Into minds, via stomachs

Brittany Cox watched her cooking teacher chop a head of cabbage before she gave it a try, her small hands quaking with each slice.

``Forward and back," the teacher instructed, as the 16-year-old sawed the cabbage into thick wedges. Along with eggplant, spinach, tomato paste, and a lot of garlic, cabbage is a key ingredient in chicken and braised vegetables, a Haitian specialty. In recent months, students have made a variety of foods representing different cultures, including dumplings (Chinese), gazpacho with codfish (Puerto Rican), and cheddar-flavored macaroni and cheese (African-American).

But this is no ordinary cooking class.

The head chef is Bill Baxter, a Roxbury-based police officer who uses lessons from his own years growing up on the city's meanest streets to impart wisdom to his students. Baxter, 47, is nicknamed Donut, a reference to the stereotypical doughnut-chomping beat cop, and has built up quite a following of sous-chefs in his dozen years of using a kitchen to keep young people off the streets and out of trouble.

Baxter says that by teaching the teenagers -- Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Cape Verdeans, and African-Americans among them -- about foods representing their heritage, he is also teaching them the importance of preserving their own culture and understanding that of others.

The lesson is especially critical, he says, in a city where youths are now divided from street to street across bitter and often bloody lines -- and where they are a disproportionate number of both victims and miscreants.

``We use cooking as a tool for young people getting information about different cultures," said Baxter, who wears a white apron over his Boston police uniform and badge.

``I teach them that gang culture is there and it's slowly trying to eradicate from the kids their own biological culture," he said.

And what better way to get a young person excited about culture than food, especially for a teacher trying to engage perpetually hungry teenage boys?

LaShawn Streater, 18, a Roxbury resident and East Boston High School senior who is training to become a professional boxer, is one of about a dozen youths in the class now.

His classmates range in age from 12 to 16 and, like him, hail from the tough streets that surround the kitchen classroom on Washington Street in Roxbury.

Streater said that before he met Baxter, he spent a lot of time hanging out on street corners. Now, he said, he fills his days with constructive activities, including learning how to make healthy meals on the cheap, a skill especially useful to an up-and-coming athlete.

``I just know how to cook, like, noodles and hot dogs," he said. ``I want to learn how to make lasagna. That's my favorite dish."

Baxter and his co-instructor, Didi Emmons, aren't just teaching the teenagers how to hold a knife properly and to peel an eggplant. Emmons, owner of the Harvard Square restaurant Veggie Planet, and Baxter also try to teach them about the world beyond Dudley Square.

The kitchen classroom program is made possible with help from Haley House, the Police Athletic League, and the city .

During a recent lesson on how to make Haitian legumes, a local barber and Haitian immigrant named Pierre Joseph came to the Haley House Bakery Cafe kitchen after hours and talked about growing up in the impoverished nation.

``A lot of the veggies grow like wild back home," Joseph, 41, told the teenagers. ``You don't even have to go to the market to buy them."

Baxter interrupted to make a larger point about life in Haiti.

``Everything that comes from the ground, everything that comes from the ocean, they utilized it because it was key to their survival," he said. ``That's why the Haitian people are recognized as strong people, strong-willed people, because they know what it takes in order to survive."

During the lesson the teenagers passed around color pictures of the Haitian countryside that Emmons had printed from Google Images.

They listened raptly to Joseph's description of the Haitian Christmas tradition (instead of decorating a pine tree, families hang a branch and wrap it in cotton). And they practiced Creole words for the phrases ``beans and rice" and ``what's up."

After they finish cooking, Emmons said, she and Baxter sit the teenagers down in the restaurant's cozy dining area to eat their creations.

``They don't sit down with their families at all," Emmons said. ``I asked them last week, `So, who sits down and how often with their family?' Two of them raised their hand, out of twelve. ``

Emmons said most of the teenagers' mothers work multiple jobs and come home so exhausted they go into their rooms and shut their doors.

But in class the students learn that there is no ritual simpler and more sustaining for families than cooking and eating together.

And that, Baxter said, might do as much to prevent crime as six-figure youth violence prevention programs.

``People don't have the time -- they're caught up in the rat race -- but sitting down and having a meal is something that is necessary," he said.

``And if they're not getting it at home, well, at least they're getting it here."

Suzanne Smalley can be reached at ssmalley@globe.com.