A HOME COOK might make supper by baking a chicken. A chef might roast a Cornish game hen and serve it with a melange of seasonal vegetables.
A master chef, however, would chase down a free-ranging quail, smoke it over chips of corncob and maple, form it into a tournedo, place it in between alternating layers of heirloom vegetables, drizzle the structure with a truffle sauce and top the dish off with a strategically placed dollop of foie gras.
That is my half-baked explanation of the difference between a master chef and the rest of the spatula-wielding world. When I learned that 10 master chefs from around the nation were going to be in the Baltimore area recently to flex their culinary muscles at a dinner at Rudys' 2900 Restaurant in Finksburg, I showed up early, with my fork and notebook at the ready.
Master chefs, like birds of a feather, tend to flock together. In the past five years, a handful of the nation's 60 master chefs have made it a habit in September to descend on the Carroll County restaurant.
There, working under the general direction of master chef Rudy Speckamp, decked out in chef's whites, and his tuxedo-clad partner, maitre d' Rudi Paul, they put on a spectacular feed.
Master chefs are not TV celebrities, but they do have extraordinary culinary credentials, having earned their master-chef designation, the equivalent of a postgraduate degree, by passing a rigorous 10-day trial by fire and ice at culinary institutes.
When I arrived at the restaurant in the late afternoon one recent Monday, the place was stirring with activity. There were too many master chefs for the kitchen, so some were preparing dishes in out-of-the-way locations.
For example, the dessert course - chocolate mousse with bourbon creme on a chocolate biscuit and a mango parfait with pecan crisp - was being assembled on a bandstand set up in a lower dining room.
There Gunther Heiland, a master chef who runs Desserts International in Exton, Pa., and Katherine Donaho-Wessman, executive pastry chef at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, worked with delicate marzipan baskets while nearby waiters pushed vacuum cleaners and moved furniture.
In an upstairs storage room, John Johnstone, executive chef for the Ritz-Carlton at Reynolds Plantation in Greensboro, Ga., was putting the finishing touches on some appetizers, tiny morsels of salmon and tuna tartare served in delicate, ice-cream-conelike wafers.
In yet another room, yet another master chef, Lawrence McFadden, executive chef of the Ritz-Carlton in Naples, Fla., was working on a trio of crab dishes. First was a velvety mixture of crab, foie gras and scallops served in a shot glass. Next came a crab tartare and yellow-tomato sorbet, and then a crab-and-artichoke comprise or fritter, crunchy on the outside, liquid-smooth in the center.
Presentation matters to master chefs, and McFadden described how he wanted the three crab offerings positioned on a rectangular plate, with the tall shot-glass crab dish at the top of the plate and the two other morsels placed in descending order, straight below the shot glass.
A handful of Baltimore-area chefs was assisting the visiting master chefs. Two who were helping McFadden, Sonny Sweetman of Abacrombie restaurant and Rodolfo Domacasse of Linwood's restaurant, nodded as they listened to McFadden's instructions.
McFadden said, for him, the dinner offered "a little competition, a little education and a lot of fun. I will get two or three ideas from here that will end up in my kitchen," he said.
Another part of the appeal for him and his fellow master chefs is that it offers a brief escape from administrative duties. "For a lot of us, the chance to work two days uninterrupted, thinking about new dishes, is a pleasure," he said.
Shortly before the customers - 188 for the sold-out, $200-a- plate affair - arrived at the restaurant, Speckamp summoned the master chefs to a meeting around a table in the lower dining room.
Each chef brought one serving of his dish and placed it on the table. One by one, the chefs described the fare to the audience of waiters and waitresses, answered questions and offered serving suggestions.
James Hanyzeski, executive chef at Pelican Isle Yacht Club in Naples, told the staffers that when they served his roasted-corn-and-oyster consomme, they should be sure to ladle in just enough soup to reach the bottom of the savory custard that sat in each bowl. Too much liquid in the bowl would both spoil the look of the custard, he said, and cause the kitchen to run out of soup.
For the next course, Johnstone told the waiters how to distinguish the calves' cheeks from the sweetbreads, served with truffled risotto and horseradish cream. The sweetbreads were bigger, he said. Both, I later discovered, were magnificent.
