1. Essential Skills and Knowledge

      As briefly discussed in Chapter 1, certain essential skills are a must for running a catering service. You are starting small and you must be able to run the business without help from time to time: when your helper is sick, when no one is available on such short notice, or when a small-business luncheon is only profitable if you do it yourself. Whatever the reason, you don’t want the extra worry of not being able to execute every part of the event competently.

      Here are the essential skills and knowledge you must have:

      • Competency in cooking and food preparation

      • The highest degree of planning and organizational skill

      • A high degree of efficiency

      • Ability to work well under pressure

      • Skills in problem solving and crisis management

      • An artistic touch in food presentation

      • Ability to deal with clients confidently and successfully

      Let’s discuss each of these essentials individually.

      1.1 Cooking and food preparation

      A high degree of skill in cooking, as well as ease, efficiency, and speed in food preparation are by far the most important prerequisites for a successful small caterer. Many would-be caterers start as good home cooks with a moderate-sized repertoire and better-than-average food preparation skills. Some are knowledgeable about cookery, its chemistry and physics, while others have done a lot of food research and experimentation. Still others are formally trained food professionals, such as chefs who are tired of working for someone else with low pay, long hours, and difficult conditions in tiny, poorly equipped, inefficient, overcrowded, and hellishly hot kitchens.

      Your cooking skill should be far better than that of a good gourmet cook, and you should have a sizable repertoire of well-tried recipes. Also, you need to be well versed in preparing all kinds of dishes, including hors d’oeuvres, entrées, side dishes, salads, desserts, breads, and beverages. You not only have to know how to prepare all these items, but you must also be able to present them in an appetizing, appealing way.

      How are you going to acquire all that cooking skill and knowledge? Practice, more practice, courses, and plenty of reading, research, and Internet surfing. The information is available, but you must find it. The place to practice is your own kitchen with readily available and eager testers — your family and friends — sitting at your table daily.

      If you haven’t had any formal culinary training, get some. It can be done, and you can have a great deal of pleasure and fun doing it. You don’t need the entire curriculum of a cooking school, or even the majority of it. A small fraction will be quite sufficient for your catering business; which fraction will depend on what type of catering you choose. It is hardly necessary to learn dozens of French sauces when you have no intention of using any more than a few basic ones (many are out of date anyway). If a demanding client insists on having boulettes of beef with sauce financière, don’t worry. Just look it up in your extensive reference collection and prepare it. If it is a complicated sauce, you may not get it right on the first try. Do it again — well before the event, of course. With a basic cooking background and some experimenting, you will come up with the perfect dish in no time at all. And you will also have a satisfied, amazed, and impressed client.

      1.1a Classes, seminars, and cookbooks

      Cooking classes may or may not be a good idea for you. Nearly all of them are geared to home cooks, and although they may be fun, professionals will learn little. Try a few classes offered in your area. If the instructor is good, observe his or her techniques — that’s where the lessons may pay off. Videotapes and television cooking programs can help in the same way. Most cooking programs on the Food Network are geared to entertaining home cooks, but you can learn kitchen techniques from the hosts. Don’t pay much attention to the recipes themselves; rather, watch how chefs work.

      There are seminars and cooking camps for experienced chefs, too, on both cooking and presentation. They don’t come cheap: expect to pay several hundred dollars for a two- or three-day cooking seminar, plus accommodation and related expenses. Catersource has regular one- and two-day seminars in various major cities in the US (see www.catersource.com). Their seminars are excellent, geared to caterers, expensive, and usually worth the fees. During the breaks you can network with other caterers and make valuable contacts. You go home enthusiastic and totally jazzed up.

      There are a truly awesome number of food- and cooking-related websites on the Internet, but only a very small fraction of these are useful to a professional.

      No matter how you choose to do it, total immersion in cooking and cooking techniques for an extended period is what you want. Keep on reading books on food and cooking, even simple cookbooks. No matter how poor a cookbook is, it will likely contain some useful information.

      Learn to cook an entire cross section of dishes, but emphasize the ones you want to prepare in your catering business. Sounds like a formidable task, but it really isn’t. Once you get into the rhythm of preparing new and unusual food with unaccustomed kitchen techniques, trying other new items becomes easier and easier.

      Mark each of your recipes with significant information you’ve discovered in preparation — anything you might need to know for future preparation of the dish. Ingredients should be slightly adjusted to your own taste as well as to current trends. Older recipes use fewer spices and herbs than today’s more sophisticated palates demand. Sugar tended to be used more generously, too, producing the over-sweetened desserts that are not much in favor today. Oils and cooking fats were used more liberally than our present awareness about good nutrition tolerates. So adjust the recipe accordingly and make sure to note the adaptation and results.

      You will need a substantial collection of recipe books for yourself as well as reference books on cooking and food. Your choices will be dictated somewhat by the kind of catering you want to do. Of the enormous selection of cookbooks available, most will be useless to you. There are very few books with original recipes, but those are the ones you need, both for their ideas of new things to try and for your own reference.

      You will also need several good reference books on cookery, basic food chemistry and physics, and nutritional information. These books should be read and reread, studied and re-studied. It is very important to understand the basics of food and cooking and to know where to look up the information when you need it. As Samuel Johnson famously said, “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” When it comes to cooking, there is no single source as comprehensive as Joy of Cooking.

      A classic since its original publication in 1931, Joy of Cooking is the best and most comprehensive cookbook ever written in English. In its revised form, it