Culinary School

It's a 90-minute trek by subway and commuter train from Lasheeda Perry's home in Philadelphia to her summer job at Sweet Jazmine's bakery in Berwyn. But that is nothing compared with how far the 19-year-old college student student has already come. Her baking talents have taken her literally to the other side of the world: a culinary sweep through Australia this summer, and a food tour of China last year, both all-expense-paid trips for winning contests. It is an impressive record, even for a young woman who rose to valedictorian of her 2004 class at Frankford High, and just finished her first year at Johnson & Wales University, in Providence, R.I., the culinary school she attends on a full scholarship.

A Philadelphia priest removed from ministry in 1993 after he was accused of abusing a teenage boy went on to teach middle school at the prestigious Haverford School - which never knew of the earlier complaint against him. The priest, Martin J. Satchell, 39, was recently defrocked, the church disclosed Thursday. Until the defrocking, he had been removed from active ministry, but was still officially a priest. Four years after the Philadelphia Archdiocese dismissed him, Satchell was hired to teach history to boys at the Haverford School.

The Flyers announced yesterday the signing of left winger Ryan Ready, an unrestricted free agent from the AHL, to a one-year contract. Ready, 25, who has never played in the NHL in a five-year professional career, split time in the AHL with the Manitoba Moose and the Worcester IceCats last season. In 80 regular-season games, he tallied nine goals and 23 assists for 32 points, and also had 65 penalty minutes. He began with the Moose, an affiliate of the Vancouver Canucks, and then was dealt to the St. Louis Blues' organization and assigned to Worcester.

As its name implies, the Old Mill Inn doesn't shy away from history. It's old with a capital O. From its warrenlike layout of rooms to its surf-and-turf dinners, this 135-seat restaurant will never be mistaken for a cosmopolitan den of culinary fads. The chicken Chesapeake roulade, made with thin slices of rolled chicken breast, is as trendy as it gets. Still, sometimes you need the old standbys. On the appetizer list alone, all the old favorites are here. Jumbo shrimp cocktail, but without the usual red sauce.

Cooking schools and classes, like so many aspects of America's troubled economy, are in flux. Among the culinary teachers manning the stoves, some seem to be doing well. A few have closed their doors - sometimes temporarily and for a variety of reasons - and still others are changing their approach. They are finding new ways to attract and hold students, especially two key segments of the population - older, often retired people looking to improve neglected cooking skills or socialize, and young marrieds who never learned to cook, often because their parents didn't cook, either.

E. Wallis Callahan, 74, one of the fathers of the Philadelphia restaurant renaissance, died yesterday after a long battle with cancer at St. Agnes Medical Center's hospice center. In 1954, Mr. Callahan opened the Coventry Forge Inn in his circa-1717 log-and-stone childhood home on Route 23 in Coventryville, Chester County. In an era of canned food, Wally Callahan was a fresh upstart. Passionate about ingredients, he insisted on buying from the farms in the area south of Pottstown, which nearly a half-century later still is largely bucolic.

Back in 1976, when Emeril Lagasse enrolled at Johnson & Wales, he was just a skinny kid who liked to cook, and the young culinary arts school was little more than a riverfront warehouse filled with kitchen equipment left over from the 1964 New York World's Fair. Today, Lagasse is a superstar chef - and Johnson & Wales University is hot, too. As the only culinary school in the United States to combine pastry-making and classic French cuisine with a four-year bachelor of science degree program, it consistently places virtually all its students in jobs within weeks of graduation.

You're familiar, no doubt, with the SATs - Scholastic Aptitude Tests. Last month, its culinary equivalent, or what could be called the EATs - Edible Aptitude Tests - took place here. It was a rating of the best among roughly 600 Philadelphia high school students enrolled in the Careers Through Culinary Arts Program (C-CAP), a three-year elective offered in 19 high schools and three middle schools in the city. The eight seniors in the competition (officially the C-CAP Final, Philadelphia)

Yo, Chefs! I am a prison inmate and am interested in becoming a chef. Can you suggest a top-notch school? - Name withheld Dear Chef-To-Be, Cooking professionally is stressful work with long hours. But if you love to cook and think you can take the heat in the kitchen, now is the perfect time to consider culinary school. After struggling for many years, Philadelphia's restaurant business is booming. Because of that, a second major culinary school is opening this fall.

Everything always went smoothly in the kitchen of the Sansom Street Oyster House when chef Cleveland General was there. And for 17 years, he was almost always there. Ever since the Center City restaurant opened 17 years ago, General had made sure the Maryland crab cakes and the flounder and his specialty, crab imperial, came out just right and on time. General, who died of a heart attack Saturday at age 59, was remembered as a tall, portly man with a charming smile punctuated by a space between his teeth, and as a perfectionist in the kitchen, said restaurant owner David Mink.