March 17, 2017

Hail to the Chef!

Meet WICE Cooking Instructor, Randall Price


Do you dare try a sauce Béarnaise? Do you dream of making a savoury tart adapted from an 18th century recipe? Or a light vegetable medley that will impress your summer guests? There are just a few spots left for three cooking classes this year with WICE cooking instructor, Randall Price, born in Ohio, and now a distinguished chef in the food capital of the world.

His popular cooking lessons for WICE members, full of witty commentary, center on a two-course meal with clear, written recipes. They are in the French tradition of fresh and seasonal ingredients, with some
updated versions of the great classics. “I learned all those by going through the recipes of Julia Child one by one, long before the 'Julie and Julia' blog made a fortune.” He never guessed he would one day meet Julia Childs herself, and compare notes on being American chefs of French cuisine! The culmination of decades of catering for chateaux and restaurants, studying food history and teaching comes through in his WICE courses, but he's no chef diva.

“I want to offer classes where people can cook with ingredients they can find in their local supermarket, without searching all over for something exotic. I know that watching food programs and cooking competitions are popular. But there’s a lot of disinformation out there. I see the same recipes copy-pasted in lots of blogs, full of mistakes. My recipes and techniques are genuine, and the classes are about sharing real food with friends. It’s not about bragging--it’s about bringing pleasure to other people. It’s about love.”

His modest manner and dulcet Midwestern accent don’t give away Randall’s remarkable career. After taking a literature degree, and working in a restaurant to pay his grad school fees, he discovered his penchant for cooking. How did he end up in France? "It was all because of a chocolate cake," he says, laughing. His recipe won Chocolatier Magazine's top prize of a trip to La Varenne cooking school in Paris, where he took the professional Grand Diplome, and later returned as a chef-teacher and director of the testing kitchen for 12 years.

Over three decades, he has been the chef to embassies and restaurants; catered for royalty and Presidents; and written his own cookbook contributions and a comic book series, Chef & Chat.  He penned his memoire, Chroniques Culinaires et Caustiques d’un Cuisiner Américain au Fin Fond de la France, about his experiences catering every summer for the many lavish parties at artist Joy de Rohan-Chabot’s chateau in the Auvergne. In addition, he hosted the Travel Channel’s “Europe’s Classic Inns,” and has made numerous other media appearances. His diverse career has left him with many anecdotes, such as trying to outwit a Yugoslavian prince who had an uncanny ability to identify every ingredient in any dish.

France is the only country whose cuisine is registered on UNESCOS’s world heritage list. Randall Price says this success is due to high-quality, seasonal ingredients, but also such contributions as Georges August Escoffier’s 1923 work, Le Guide Culinaire, which codified sauce-making, kitchen management, and other techniques. Randall says it’s the Bible of classic French cooking, and he couldn’t be without it. Come join a WICE course with Chef Randall Price in this private Paris kitchen, and savor more of his secrets of the finest French cookery.

Posted by Elizabeth Bouché

Book for the next cooking demonstration classes with Chef Randall Price on: 

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