It’s Sunday morning in the Davis house and things are hopping. A trio of gigglers–5-year-old Solomon, 4-year-old Emmanuel and 2-year-old Caleb–have just finished a pancake breakfast, immersed themselves in hugs from mom Felicia and scampered off, with gentle coaxing by dad Dwayne, for their a.m. baths.
At the kitchen sink, 15-year-old Chris and 13-year-old Jillian tackle the breakfast dishes while a baking sheet of oatmeal cookies, stirred up by Jillian, perfumes the home.
There’s talk of work schedules, school schedules and homework. That’s Mom’s homework–in hospitality law.
You see, Felicia Shallow Davis, once a detective with the Chicago Police Department, is immersed in culinary school.
That a cop would trade her city blues to begin the training necessary to don the white jacket and toque of a chef didn’t surprise her husband.
“She had always talked about how it had been a dream of hers to become a chef,” said Dwayne Davis, also a Chicago police detective. “And when she took off from the department for our children, it was a good time to re-evaluate where she wanted to go from there.”
The couple researched culinary schools, talked schedule juggling and figured costs. It was then, Davis said, “we decided she would go back to school.”
So almost three years ago, Shallow Davis enrolled in the Kendall College School of Culinary Arts in Evanston, taking on classes, internships and a hefty commute from the family’s neat brick home on a tree-lined street in Chicago’s Chatham neighborhood.
Today, Shallow Davis, 34, has an associate’s degree in hand. A degree in hospitality management is less than 18 months away. And she recently won grand-prize honors in a Las Vegas competition among students from the nation’s culinary schools.
Credit Shallow Davis’ determination and dedication for pursuing her dream. Credit her husband and family for giving Shallow Davis the support she needed to turn a dream into reality.
It was not always easy.
“The outcome has been rewarding, but it was quite an adjustment,” said her husband. “Being the mother and wife, she was very integral to the daily functioning of this house. And then all of a sudden, she was gone from before sunrise to way past sunset. We all had to chip in and pick up the slack.”
“It was a little hard at first,” said eldest son Chris. “We did a lot of baby-sitting.”
“We had to do extra chores and baby-sitting,” chimed in Jillian.
“As time went on, either we got used to it or her schedule wasn’t the same, but it lightened up,” said Dwayne.
No price for a dream
“We have five kids; making sacrifices is what we do,” said Shallow Davis. “Besides, to follow your dream–how can you put a price on it?”
Or handle the ever-changing schedules of culinary school. One quarter, classes began at 6 a.m. and ran until noon. The next quarter, hours changed. And so did the schedules at home–including those for her husband, who juggled his work schedule to help cover the gaps.
“Each quarter has unique challenges for me and for my family,” she said. “When I was doing dinner production class and was working in the [school’s] dining room, those were the times I made a deal with my sister: I’ll cook dinner and she would go to my house after work and reheat dinner. She didn’t have to cook, but she baby-sat for me and she got dinner.”
Despite help from her mother and assorted family members, there were rough spots, particularly before she began her school internship at MK North.
“Dwayne and I had said that for our family to work, there would be no one person more important than the family as a whole,” she said. “I said this is going to be tough, this is going to take away from our family. I can quit now and just be OK.
“We just talked about it and Dwayne–he was in the military–said, `Felicia, you’ve already finished basic training. That’s the hardest part. Now you can go and finish and it won’t be as hard as the first half. The hardest part is behind us. You’ve been in the trenches.’ So I just kept going.”
These days, Shallow Davis begins her day at 3:30 a.m., arriving at the school by 4:30 a.m. to ready the kitchen of the school’s Cafe du Jour for the morning quantity production class where she works as a teaching assistant to Kendall chef/instructor Andrew Meyer. Classes follow in statistics, hospitality law and accounting. She is home by midafternoon.
And once she completes school?
“I will be looking for employment,” she said. “I’ll probably work the [food preparation] line like everybody else. I’ll start out very humbly. A small restaurant with a focus on simply prepared food that is nutritionally sound.”
And that may mean another juggle of the family’s schedule. “Dwayne and I talked about that,” she said. “And when it comes to pass, he’ll take the day shift,” covering the homefront while Shallow Davis works evenings.
Quick thinking
Indeed, it was simply prepared food, plus savvy coordination and a cool head, that helped Shallow Davis compete in the S. Pellegrino Almost Famous Chef Contest held in the Mandalay Bay hotel and resort in Las Vegas this fall.
There, eight young chefs were faced with identical baskets of ingredients containing duck, Granny Smith apples, carrots, artichoke, red bell pepper, fennel, onion, garlic and herbs, then challenged to put together an impressive entree using every item–in just 90 minutes.
Four chefs had to share a stove. Video cameras captured every flustered expression and wayward mince of a knife and dribbled bit of sauce. Judges were everywhere, watching technique, asking questions.
Asked by one about her plans for the artichoke, Shallow Davis quipped that it “was going to be harder than open-heart surgery” before cooking the challenging vegetable, removing its heart, cutting it in quarters and then sauteeing it.
Her finished dish? Herb-crusted roasted duck breast in a red wine-citrus reduction with apple-carrot puree plus a fennel cream sauce served with a julienne of red pepper and yellow squash, with artichoke saute and polenta cake.
“The adrenaline was going, and there was this feeling of satisfaction that comes at the end,” she said. “You have a serene moment of victory. You’ve conquered your ingredients, and you have this plate that you think is beautiful, and you hand it over to the judges.”
For Shallow Davis, that serene moment of victory lasted longer. Citing her creativity as well as her confidence and sense of humor in front of the cameras, the judges awarded Shallow Davis the grand prize in the competition honoring the young chef in the country with the most potential star power.
“You know, I have to have a sense of humor with five kids,” said Shallow Davis, relaxing at the kitchen table during the post-breakfast calm. “And being in the police, you are faced with a lot of stressful situations. You have to have a presence about you.”
Her classmates, many much younger than Shallow Davis, seemed to recognize that, tapping her as their graduation speaker.
“I felt I was in a unique position because I told them [in the speech that] I saw the future in them. And I saw the past. I saw me at 17 and 20 and I saw them later in life,” she recalled. “Somehow I was able to relate to them. You know, like they let this old chick in and allowed me to be with them. They really gave me their friendship, and I gave them my friendship. They honored me with that.”
That Shallow Davis went from cops to cooking may have been in the cards all along.
“My mom was a single parent, and so by default, being the oldest of four, I had a lot of responsibility for cooking and taking care of my sisters and brother,” she said.
Shallow Davis, who grew up on the South Side, helped out at a Chinese restaurant where her mother worked, earned a reputation with family and friends for her layered cake with pineapple, and clocked time working at Wendy’s during high school.
When it came time for a career, she said, “A lot of us were steered away from the arts and those types of things.
“I think my whole generation–like my friends–all their parents stressed getting a job with great benefits and a pension, and being a police officer offered that security,” she said.
Still, “cooking was something I just did for fun, for free and for family. It just never left me.”
Not through jobs in the clerk’s office at the Cook County Criminal Courts at 26th and California. Not during her years in the Police Department, where she met her husband, first patrolling Englewood, then working her way up to detective in Area 1, investigating “sex crimes, rapes and those types of things.”
An epiphany
How did she know she was on track with this new career? That moment came during a class titled Cuisine of India.
“One night, we were making this sauce called makhani gravy. And when it was finished I tasted it. It was the same flavors of the spaghetti sauce that I had been taught [as a child],” she said, explaining how the late Jinnie Mae Pearson–“a woman who was like my grandmother”–taught her how to make a sweet spaghetti sauce flavored with sugar and chili powder that was different from Italian-style sauces but was a popular dish with her family.
“Makhani gravy has ginger, cardamom and a lot of exotic spices and things that are expensive. It has butter in it, honey, tomato and a little cream. This was essentially the same dish Jinnie Mae had taught me,” she said. “I almost cried. It moved me so much that I had to tell the class the story that I had tasted this before and I just never had a name for it.”
She couldn’t stop thinking about Jinnie Mae and the sauce. “I can’t exist today and not think about the different aspects of how slavery has touched us–even cooking,” said Shallow Davis, noting how the British had colonized India then took spices from those lands when they traveled to the Caribbean.
“Perhaps at some point, one of Jinnie Mae’s [ancestors] had worked here in the British colonies, the islands in the Caribbean,” she continued. “They made the sauce here in this country with indigenous things, but they were able to maintain the integrity of this flavor.
“It was almost like she was speaking to me from beyond,” she said. “At that moment, I felt like, wow, I was on the right path.”
