A history of The Culinary Institute of America: 1946-56

The scenario suggests tropes from black-and-white newsreels of yesteryear – a newspaper whirling toward the camera, its headline trumpeting a surprising development: “American GIs’ Next Deployment: The Kitchen!”

Indeed, the origin story of The Culinary Institute of America, more casually known for decades now as the CIA, was sparked by the can-do spirit of what’s now referred to as The Greatest Generation – the men and women who sacrificed in all manner of ways, and without complaint, in service of the Allied cause in World War II. As young American men enlisted in the United States Armed Forces, multiple industries at home were suddenly challenged by a diminished workforce. Among these was the restaurant industry.

In most localities, restaurateurs muddled through with what staff they could cobble together. But in the mid-1940s, in New Haven, Connecticut, home to Yale University, the New Haven Restaurant Association resolved to confront the challenge head-on with a bold and potentially game-changing concept.

The Association’s leadership envisioned a vocational cooking school that would draw its student body from the ranks of recently retired servicemen, converting them into freshly minted professional cooks who would then take up positions in its under-staffed kitchens. It sounds quaint, if not painfully obvious, today, but this was a revolutionary notion that, if successful, would result in the formation of the first-of-its-kind academy in the US.

To make it a reality, the Association turned to Frances Roth, New Haven’s Assistant District Attorney, and a woman known for persistence and goal-attaining. Working often in tandem with Katherine Angell, wife of a former Yale University president and the mother of a soldier who was lost in the conflict, Roth went about creating the school, one determined step at a time. She and Angell proved a “match made in heaven,” according to Arnym Solomon, a 1969 graduate and trustee emeritus of the CIA. “Angell brought structure. Her husband had been president of an Ivy League university, so she knew how to write a student manual, and so on,” says Solomon. “Roth was more legislative, she knew people like the Governor, and had a passion for educating young people.”

Roth secured a storefront location, solicited donations of funds and equipment, and lobbied successfully for accreditation that qualified the school for support via the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the G.I. Bill.

Dubbed The New Haven Restaurant Institute, the school introduced a new approach to training aspiring cooks. Rather than the sink-or-swim model of learning on the job, or the unpaid apprenticeship program in which cooks toiled for years without pay (more suited to teenagers for obvious reasons), here was a chance for GIs to swiftly develop a marketable skillset and embark on a new career.

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There’s a rich, almost poetic, logic to funnelling recently retired servicemen to the professional kitchen: Auguste Escoffier, the father of the brigade de cuisine, or ‘brigade system,’ of kitchen organisation, was himself a veteran of the French military and modelled the system on the military hierarchy. Chef, for example, means ‘chief,’ and ranks and stations such as sous chef, garde manger, and tournant, took the place of military titles, specialisations, and post assignments. And, like soldiers, cooks and even chefs were for the most part anonymous, their names and personalities subordinate to the organism and its mission.

To fully comprehend the importance of The Culinary Institute of America, as the school would eventually be renamed, it’s important to understand that through the late 20th Century, the US was largely bereft of culinary identity. Regional home cooking wasn’t yet codified or celebrated. More pertinent to the Institute’s impact, the nation’s great restaurants and chefs were imported from Europe, primarily France. CIA President Dr Tim Ryan, a 1977 graduate of the CIA himself, describes the prevailing attitude towards American cuisine at the time as: “There is no such thing. It’s derivative. There’s not one thing you could say was uniquely American.”

Underscoring this sentiment in restaurants, waiters and captains spoke with Gallic accents; and menus composed in French were considered a stamp of sophistication. The French classics served in even the best restaurants were largely interchangeable, culled from the canon first committed to the page by Escoffier, with no room for, or expectation of, self-expression. In other words, the very notion of a ‘signature dish’ was still several decades in the future. And professional kitchens themselves, even the best of them, were regarded as dirty, shameful, dead-end receptacles for the otherwise unemployable.

In time, the school naturally morphed into the Restaurant Institute of Connecticut, and under Roth’s leadership as Director, grew from an initial class of 16 students, taught by a mere three instructors, to a second class of 55, and eventually to about 400 in 1965, her last year at its helm. The school’s early curriculums focused on American fare fit for Norman Rockwell paintings, such as beef stew and apple pie, before expanding to a more worldly, French-leaning repertoire. Its increasing and ever-more geographically diverse student body led to a move to the Wallace Estate, sandwiched between two Yale University buildings, and a second name change, in 1951, to The Culinary Institute of America. Over time the school flowered into a force that would help usher in, support, reflect, and ultimately influence an ever-evolving culinary sea change in the US, and beyond.

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