By Joe Emanski
Marcia Willsie wants you to start throwing some dinner parties.
And if the very idea is stressing you out, well then, she also wants to better prepare you to make your soirées a smashing success.
Trained chef Marcia Willsie hosts Ezekiel's Table cooking school out of her Mercer Street home. (Photo by Kylie Springman.)
Willsie is the trained chef behind Ezekiel’s Table, a cooking school she runs out of her more than 300-year-old home on Mercer Street in Princeton Township. As often as once a week, she hosts groups of eight would-be home cooks, who spend two hours of an evening preparing and cooking a multicourse meal under her guidance.
Afterward, the students eat the fruits of their labor.
“I think for most people, [hosting a dinner party is] not enjoyable for one reason or another,” Willsie said during a recent interview in her home, the air deliciously scented with the aroma of fresh-made crumpets. “If there’s a cook in the house, there’s probably only one. It didn’t used to be that way. You used to cook with each other—a lot of people used to be involved in cooking.”
And that’s how it is for students at Ezekiel’s Table. Willsie meets with one or more members of each party in advance to plan a dinner. The morning of the party, she shops in area markets for the ingredients they will need.
Once guests arrive, they are assigned to stations around the spacious kitchen where they will work in pairs chopping, butterflying and seasoning the part of the meal they will be responsible for. Willsie moves from station to station, showing each pair cooking techniques they need or helping them stay on schedule.
“I’m checking up on everybody, keeping it all going the way the way a chef would,” she said. “When something really important is happening [at one station], I try to bring everyone’s attention to it. It’s kind of up to me to make sure that things are working out, so if something is falling behind, I might do something to hurry that up,” she said.
Once all the food is prepared, guests take off their aprons and repair to the adjoining dining room to enjoy the meal. Sometimes, Willsie joins them at the table. Often, the post-kitchen conversation is focused on the experience of preparing the food.
“After you’ve cooked together for two hours, there are no pretenses whatever at the table,” she said. “People are tired, they’re glad to sit down, and they get a chance to talk about whatever they did.”
The Los Angeles native was living in Seattle with her husband, Bruce, and two children in 1999 when Bruce, on a business trip, found a house he loved on Mercer Street. The Willsies had lived in Princeton some years before, when Bruce was a student at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School.
They bought the house knowing they were not yet ready to move from the Pacific Northwest, and that the place also needed extensive renovations. The refit took two years. The couple then rented the house for five years before moving east in 2006.
During the intervening years, they got to know some of the history of the home.
Quaker Ezekiel Smith had been the owner of the home in 1766, when he died without a will. In conducting an inventory of his estate at that time, county officials had documented in Smith’s common room a large cooking fireplace, 17 chairs, 21 plates and a table large enough to entertain many guests. It was noted among the other old Quakers in the nearby Meeting, Willsie said, that Ezekiel Smith had been a “fast-living Friend.”
“That was the Quaker term for party animal,” she laughed.
But it was Ezekiel Smith who inspired Willsie to start on a path toward fulfilling a lifelong dream.
“When Bruce found the document about Ezekiel, it just sort of fell together,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to run a cooking school, so I thought that would be perfect in a house that was really too big for two people. [I thought,] ‘We’ll call it Ezekiel’s Table, and I’ll go to cooking school.’” She completed her training and internships while still living in Washington.
Willsie said she teaches a wide variety of groups in her kitchen. Sometimes the class doubles as a birthday celebration. Other times, four sets of couples who all know one another use it as an educational alternative to meeting at one person’s house or at a restaurant.
Often, there is one person in the group in particular who is interested in learning more about cooking or hosting, and through that person, Willsie gets ideas for the menu.
“We talk about what the party is about—the main person who’s organizing it maybe wants to learn to make a crème brûlée or something like that,” she said. “Then I ask them to canvass their guests about aversions. We work together.”
Willsie said she does as much shopping as possible at local and organic markets and farms, and encourages her students to do the same.
“I think the soul has got sucked right out of our food system,” she said. “Once you get used to organic, truly organically done food … you look at those kinds of vegetables and they have a whole different feel and taste to them.”
Her students tend to have a range of cooking skill and experience. For some, the very sharp knives in her kitchen are intimidating, while others are comfortable with cutting but aren’t prepared to do a flambé.
Willsie works with all of them to help make them more comfortable in the kitchen. For people who are more adept in the kitchen, or or even who just like to experiment, she is happy to indulge them. “I encourage people to depart the text,” she said.
Arianne Kassof is a neighbor of the Willsies. She remembered one time she and her husband Allen had been given a large batch of shucked and frozen clams they wanted to make use of, and she knew the best place to do it: Ezekiel’s Table.
“So we got some friends together and made the world’s greatest clam chowder,” she said.
For a time, it looked as though Willsie was not going to be able to operate her cooking school. In 2009, not long after she had opened for business, some articles appeared in local publications profiling the new enterprise. Unfortunately, the articles caught the attention of the township, which wasn’t certain that the Willsie’s home was zoned for a cooking school. They told Willsie she had to shut down.
It wasn’t until 2011, after two years of legal wrangling, that the Regional Planning Board gave Willsie clearance to reopen, and in the end, it was neighbors like the Kassofs who had asserted that the home-based cooking school was an asset to Princeton.
Willsie said she gets satisfaction from helping students gain the confidence they need to host dinner parties of their own.
“People say, ‘Oh, I had no idea that this was that easy,’” she said. “Sometimes people want to do a project, but they don’t know how to attack it, so they don’t ever start. This lowers the hurdle to try new things.”
A class at Ezekiel’s Table costs between $600 and $1,500 for a party of eight. Willsie will be taking reservations for fall parties starting Sept. 12. The Willsie’s home is located at 974 Mercer St. in Princeton Township. For more information, call (609) 240-7712. On the Web: www.ezekielstable.com.
