Test Kitchen films a year’s worth of episodes in three to four weeks. “We film six episodes a day,” Suzannah says. “It is a logistical feat to get it all done.” For example, if the host tells viewers he is going to cook a Bolognese sauce for two hours, behind-thescenes staff have three versions ready at the two-hour cooking point. If the dish is a roast pork loin, ovens are filled. “We’ll have five porks going in the back to try to have one at the right temperature,” she says. Suzannah first fell in love with food while studying abroad in Italy and took several cooking classes there, but she stumbled into a food career, in part through a coincidental Groton connection. When she moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2001, she was looking for work while her husband attended business school. A friend suggested she call someone named Kate who was opening a cheese and wine shop. Although Suzannah had just left a job at an Internet company in San Francisco and was hesitant, she made the call. The voicemail message was startling: Suzannah knew immediately that Kate was Kate Collier ’90 from Groton. They hadn’t talked since high school, but would spend the next two years launching Feast, a Charlottesville gourmet shop (see page 18). After two years at Feast, Suzannah studied at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York, then interned with famed chef Jody Adams at Rialto in Boston. She stayed on as a line cook—“the hardest job I’ve ever
Favorite Kitchen tool A sharp knife
can’t live WithoUt Dark chocolate
Favorite Food Avocados
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Groton School Quarterly
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Winter 2014
had.” She likens it to putting on a play every night, with immediate feedback, good and bad. At 30, Suzannah was by far the oldest cook on the line, but she worked her way up the kitchen hierarchy. She moved from the “cold station,” where she prepared salads and other cold appetizers, to hot appetizers, and then to the oven station, where she mastered the proper roasting of duck, chicken, and other meats and poultry. She never made it to the next stop, the grilling station. “I stopped at oven,” she says. “I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant and I couldn’t do it anymore.” The lifestyle was easy to give up. She and her husband had opposite schedules, and she often arrived home at 2 a.m. After several months at home with her baby, she applied for the job at America’s Test Kitchen. Now her work days are filled with perfectly composed recipes, but her nights are spent at home with her husband and two kids, where she cooks simply and seasonally. In the summer, she loves grilling steak with chimichurri sauce and Mexican street corn (slathered with mayonnaise, queso fresco, sour cream, lime, and chili powder). In cooler weather, she gravitates toward squash soups, short ribs—whatever is fresh at the local farmers’ market. “I don’t cook restaurant food at home,” she says. Considering Suzannah’s workaday standards, her home cooking may be even better.