First with a stone, then, using long diagonal strokes, with a steel. It's a basic routine raised to an art — and it's the desire to acquire this level of skill that draws growing numbers of food aficionados to the hotel's regularly scheduled cooking classes.

Almost since the launch last Fall, these informal sessions have been sold out months in advance. Tonight's class — An Introduction to Soups and Sauces — is no exception. In the "classroom" (by day the hotel bakery) the eight students don aprons and jackets. For many, it is their first visit behind the scenes of a major hotel. Fascinated, they examine the giant stainless steel stock pot and the vast central "prep" table where a single onion and two knives are set out at individual "stations."

Milne has already done some of the groundwork. Because stocks, the basis of many soups and sauces, call for long slow cooking, a pan of brown beef stock has been simmering since morning. Boiled down, Milne explains, it becomes demi-glace. Further reduced, it is glace de viande. For vegetable stock, Milne recommends grilling or roasting the vegetables first to enhance flavour.

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Tonight the class will prepare four very different soups: a mush- room cream made from a roux base, a smoked onion purée, a New England style clam chowder and clear duck consommé, already bubbling away, its surface thick with the typical "raft" of cooked egg whites to filter out impurities.

It's time to get to work.. .Dicing an onion with architectural precision, Anne demonstrates the right way to chop vegetables. "Keep your fingers behind the blade" she advises. Some confidently, others clumsily, the students follow suit.

By now the kitchen is heady with fragrance and with soup on — all four pots of it — Milne turns her attention to the five basic sauces. As her students scribble frantically, their instructor smiles and points to the big yellow recipe binders supplied to each student: "Relax. It's all in there."

Mixing food chemistry with esthetics, demystifying "haute cuisine," Milne spices her lesson with nuggets of information: "Use white pepper for white sauces. If you're making a Mornay sauce, add the cheese at the very end so the sauce doesn't "split." Properly cooked roux (the mixture of flour and butter that's the foundation of Béchamel sauce) should look like "golden sugar."

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The mere mention of Hollandaise creates both anticipation and apprehension. "I've made it from packaged mixes" whispers one student. "I've never made it!" confesses another. Earlier, Milne reduced white wine to half its original volume, simmered a pound of butter and then skimmed off the milk solids. Now she briskly whisks six egg yolks until they are the desirable foamy yellow, then I'm going to let you do this"... the students take turns, dribbling the melted butter into the eggs in a slow steady stream.

Hollandaise must be handled with caution. "To avoid making scrambled eggs" says Milne, "stick your finger in and if the mixture stays on your finger and doesn't slide off, it's just right."

A basic hollandaise is just a jumping-off point for a myriad of delicious sauces. Milne adds chopped fresh thyme (in Summer, herbs are gathered from the hotel's own rooftop garden) and suggests that the students try orange juice instead of white wine as a base for the sauce.

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Nervousness disappears as the students are made to feel at home with haute cuisine. Beurre blanc, Milne reveals is "basically butter incorporated into a white wine and shallot mixture." Even simpler is a robust salsa verde, the recipe sent by a friend in Sardinia.

Class is almost over. Soup pots have been borne up to the main kitchen for finishing. The sauces are ready. The students have met earlier over house-made chocolate truffles and coffee and now, two hours later, they're starving. Aprons are doffed, hands washed and everyone adjourns to a private room in Monterey Lounge and Grill. "Everything we made tonight is 'big' flavoured" says Milne as she introduces the wines she has chosen to complement the meal: a Saddle Mountain Chardonnay 1989, and a Geyser Peak Gewurztraminer, 1989, from California. First comes the quartet of soups: the onion dark and smoky; the consommé, clear as glass and veined with strips of duck and ginger; the mushroom soup, a poem of velvety smoothness; and the clam chowder, hearty and warming.

Entrees are brought in and the students serve themselves buffet style: platters of asparagus gilded with hollandaise, brochettes of shrimp and scallops with Szechuan sauce, salsa verde topping grilled chicken, beurre blanc blanketing delicately smoked black cod... There's a chorus of approval, then silence. The students are already planning to host their own dinner parties.

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