CENTER TWP. — As making a cake from scratch takes precise measurements, patience and care, Camille Stevenson uses the same finesse when teaching cooking methods to her culinary students.
She’s taught thousands of Beaver County high school students over her 40-year career as culinary arts instructor at the Beaver County Career and Technology Center.
Making cake batter usually entails mixing flour, sugar, eggs and other ingredients together. And sometimes it’s good to taste-test the batter. Teaching, too, is a mixture of labor and love.
During a recent lesson where students were learning to cut a whole chicken, she provided firm, straightforward instructions, showing first a demonstration of what to do, but later going around to each student’s station one by one to ensure they understood each step.
“There are 100 different ways to cut a chicken,” she explained to the group, adding that chicken can be purchased much cheaper whole. “Every time a butcher puts a knife to a chicken, that raises it 10 more cents a pound.”
It’s one lesson among thousands she’s done, a handful of students among the countless she’s taught since 1978, the same year Stevenson graduated from college, and the same year BCCTC opened its doors.
Mary Alice Gettings, a food safety and nutrition educator with Penn State Extension, has known Stevenson for nearly 25 years.
Stevenson’s leadership and guidance shines through with her teaching.
“She has a way about her with her students that is firm, but caring,” she said. “Because I think the students that she has come from so many different backgrounds and they need that mentor that they see cares, but they also need that mentor that provides them with some discipline and firmness to know that there's ... reasonable expectations of them, and I see her do this, and her patience with them, and it amazes me. After 40 years, she's still patient with them.”
Stevenson began teaching months before ovens were even delivered to the school and estimates cooking more than 10,000 meals for staff, special events and lessons over the years.
Teaching was all she ever wanted to do.
“There wasn’t any other option for me. I just always knew I wanted to be a teacher,” said Stevenson, who has had the career path in her blood.
Her parents were educators: Her mother was an art teacher, and her father was a school administrator.
But teaching culinary classes specifically was something that slowly rose over time. She wasn't able to attend the only vocational school in the area when she was in high school. She did not attend the Parkway West Career and Technology Center in North Fayette Township, where her father was principal, because he didn't want to show favoritism.
It was taking courses with a classically French cuisine-trained culinary instructor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania that ultimately pushed her in that direction. Perhaps it was the icing on the cake.
“We were doing things like souffling, coq au vin, and we had a whole sweet breads lesson, and my job was to cook the cow’s tongue,” she said. “I’m getting chills talking about it, because I was like, 'oh my gosh, people really cook like this.'”
Preheat
Cooking preparation is essential to a successful kitchen, and it’s something Stevenson instills in her students. They need to get out equipment, ingredients, chop items and sit things from left to right.
It’s called mise en place, which is a French culinary term meaning “everything in its place.”
It makes for a calmer cooking experience, too.
“They’re not running all over the place. They’re organized. It takes the two years that they’re here to get them to do that every time they cook, because they want to go back to grabbing the butter, grabbing the milk. Now I need a pot. Now I need a spoon,” Stevenson said. “But again, they’re kids. So their minds are a little scrambled, so we’re just trying to imprint on them what’s going to make them successful in the kitchen, because they’re not going to be so stressed.”
Working with teens has kept her energized over the years, but students are a bit different nowadays than when she started teaching. In a digital age, teaching students patience can be challenging.
It’s also important to show all aspects of working in the kitchen, from preparation to cleanup, since popular cooking television shows often overlook those parts.
“I get kids that walk in and think they’re going to be Bobby Flay,” she said. “And then I say, well Bobby, you’ve got to go wash the pots you just made.”
Cooking culture is a bit different, too. There weren’t as many restaurants then; families ate at home more often than they do now. While students learn everything from scratch, restaurants incorporate convenience items into cooking too, meaning a cornish game hen might be hand prepared, but the stuffing in it is premade. Culinary students do the same.
“A lot of kitchens integrate a lot of convenience foods, kind of mix it in with the foods they’re making from scratch, because it saves them labor,” Stevenson said.
And while the recipes have remained mostly the same, the lessons taught have evolved. Food safety and cleanliness were not organized lesson plans when she started, but were added in the 1990s.
“Prior to that, it was pretty much anything goes,” she said.
There is also more state oversight now, so over two years, she has to ensure her students complete 187 culinary arts tasks that are tracked within a spreadsheet.
And culinary arts competitions are something that wasn’t done when she started. That gives her students the opportunity to practice skills for professional judges and even earn college scholarships.
As a National Restaurant Association Servsafe Food Safety program teacher and Family Career and Community Leaders of America adviser, these are roles she has embraced.
“When you’re in culinary, there’s always something new and exciting happening, whether we’re doing a banquet for somebody, or the kids are doing a special project, so my interest is always piqued, Stevenson said. “I can always be creative. The kids can be creative. You can kind of pull that creativity out of them. So there’s always some new, exciting challenge happening. And I kind of feed off of that energy.”
Bake
Seeing the creativity flourish within her students is perhaps the most satiating aspect of teaching for Stevenson.
The lessons are often the same: Cook a rice pilaf, or a steak Diane. But often after, she creates a follow-up lesson that allows for more personality.
“I like them to take a basic recipe, and then keep the ratios, keep the formula, but change everything in that recipe,” she said.
With rice, instead of water, students have used fruit, coconut, even Pepsi as a substitute. If there’s a steak recipe, how can it be adjusted to taste the right way with chicken?
“They get to see what the adaptation of that is, and then every student does something different with their rice,” she said. “And then I lay it all out and I say, 'This is all the same recipe, but nothing looks the same.' So I teach them there are no new recipes; there are just new ways of making those recipes with different ingredients.”
Stevenson has taught generations now, often teaching children and sometimes the grandchildren of former students.
After all, the love of cooking and baking often has roots in family.
She asks her students at the beginning if the school year if they cook with a loved one.
“A grandparent, parent, you can’t believe the influence that grandparents have on kids going into cooking,” she said. “Kids that have worked with a grandparent or an aunt or their parents have an intrinsic love of cooking, because of that emotional bond to it.”
Alumnus Eric Nesmith, of Nesmith Catering in Rochester, described Stevenson’s teaching style as “stern but fair.”
“Her main thing was to focus on the job at hand, and to follow instructions and be focused, and it has helped me all the way through,” said Nesmith, whose daughter Arica is now in the culinary arts program.
“I would recommend anybody who wants to be in the culinary program, or wants to try it, see what it's like, to definitely go and try Mrs. Stevenson's program,” he added. “They're going to learn so much. It helped me tremendously through my journey.”
Bon appetit
Something else that satisfies is being able to see former students, Stevenson said, and what her guidance meant to them years later.
Some BCCTC alumni have gone on to college; others have worked at local restaurants or opened their own businesses. Others decided on other professions, but the lessons she taught can be applied in many areas of life.
“You never know how kids think about you. I’m pretty strict, because I think kids have to be disciplined in order to do this field,” she said. “You might have some kid that you were really strict with in high school and you think, 'They’re going to graduate and hate me until the day they die.' And then they come back and they were like, 'You were the best thing that ever happened to me!' Every teacher has a story like that here.”
Baking the cake is fun, but getting to eat it or see others enjoying it is probably the best part for most.
You can’t tell how a cake is baking inside without poking it.
Gettings said Stevenson has been an asset to the Beaver County cooking community.
"Beaver County has been lucky to have her in that program, and that she's stayed so long,” Gettings said. "I think instilling confidence in students as much as she can, and clearly the mentoring is key.”
Stevenson, a Monaca High School alumna who enjoys painting watercolors and taking photography in her spare time, is married with two children.