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Larry Frazer with tiger tallow sculpture (Photo by Denise Applewhite) |
He's headed to Nashville, but not to pursue a musical career. Larry Frazer, catering chef for Dining Services, will be inducted into the American Academy of Chefs on July 29.
"The academy is the honor society of the American Culinary Federation," says Frazer, who is known on campus as Chef Larry. There are only about 500 current members; 15 people will be inducted this year, including famed French chef Paul Bocuse.
It takes more than culinary know-how to merit induction into the academy. In addition to being in the profession a minimum of 15 years, 10 of which must be as an executive chef, each candidate must have won at least one national culinary medal.
The academy also emphasizes "teaching, education and promotion of the culinary arts," says Frazer. "They stress the ways in which a culinarian extends to the community the highest qualities of professionalism and altruism."
Frazer, for example, cooks every summer at the Eden Institute Summer Camp in Connecticut, a camp for autistic children. He also chairs the Chef and Child Foundation, a national organization that operates under the auspices of the American Culinary Federation. The foundation "attempts to educate the public about the plight of homeless children and to teach the basics of a healthy diet to the children themselves," Frazer says. In September he will spend a week as chef at the DC East Homeless Shelter in Washington DC.
Frazer frequently gives talks and demonstrations for schools and civic groups, as well as presenting workshops on his specialty -- tallow sculpture. Using a medium that he says is "about 90 percent spaceage waxes, combined with sterilized beef fat or butter to give pliability," he creates decorative table statuary, building on a styrofoam core and using knives, scoops, scrapers and (mostly) his hands.
For the opening of the new stadium, he sculpted a half-life-size tiger. For the retirement dinner of former Vice President for Facilities Gene McPartland, he made a golf ball on a tee, standing about two feet high. When Dean of Student Life Janina Montero left for Brown University, he did a three-foot-high Buddha, "because she had oversight of the Office of Religious Life and the Chapel."
All Frazer's creations are stored in the "Wax Museum" at the Graduate College, a tiny room he smilingly dubs his "studio." There reside a Leaning Tower of Pisa for Italian meals, a gargoyle "for wherever," a Bacchus for bars, a miscellaneous bestiary and a lady known as "the Venus de Prospect Street."
Mature tastes
Frazer, who also oversees food production for the Graduate College, has been with Dining Services for two years. For the previous two decades he worked as executive chef at Campus, Terrace and DEC clubs. "I've fed thousands of students in my time," he says. He is now enjoying equally "cooking for people with mature tastes.
"I've been cooking since I was a kid," Frazer says. "It was my summer job all through high school and college" (Rutgers University, where he earned a degree in economics). A Certified Executive Chef since 1993, he describes himself as "mostly self-taught" in the culinary field.
Frazer notes that his upcoming induction into the academy helps make 2000 "a very good year for Dining Services," which recently won a national Menu Visionary Award with its "Culinart" menu, a series of dishes based around art themes. (Frazer entered a "Jackson Pollock" dish: four-color rice with red, yellow, purple and green pepper strips "and three different color sauces squirted all over it.")
Also a musician who plays "anything with strings," Frazer plays mandolin and guitar in an acoustic swing band called Back Porch Swing, so a trip to Nashville ("Music City, USA") has extraculinary interest for him.
On Frazer's calendar for fall, among other events, is a dinner to celebrate the close of the Anniversary Campaign for Princeton. He won't reveal the menu, but notes, "It will be a very special night."
All he can say now is that the centerpiece will be a large sculpted "ONE," emblematic of the campaign motto, "With One Accord."
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