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| Haute pastry: Master chef Marshall Faye unloads a batch of cookies at the Trapp Family Lodge. He and his staff serve up to
1,200 people a day with more than 75 different breads and sweets, like the fresh berry parfait made with white chocolate mousse. Mary knox Merrill – staff |
Just desserts for a backwoods boy-turned master chef
Even his school counselor laughed at Marshall Faye's dream of baking. Now the master chef has the last laugh.
from the March 20, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 3
Faye grew up close to the earth and close to his parents. The ninth-generation Vermonter inhabited the kitchen with equal fervor as he inhabited the outdoors. "My mother and grandmother were bakers, and I sort of picked it up that way," Faye says. "My mother was in a wheelchair and, so, I did all the cooking."
Faye has his mentor and friend the late Fred Mould to thank for turning his passion into a profession. Faye spent a lot of time in the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, where Mr. Mould was a curator. It was Mould who told the boy to reach for the pie in the sky.
While attending the Culinary Institute of America in New Haven, Conn. (now in Hyde Park, N.Y.), Faye scraped together tuition by washing glasses in a bar, peddling milk for a dairy, and even clocking in time as a security guard. Although he did train as a pastry chef, landing such a job upon graduation was difficult in the 1960s. "At the time, it was deemed women's work," Faye says.
Instead, he worked as a chef in various restaurants in the high pressure atmosphere of cooking to order. When he wanted to relax, he flourished a rolling pin and shuffled cookie sheets, relishing the slower rhythms of baking.
He might have been content to continue in that vein if it wasn't for the von Trapps, the singing Austrians portrayed in "The Sound of Music" and who, after escaping the Nazis, founded the lodge. Johannes von Trapp and his mother, Maria, who died in 1987, begged Faye to work at the bakery and tearoom of their hotel, near Mt. Mansfield, Vermont's highest peak.
Soon Faye began teaching classes to guests who constantly requested his recipes. Now his classes are seasoned with tricks of the trade (forget the KitchenAid ... just use your hands!) and based with his rich tales of Vermont life.
One of the most famous stories concerns the birth of the Von Trapp Linzertorte. As Faye tells it, Maria von Trapp adored linzertorte, a jam-filled cinnamon walnut crust. But she didn't much care for Faye's version, which he made with raspberry jam. Refusing to be beaten, Faye made a new linzertorte every day, tweaking the recipe for her. Every time, he'd climb the stairs to her apartment in the lodge only to hear her declare it wasn't quite right.
He was stumped until Johannes mentioned that currants grew in the part of Austria they were from. Faye decided to mix red currant jelly with raspberry jam, and – voilà – Maria cried, "Now that's a linzertorte!" That's the title of Faye's cookbook.
The musical matriarch had a sweet tooth, Faye says. She relished fresh pastry. And though she was frail and on a strictly supervised diet, she'd sneak down each morning at 5 to Faye's cozy kitchen, eat one or two pastries hot from the oven, and drink freshly brewed coffee heavily dosed with sugar. Then she'd crawl back under the covers until her nurse woke her up to her breakfast of dry toast, tea, and one poached egg.
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