Mix a little bit of a children’s show host and a bit of celebrity chef and you might have the makings of Tom Austin, a cook in the Housing Division. “My favorite thing is telling stories,” says Austin, a self-taught chef and former food columnist who is writing an unconventional cookbook that will help readers learn to cook spontaneously. Austin, who splits his work weeks between Illinois Street and Florida Avenue residence halls, joined the university’s staff as extra help a couple of years ago and then became a full-time employee last February. When he’s not experimenting in his kitchen, Austin enjoys reading and ballroom dancing.
How did you become a cook?
When I was 16, I was a busboy at a white-tablecloth Italian restaurant in St. Louis, and one Friday night a cook got sick right before the line opened, and the chef said, ‘Hey, kid, come back here. You’re going to help us out tonight.’ I was there all weekend, fetching things for them and watching and learning. When the cook died a few days later, I had the job. Even though I was still in high school, I worked with the chef there for a couple of years. When he left to open his own restaurant, I took over his position. I was 18 or 19 years old and was a chef in a restaurant that most of the kids in my upper-middle-class high school couldn’t afford to eat in.
Where else have you worked?
I’ve worked in Minnesota, North Carolina and Wisconsin. I stayed some places a year, some places five years, and moved on when I got bored. I went from place to place to gain different kinds of experience. I had a bakeshop in Minnesota for a while, where I did outside catering along with retail and wholesale baking.
I did catering at a women’s club for about four years, catering about 150 weddings a year there – one every Friday and two every Saturday. I taught myself how to decorate wedding cakes one afternoon by getting a cake-decorating book, mixing up 60 quarts of icing and decorating my workbench.
What has kept you interested in cooking all this time?
Mom used to make homemade bread all the time, and I really enjoyed helping her. When I was about 4, she taught me how to make 1-2-3-4 Cake. As my children each turned 4, I’d visit their preschool classes and help the kids make homemade cupcakes. That could be really interesting, especially having the children crack the eggs. Once we had to crack two dozen eggs in order to get four into the bowl. One of my daughters learned how to do Bananas Foster flambé when she was in about second grade and would invite her friends over for flaming desserts as an after-school snack. During my years in the kitchen, I was always learning, creating new dishes and teaching new staff. When I finally attended the University of Wisconsin at the age of 36, many people there told me I should be a teacher. After thinking about it, I realized that I had been one for the previous 20 years. I enjoyed it, and I guess that’s what has kept me doing it.
How did you get interested in food writing and in writing a cookbook?
About eight years ago, my brother asked for a recipe and directions to make pot roast. My reply evolved into a food column for the Decatur Herald & Review. The column ran for a couple of years, until I had a mild stroke about two years ago. The column was called “Ask Chef Who?” and it featured stories about different foods and some of my spontaneous moments in the kitchen. I told how I came up with dishes or what inspired me to put certain ingredients together. I usually included recipes because the food editor said that people liked recipes.
The cookbook evolved over the years from people telling me, ‘I wish that I could cook like you do, without a recipe, without measuring or anything. You should write a cookbook.’ It’s a cookbook to teach you how. No real recipes, just a range of discussions about recipes, the differences and similarities in cooking methods and how to interchange them, and how to avoid being intimidated or narrowly directed by somebody else’s recipe.
What inspired you to create the gingerbread castle that was displayed at ISR before the holidays?
I’ve been interested in gingerbread for a long time. One Christmas I made gingerbread houses at my shop and sold them at a mall kiosk. I had been toying with the idea of creating a castle because Camelot is my favorite story. I had talked about the idea with Keith Garrett, the unit manager at ISR. The Monday that we returned from Thanksgiving break, I did a quick sketch of a castle and began working on it. I didn’t want square or rectangular towers, so I tried different methods of wrapping the gingerbread dough around cardboard tubes before baking it. The rest was a piece of cake, well, actually gingerbread, and it was a fun project. I worked on it every spare minute that I could and had help from a few students who sculpted landscape by sprinkling coconut and granola. Special thanks to my co-workers who picked up the slack while I was immersed in the project.