that." He has the absolute trust of Dr. Mee, who doesn't like to schedule particularly difficult cases when Mr. Fackelmann is not on duty. Outside the O.R., he's maniacally compulsive and far less secure, modest even. "I like to cut my grass and see the lines-perfect line." He stops at the end of each row, looking back to make sure it's at 90 degrees, then crosshatches it like a baseball field. "And I do not want anybody walking on it until I can look at it for a while." When someone compliments his work, he is genuinely surprised. Dr. Mee and Mr. Fackelmann do not waste a lot of time praising one another; it all goes without saying. Once, speaking of Mr. Fackelmann to the author, Dr. Mee said, "It's ironic. Mike will never be a surgeon, and he will never operate on people. And yet he's ten times better than the fellows, and they're going out and operating on people." Told of this comment by his boss, Mr. Fackelmann was flabbergasted: "You're kidding me. He said that?" About the residents, and the surgeons other than Dr. Mee, Mr. Fackelmann is candid: "They behave like little kids, they're just like little kids." And yet he's compassionate toward them: "You've got a resident who's standing there not really knowing what to do. Because residents don't. They're scared."

But fear is a good thing in the training of a surgeon-not the fear that is disabling, but the fear of being less than you had hoped. You wake up every morning knowing you're going to be nervous all day.

One section of the book deals with the discrepancy in the success rates of congenital-heart-defect surgeons at various medical centers around the country. It's a fact that anyone, however unsuitable, can become a surgeon, given enough determination to do so. Once having arrived, such a person will continue to operate in the face of unacceptable failure rates, which in this specialty means death. Dr. Mee and the handful of others in the surgical pantheon cannot possibly operate on all the afflicted infants, so many are treated by less gifted surgeons. Even standing next to a man like Dr. Mee for a dozen years cannot transform a sow's ear into a silk purse. Still, that's the only way to learn how to do it.

Fifty years ago, at the Albany Medical College where I was a student, there was a well-known and hugely successful obstetrician/gynecologist who went to church early every morning to have his hands blessed by the priest-despite which, he had the highest mortality rates in the area. One wonders what Roger Mee or Mike Fackelmann would have said of that.

Richard Selzer is a retired surgeon and author of the forthcoming The Whistlers' Room (Shoemaker and Hoard) .

Several years ago, I had a meal of a lifetime at Marc Meneau's three-star restaurant, Auberge à l'Espérance, in Vezelay, Burgundy. We began lunch with fried Marenne oysters topped with caviar and went on to morels cooked in truffle juice followed by cromesquis, little breaded balls that squirted melted butter, foie gras, marc and truffle juice into the back of your throat when you bit into them. After a flawless piece of turbot roasted with onions and truffled poulet de Bresse, I could eat no more. When the waiter set a large bowl of chicken soup before me, I almost burst into tears. He was unmoved. "The chef says you must try this."

There was no argument. But with the first mouthful, I felt that I had discovered a whole new food. (Anthelme Brillat-Savarin once wrote about a Prince de Soubise whose steward ordered 50 hams and when asked for an explanation, the prince replied that he only needed one for the table; the rest were for his stock and his brown sauce. I don't know whether Mr. Meneau used 50 chickens for the stock for his soup, but never had I tasted anything like it.)

Michael Ruhlman understands the concept of a good stock and goes straight to the point in The Making of a Chef , a memoir of a year he spent at the Culinary Institute of America. "I rented our home in Cleveland, moved virtually everything we owned into my father's house, and transported my wife (a photographer who had paying clients in the city we were leaving), our daughter (not yet ambulatory) and myself 500 miles to a one-bedroom garret above a garage in Tivoli, N.Y., a town with a '1-to-1 human [to] cow ratio.' I had done all of this, I eventually realized, in order to learn how to make a superlative brown veal stock."

Mr. Ruhlman is not a chef, but a writer. He enrolled himself at the C.I.A., a residential college devoted entirely to cooking in a former monastery on the banks of the Hudson River in Hyde Park, N.Y., to learn the elements of what makes a great cook. There he began his training with Skills 1 (stock making), finishing at the final kitchen, the American Bounty Restaurant, where students act both as cooks and waiters.

While I love cooking and have always been fascinated by restaurant kitchens at work, I have never for a moment felt the urge to become a chef. I couldn't take the hours, for a start. Chefs and line cooks typically work six days a week, usually on 10-hour shifts and longer, often going from dawn till midnight. Depending on when their restaurant is open, they may not see their families on Christmas, Thanksgiving or Mother's Day, and if their day off falls on a Monday, they don't see much of their children. Not surprisingly, they have a high divorce and burn-out rate.

As for working conditions, they have certainly improved since George Orwell was a dishwasher at the Hotel George V in Paris 54 years ago, but Orwell's description in Down and Out in Paris and London will sound familiar to anyone who has ever cooked in a restaurant. "The kitchen was like nothing I had ever seen or imagined-a stifling low-ceilinged inferno of a cellar, red-lit from the fires, and deafening with oaths and the clanging of pots and pans. It was so hot that all the metalwork except the stoves had to be covered with cloth. In the middle were furnaces, where 12 cooks skipped to and fro, their faces dripping sweat in spite of their white caps. Around that were counters where a mob of waiters and plongeurs clamored with trays.… Everyone seemed to be in a hurry and a rage. The head cook, a fine, scarlet man with big moustachios, stood in the middle booming continuously. ' Ça marche deux oeufs brouillés! Ça marche un chateaubriand aux pommes sautées !'"

But in recent years, despite the physical toll of this kind of work, the number of people wishing to become professional cooks has increased dramatically. When Ferdinand Metz, the current director of the C.I.A., arrived in 1980, the food revolution was already under way in America, and a chef's profession was no longer a blue-collar job; it was glamorous. Chefs became celebrities; they appeared on TV and were profiled in glossy magazines.

Enrollment at the C.I.A. is now double what it was 25 years ago. It has an operating budget of $65 million and numbers between 8,000 and 10,000 students a year in its undergraduate and continuing education programs. "While it has never been known for creating legions of cutting-edge chefs and its graduates are often criticized en masse for thinking they know more than they do and demanding more money than they're worth, the C.I.A. is nevertheless called the Harvard of cooking schools," writes Mr. Ruhlman, who goes on to list some of its famous graduates: Jasper White, Waldy Malouf, Chris Schlesinger, Dean Fearing, Susan Feniger, Rick Moonen, David Burke and Todd English.

At the C.I.A., full-time students study for 30 weeks in seven different kitchens, after which they do an externship in a restaurant or hotel. Then they return to learn baking and pastry, wines and menus, restaurant planning and law, after which they move back into the kitchen for the final chunk of their degree, which concludes with 12 weeks in the school's four public restaurants.

Mr. Ruhlman's memoir is immersed in cooking details-how a hollandaise differs from one day to the next and why, how to debone and stuff a chicken, how salt draws the concentration of protein to the surface of meat. "Protein is what caramelizes; if the salmon had a good deep caramelization on the grill without being overcooked, it had been salted before cooking." He is taught how to season pasta water properly. (And you thought you only had to throw in a little salt!) Even the club sandwich is a challenge. When students had assembled the different elements of the sandwich, they had to put in 240 toothpicks. "The most important part," writes Mr. Ruhlman, without a touch of irony. "They've got to go straight down through all the layers. If they don't go straight down, the knife catches them and pulls the sandwich apart and the toothpick gets cut in half, and whoever eats that half will not be a happy camper. The science of doing a club sandwich is really, really important."

He asked Eve Felder, the chef who taught "Garde-Manger" (the station serving cold food such as canapés, salads and sandwiches) if great cooking was innate or could be learned.

"I believe cooking is a craft," she replied. "I do not believe it's an art." But she went on to add that anyone can be trained to cook, provided "the passion is there."

Mr. Ruhlman's book is obsessive, sometimes dizzyingly so, and if you are not passionate about cooking, this may not be your cup of tea. But if you are trying to decide whether you are C.I.A. or even chef material, it might set you straight.

One of the cooks at Le Bernardin, when Eberhard Müller (now at Lutèce) was chef, told Mr. Ruhlman someone once made the fatal error of putting a little chicken stock base into the restaurant's lobster stock because he couldn't get the taste right. "There was 10 gallons of this stuff, and we added a tablespoon," he said. "Eberhard tasted it and said, Who put base in this stock ?" Needless to say, if you have a stock cube in your kitchen, The Making of a Chef is not for you.