Jeremy Leinen, Executive Chef, The Country Club of Rochester
I’m sure many chefs are often asked how they found their way into the kitchen. A few of the usual stories get shared, but it’s not always the cookie-cutter story of helping mom or grandma.
For me, it’s half typical and half not. At a young age, I was helping my mom make bread—I think I was six. It was from the Betty Crocker Cookbook, and I recall using a standard white bread recipe. This bread got an unlikely nickname: “the bread with the hole in the top.” To explain, my mom was in a hurry one time she made it and didn’t form the dough firmly enough when placing it into the loaf pan, leaving a pocket of air where the dough was folded. This resulted in a hole in each slice of bread, thus the name. Despite its technical shortfall, it was very tasty bread.
In addition to that recipe, we also made one from the book for a potato dough called “Refrigerator Roll Dough.” I still use this recipe occasionally, as I find it very easy to work with, and it’s forgiving with its overnight proof in the refrigerator. After a couple of years of helping her, by the time I was nine or ten, I made the bread myself for Thanksgiving. The following year, I was probably too ambitious for my own good and failed at attempting to make croissants. There were tears and some butter angrily thrown into the trashcan when I couldn’t get it to cooperate, but making bread with Mom is otherwise one of my fonder childhood memories. I also helped Mom make pies, which were sometimes simple with store-bought pie shells, but not always—Mom got pretty serious about pie sometimes.
She also made a yearly batch of what she referred to as “killer chili,” which is based on a more traditional “Chile con Carne” and not this ground beef and beans nonsense that gets sold in a can. Mom made chili that took a couple of days and $100, and that’s when $100 was actually worth something.
I had a highly enviable childhood with my grandparents living in the house next door. As such, I spent as much time with them, particularly my grandfather. Most kids look up to their grandfathers, but this was different. Not to belittle anyone else’s grandfather—it’s always a really special relationship for any child—but my grandfather was a true American hero, surviving four tours in Vietnam as a Captain of Marines leading artillery units. He also endured a truly horrific car accident at eight years old that killed his father and was supposed to cripple him after he suffered multiple compound fractures in both of his legs. He was never supposed to walk again, much less go to Vietnam four times. Grandpa was a badass, and he was always my hero—still is, despite passing almost eight years ago. At any rate, Grandpa cooked because that was his role in the house as a child. He had like eight or nine siblings and Grandpa was the oldest, so cooking was his responsibility and one he still enjoyed as an adult.
Besides just doing the daily cooking, Grandpa gardened and picked walnuts from the woods of his property in West Virginia. I remember the walnut fudge he made around the holidays. At some point, he stopped making it. I don’t know if it was time or simply the fact that his legs hurt too much after that childhood car accident and 15 years in the Marines to trudge through the hills of WV picking walnuts. I always helped him in the kitchen when I was with him, as it was as good an excuse as any to get to be with Grandpa. I asked him why and how he did certain things, and eventually, I took over cooking dinner so he didn’t have to stand on those legs that had already endured too much. Let’s be honest: Grandpa trusting you with cooking dinner at eight or nine years old is a big deal!
Cooking continued through my adolescence, which was handy when Mom or Dad worked late. I never knew much about chefs or had any concept of what a chef was or really did. I was cooking largely out of wanting to help my grandfather, enjoying self-sufficiency, and thinking bread was fun. Up to this point in my life, being a chef had never actually entered my mind. I wanted to be an architect because that’s the kind of thing kids are supposed to want to grow up to be.
Deep down, I always knew I wouldn’t like an engineering-related job. If for no other reason, I mostly hated math classes. Calculus was absolute torture, but I’m the only person I’ve ever met who enjoyed trigonometry. My wife, an industrial engineer, took far more calculus than I would ever care to and insists I must be psychotic to find trig fun. All the heavy algebraic equations never seemed to have any purpose, but trig taught me how to crunch numbers, and that comes in really handy as a chef.
I began college as a pre-engineering major with the intent of becoming an architecture major once I transferred to a school that offered that program. This plan came off the rails in my first semester of college. Besides hating calculus, I had to take a drafting class. It wasn’t difficult, at least not the basic version of it in this class. I got a 97, but I learned I did not want to spend my days looking over blueprints. I’d been working in a restaurant while balancing classes, and I had this crazy idea about wanting to open a restaurant someday. I laugh at that now, but that was my idea. While I was waiting tables and learning the guest-facing side of the business, I knew I would need to learn how a kitchen works to be an effective restaurant owner.
I fell into the kitchen purely by happenchance, really. I was waiting tables at an IHOP, and it became a Friday night ritual, waiting around late at night to help make eggs. I had a pretty good relationship with the guys in the kitchen and found myself as the lone spare person around late on a Friday night, with one guy working alone. I was supposed to be off the clock, leisurely folding my silverware at the lucrative rate of $2.13 an hour, but when the dining room began to fill up, I stumbled back into the kitchen and asked what I could do to help. “Eggs.” It took me a minute to figure out where everything was and how to get into a flow, but I stumbled through getting some egg orders out. Not half bad for a waiter. This happened again for the next few weekends, and I decided I didn’t want to wait tables anymore. I told one of the managers I wanted to transfer to the kitchen. She laughed at me. She thought I was too much of a pretty boy to be in the kitchen if you can believe it. Funny how things work out.
