This isn’t your mother’s home ec

It’s 9:30 a.m., and the hallways of E.C. Glass High School are filled with the aroma of what you’d expect around dinnertime.

The smells aren’t emanating from the cafeteria, but the room almost directly across the hall from it.

Inside, Renee Stephens’ Culinary Arts students are searing, boiling and mashing their way through their last food lab of the school year.

Two groups of juniors, all Culinary 1 students, are hard at work in their respective stations.

One group is making filet mignon, mashed potatoes and green beans with a balsamic vinegar drizzle; the other, angel hair pasta with shrimp and basil. 

About an hour later, they’re joined by seniors Darius Bell and Darius Hill, Culinary 2 students who will be making salmon with a parmesan lemon herb risotto and stir-fry green beans. At one point, the smells of sizzling filet and shrimp catch the attention of a passing student.

“What are you all cooking,” he asks, sticking his head in the door, “That smells so good?”

As the three groups whip up their meals, the teacher mills around, offering up tips.

“It’s not like hamburger, where you don’t want any pink,” Stephens tells group one about their filets, which they’re searing in a pan. “Steaks can be a little bit rare.”

“It’s good for them to be able to experiment and put their skills to use,” she says later. “They don’t get to cook filet mignon every day.”

The class is definitely not your mother’s home economics course.

It’s a career tech class — along the lines of others like marketing, auto body repair, business and architecture — aimed at teaching the students commercial food preparation, or how to cook for and in the restaurant business.

“It’s a good program for the kids, with food service being such a big employer in Lynchburg,” says Stephens, who helped start the course two years ago.

The class is divided up into two sections, Culinary 1 for juniors and Culinary 2 for seniors.

It’s open to students at both Glass and Heritage, who must go through an application and interview process, and agree to take both courses, before they’re allowed in.

“We want them to make that (two-year) commitment,” says Stephens, who looks at the students’ academics, attendance and disciplinary records, as well as teacher recommendations, to make sure they’ll take it seriously.

Throughout the school year, she provides them with a mix of food labs and instruction time — completing units on pretty much everything you can think of, including cooking methods, commercial menu planning, equipment, knife skills and nutrition. They also study specific sections on topics like breakfast, poultry, stocks and sauces, baking and sandwiches.

There’s even an entire unit about safety and sanitation that mirrors ServSafe, a food service sanitation course developed by the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation to certify food service managers. Nine of Stephens’ students are ServSafe-certified.

“We gear everything toward restaurants,” Stephens says. “I try to give them as much real experience as possible. But they’ll learn (skills) that, whether they go into a career in food service or not, they can use.”

Bell, who is going to study culinary arts at Johnson & Wales University in the fall, says the course has taught him life skills right along with the cooking skills — things like “leadership and how to make good decisions under pressure.”

For their last food lab, Stephens instructed students to plan out an ideal meal. They had to come up with a work plan, specifying who would do what and when, as well as an ingredient and equipment list.

The lab also focused presentation, so each group had to draw a sketch depicting how they’d set the table and plate the food.

When it comes time to plate, the members of group one prepare theirs with all the thought of “Top Chef” contestants.

“We’ve gotta make it look pretty,” says junior Britney Arthur, who is tasked with putting perfectly rounded piles of mashed potatoes on each plate.

After Arthur is done, fellow chef Anna Stevens adds a little flair to the plate: three dollops of a creamy mustard sauce she made with Dijon mustard, lemon and heavy whipping cream.

Stephens likes what they’re doing, but wishes the plate had more color.

“You can have something on the plate … that is just there for decoration,” she says.

“You eat with your eyes first,” she explains later, as the students clean up their stations after sampling the fruits of their labor.

“If it doesn’t look good, you don’t want to taste it. I try to get them to be creative and do some little things differently (and) out of the box.”

In addition to the food labs, the students do some catering — mostly fruit and vegetable trays, which help them practice knife skills, for in-school receptions and gatherings — and sell boxed lunches to teachers.

“We have to be self-supporting in order to have money for all our instructional labs,” Stephens says.

The students make everything in the boxed lunches themselves, including the potato and pasta salads, sub sandwiches and desserts, which include brownies, chocolate chip cookies and sugar-free chocolate pudding. They even came up with their own recipe for a ham and apple wrap that Stephens says is popular.

After finishing a unit on baking, they made and sold pies and pumpkin bread for Thanksgiving and cheesecake for Christmas. The students have also made pecan pies, and Stephens says one has “perfected the apple pie. It’s just out of this world.”

The boxed lunches also teach the students how to follow a standardized recipe down to every last ingredient — something that’s very important in the restaurant business.

“If you go to a restaurant to cook, unless you’re an executive chef at a fancy restaurant, you don’t get to experiment,” Stephens says.

“I like them to rotate, so somebody is making the brownies this week who didn’t make them last week. And they have to taste the same. It has to come out the same every time.”

They also do a lot of tasting, so the students become familiar with dishes they’ve never eaten before.

“A big part of the culinary business is knowing how things taste, and what it should be like,” Stephens says, citing French onion soup and shrimp bisque as examples.

“A lot of these things are pretty common in the culinary world, but not with high school students.”

Right now, the class is based out of two adjoining rooms in the main building. But, once the funding is there, Stephens says they’ll start construction on a new space, with a dining room, classroom and a much bigger kitchen that would closely resemble that of a restaurant.

For now, they make do with a mix of commercial and conventional equipment.

But no matter what they’re using, it’s the hands-on nature of the labs that captures the kids’ attention.

“They sit through English and math and history,” Stephens says. “(In this class), they need a lot of activity. They expect it.”