From roots to the range, a culinary master

Award-winning teacher blends experience, flair

Roberta Dowling, director of the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, works with student Steve Nolan. (Joanne Rathe/Globe Staff)

They're called "baci di dama," which means "women's kisses," and they're delicate Italian cookies usually made with finely ground almonds or hazelnuts and a bittersweet chocolate center.

But Roberta Dowling, executive director of the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, teaches her students to make a savory version that resembles the original in form only: Mushrooms replace the cookie caps and a blend of tuna and tome cheese acts as the filling.

Dowling brings a distinct flavor and twist to culinary training, and last month the International Association of Culinary Professionals recognized her with an Award of Excellence as an entrepreneur.

For Dowling, the award was an opportunity to reflect on a cultural heritage devoted to food.

Her childhood memories are filled with the aroma of fine cooking, from her mother's ability to prepare five fresh vegetable dishes every day without ever repeating a dish (asparagus alone was served in several forms) to her first taste of a stuffed zucchini flower as an 11-year-old in Rome.

"I come from an Italian-American family of very fine cooks," she said. "My great-grandmother left her husband, took her two children, got on a boat, and came to this country, and opened a restaurant in New Hampshire. They refer to her as somewhat of a spitfire."

The same fiery spirit prompted Dowling to open a culinary school and catering company, DeGustibus, more than three decades ago. (She closed the catering business in 1999 to focus on the school.) She started out with hectic demonstrations in her home, and when the classes grew past her kitchen's capacity, she moved to a small rented space in North Cambridge, where she gave cooking lessons during the week and scrambled to put together full-service catered meals for parties of 1,000 or more on the weekend.

With one main kitchen on the ground floor and another squeezed into the basement, the school was always a flurry of activity.

"We were a one-room schoolhouse, like 'Little House on the Prairie,' then," said Ralph Bryant, who completed the school's professional chef program as part of its second graduating class in 1983 and worked in Dowling's catering company and at a variety of restaurants throughout Boston.

"Now," added Bryant, the school's assistant purchasing manager, "we have four kitchens and we're adding a fifth," referring to plans to expand into the space next door with a new kitchen and possibly a takeout pastry and sandwich counter in the fall. "It has grown by leaps and bounds."

Julie Burba, another professional program graduate and the school's director of communications, noted that the school opened at a crucial time in the Boston culinary scene.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Burba said, renowned chefs such as Jasper White, Lydia Shire, and Gordon Hammersley began opening three- and four-star restaurants in Boston. Chefs around the city began looking for professionally trained staff who "would understand why hollandaise breaks or how to make two gallons of hollandaise the classic way and hold it for three or four hours instead of having to remake it every hour," Burba said.

"That's where Roberta's entrepreneurial spirit really happened, in capitalizing on the movement," she added.

Under Dowling's supervision, a current group of professional program students moved into the kitchen to test out their first batch of Italian recipes last week.

Leaning on the stainless steel island, she advised one student on how to char a red pepper without blackening it and sampled the cheese-and-tuna filling for the mushroom-based baci di dama.

Like many in her industry, Dowling works long hours as if by nature, logging no more than four or five hours of sleep a night.

Her sources of inspiration vary, but her recipes all bear a trace of creative humor. While staring at the colors and patterns on Easter eggs, for example, Dowling decided to create similarly decorative foods, but in the form of three-dimensional ravioli. The recipe made its way to an Italian Christmas special on the Food Network hosted by chefs Giada De Laurentiis and Mario Batali.

Dowling made wreaths, snowmen, and snowflakes using cookie cutters, added decorations made from pasta tinted with squid ink, asparagus, carrots, and beets, and stuffed them with a lobster and mascarpone filling. ("They looked like sugar cookies, but were all pasta," Burba said.)

The recipe, also used to create turkey-shaped ravioli at Thanksgiving, has become a signature item of sorts, in part because its origins so closely mirror the successful tenor of Dowling's culinary endeavors: "I don't even remember how I first made them. I was just playing around," Dowling said. "Experimenting."