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Thursday, May 27, 1999 By Suzanne Martinson, Food Editor, Post-Gazette
Artistry isn't easily defined, but we know it when we see it. Cost doesn't guarantee its worth, nor does effort guarantee its success. It's not easy to cook perfect food in an imperfect world.
And afterward, the only proof that it ever existed is a smudge of sauce on an empty plate. Yet the pursuit of perfection in the Duquesne Club kitchen is as pervasive as the love in a new father's eye.
"Food is art," says Keith Coughenour, executive chef of the Downtown club.
Bringing art to the plate is one thing. Taking it to the page is another.
What you see in Coughenour's "The Duquesne Club Cookbook: Four Seasons of Fine Dining" is what a few lucky so-called "captains of industry" have feasted on for more than 125 years and the rest of us lovers of great food can only fantasize about.
Coughenour has the credentials to do it. He's the executive chef of the private club voted the best in America. A former captain of Culinary Team USA, the 41-year-old Elizabeth native apprenticed at The Greenbrier, where he was plucked from the saucier job to be one of five sous-chefs by Walter Scheib III, the man who is now the chef at the White House. A 1979 graduate of Penn State in business administration, Coughenour switched career aspirations after completing the three-year Westmoreland Community College Culinary Arts Program in 1984.
Dining at the Duquesne Club -- does anybody simply "eat" there? -- is an interplay of the best, freshest ingredients, the most skilled (dare we call them cutting-edge?) culinary techniques and the self-assured idea that the members are getting what they've got coming to them.
The Sixth Avenue club, with its fine collection of art and furniture, does not automatically make its chef a star. It may be the other way around, though you'll never hear it from this modest, even shy, cook.
Coughenour is not one to parade through the club's eight dining rooms, where he and his kitchen staff of 45 prepare 200,000 covers -- restaurantese for meals -- a year. He makes an impressive leader of the parade, though, all dressed in chef whites, a man who reaches a towering of 6 foot 7, once his toque is atop his lean 6-foot-2 frame.
"I meet with members, but I don't go into the dining rooms," he says. "This is a private club and I don't think the chef ought to be out there marketing himself. I'm not here to try to get accolades from members, but to please them in a sophisticated way."
The celebrity chef gig is seemingly not his shtick.
Photographer Mark Hobson says he's met a lot of chefs, and many of them are "egomaniacal jerks."
Not Coughenour, though, says Hobson, who designed and photographed the 174-page cookbook. He says he and the chef were a "good match."
"We both respected each other's area of expertise," says the Troy Hill photographer, who moved to Pittsburgh -- "always on the North Side" -- seven years ago from Rochester, N.Y., where he did the majority of his work for Kodak.
"Keith is committed to food and cooking as art. I'm the same over photography and design. You could say we both obsess."
Obsess? Yes. For example, Hobson recalls a 60-mile drive to a lamb farm, where they got the grand tour of Elysian Fields Farm, which supplies organically fed lamb to the club. From this day's work, one photo appears in the cookbook, which has an interesting mix of photos from today and all of the Pittsburgh club's yesterdays.
The club history, written by Eliza Smith Brown, with its enticing photos of the movers and shakers and their Nirvana of food as interpreted primarily by five executive chefs over the years, is interspersed within the book's four sections -- the four seasons. It's an imaginative way to organize the cookbook and a telling commentary of how Coughenour goes about his work in getting the best basic ingredients, each in its season.
In shooting the food, photographer Hobson says he made "the background and environment very very warm -- food is about warmth."
Both he and Coughenour praised the fine job the printers, Broudy Printing Inc. of East Liberty, did in reproducing the intricate details of the book. For example, the reader is alerted to the wine selections for each entry by the recurring presence of a 1856 painting owned by the club, "The Urchin or Sipping Wine."
The cookbook is truly a tribute to local talent. "The whole book was done locally," the chef says.
Many of the old favorites are in the book, with the famous Duquesne Club macaroons on the cover. The recipes run opposite the photographs of the food presentations -- still lifes in the best sense of he word. Consider Crab a la Hoezel. Astute cookbook users will note that the pages with the least type -- white space spells simplicity -- may be the most do-able in the home kitchen.
"Some people have said that their Crab a la Hoezel just doesn't taste like ours," Coughenour says in a quiet voice. "They probably didn't have the crab and the right vinegars that we do."
He has hit upon a salient point. Chefs and restaurants have access to equipment, ingredients and specialty products that Betty Home Cook may not. Yet this book tries to help with shopping in its excellent sources sections. Another assist to the novice is the glossary of terms, as well as the detailed templates and instructions.
How far do you go to help? That was the question, says the cookbook's recipe editor Ann Haigh, the restaurant critic for Pittsburgh Magazine. Answer: to the limit.
"Keith is very creative," says Haigh. "If I'd ask how something was to be done, he'd often draw me a picture."
She laughs, recalling the detailed directions for Hippenmasse for the garnitures, which included templates for the shapes. "We even decided to do one for soufflé potatoes," she says.
Until she met pastry chef Thaddeus DuBois, she says she'd never discussed chocolate tempering at such length.
Whether anyone will undertake such intricate techniques and complicated, time-intensive tasks remains to be seen. It is of great interest to aspiring and working chefs. The cookbook was the cover story for American Culinary Federation magazine, the Culinary Review.
The threesome all say they expect the readers will pick and choose from among the full range of options presented. "Anyone can make the rice pudding," says Coughenour. At the same time, the cookbook also includes the recipes for its accompaniments -- sesame cake and rhubarb crisps "randomly broken." In the beautiful photo, the mousse in a champagne glass is highlighted with spun sugar, also described in the book. Also on the plate are transfer sheet chocolate cut-outs embossed with the Duquesne Club name.
Says Coughenour of the "extras" that make a simple dish such as rice pudding seem spectacular: "We do them all at the Duquesne Club because we can."
Some dishes are so complex that the recipes jump to the back of the book to finish the detailed instructions, a few of which may take days of preparation.
The three cookbook creators are unanimous in their praise of DuBois. Haigh says she spent many a Sunday morning working out recipes in his apartment -- even his plants looked meticulously cared for -- for some of the most skill-intensive techniques.
DuBois has since left the Duquesne Club for Mississippi, though he probably won't soon forget what it takes to bring pastry artistry to print.
"I'll never forget the day we did the soufflés," says Hobson.
DuBois would bring the delicate dishes out of the oven at five-minutes intervals, run up and down three flights of stairs to where they were photographing, trying to get there for a picture before the soufflé deflated.
"Was it three flights?" Hobson asks Erica Dilcer, photo assistant on the shoot, which took more than 18 months -- speedy by cookbook productions standards.
"I think it was only one," she says. Probably seems much farther when you're schlepping a soufflé.
In the end, birthing a book is as much a matter of the heart as the head. Coughenour recalls the day they photographed the quail and spoon bread. "I couldn't get it to look right -- it looked manipulated, unnatural, it didn't flow."
Eventually, it came together, as did they all, though the one-year, seven-month project was not without serendipity. All the dishes were photographed in the club. The more homey the dish -- less structural, more comfort -- the more the photo included of the room's interiors, the intricate, highly stylized ones were photographed closer up.
Just when you thought you had a page down, you didn't. Coughenour recalls Haigh pointing to a chunk of something in the Stewed Oregon Rabbit Legs.
"What's this?" she asked.
"Pumpkin," the chef said.
"There's no pumpkin in the recipe," she said. She added it, along with any missing spice or advice on how a dish ought to be plated in the dramatic style that is the artist chef's trademark.
They learned to expect the unexpected. While the creators got along on creative compromise, their computers didn't. There was the pesky matter of the fractions not translating from one machine to another. And the difficult task of converting the chefs' grams, liters and pan sizes into measures more suitable for the spirited home cook.
In such a high-energy, full-speed-ahead setting, sometimes something's gotta give. "This is what we started calling 'the potato hairball explosion,' " says Hobson, pointing out the photo of the Deep-Fried Potato-Crusted Sea Scallops, and laughing all over again.
"And we had continuous recipe testing," says Haigh.
A finely honed sense of humor is going to come in handy for Coughenour on his next project. He'd no sooner left the helm of America's Culinary Olympics team, which he led for six years, when the cookbook project got the go-ahead. Typically, he styled three dishes a day, sandwiched between planning wine dinners for members, innovating on lunch specials and supervising the preparation of some of the best dinners and events seen in Pittsburgh.
Like many creative enterprises, the new project at the Coughenour house will have a will and a way of her own. Her name is Alayna Marie, and she was born to Bridget and Keith Coughenour on Jan. 29.
She didn't immediately ask for Crème Brûlée, but she will eventually. The family of three has an expansive kitchen to experiment in. They purchased the Children's Hospital House in Franklin Park, which Coughenour says is ideal for entertaining.
And the baby has fallen heir to at least three good cooking teachers, including her mother, whom Keith describes as a "good Southern cook," and her grandmother, Anna Coughenour, who passed on her artistic eye to her chef son.
As for Keith Coughenour, for now none of the beautiful photographs in his cookbook make him the least bit hungry.
On the other hand, if you'd like to see enthusiasm, ask him about the pictures of his newest creation. This one has blue eyes.
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A good match
