That's not to say that this whole experience has been a waste of time or that I plan on subjugating the rest of my life to making food that I don't love. The most important thing that I'm learning is technique, and the proper fusion of French with southern cuisine could prove amazing... just as long as that fusion doesn't involve fish mousse or aspic jellies.
Monday
The week began at 8:30 AM with Chef Poupard making marinated sardine fillets as the appetizer, lamb fillet and peppermint jus with potato "noisettes" and a vegetable tian (cooked spinach, tomatoes, and onions) as the main course, and a Parisian-style frozen nougat for dessert. To say that I was excited that we'd be making real vegetables (as opposed to potatoes) for a change would be an understatement.
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| Marinated sardine fillets (with Poupard's signature right angle); Lamb fillet with vegetable tian; Parisian-style frozen nougat |
The practicum to make the lamb fillet followed after lunch. It was quite possibly the best dish that we've made so far--one that I truly liked. Aside from the tasty vegetables, the meat was great--and that's saying a lot because the only meats that tend to excite me are hamburgers and barbecue. The dish was also incredibly quick and simple to prepare--the meat had only to be cut off the bone and the potatoes were formed with a melon baller--meaning that we shouldn't expect to do this one on the final exam. It lacks the fun technical stuff like cleaning an animal or turning a vegetable.
Tuesday
The morning cuisine demonstration with Chef Caals centered on the central Berry region. Like the rest of France, it has the puzzling propensity for making dishes with forcemeat, so Chef began with the Easter pâté--a pie filled with pork jowl, fatback, and veal. The more exciting dish was the the coq en barbouille, more commonly known as coq au vin. We had to settle for chicken rather than rooster and chef mercifully thickened the sauce with potato starch rather than pig blood as the recipe called for. He finished the demonstration with a pear and walnut tart. The addition of black peppercorns to the pears seemed a bit odd, but the end result was amazing.
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| Easter pâté; Coq en barbouille; Pear & walnut tart |
The semester's Intermediate Cuisine and Grand Diplome lunch followed the demonstration at Le Petit Bordelais. Remembering my sadly casual attire that stuck out like a sore thumb at the Basic lunch, I had set out a dress and heels at my studio to change into beforehand, but we didn't get out of class until 11:30. The instructions were to be at the restaurant no later than 12:00 because we would begin eating "promptly" at 12:30. Most students had brought their clothes to the school to change into, so I booked it home and threw on my dress before running to the metro.
By 12:15 I arrived at the address only to find a locked door and no other students anywhere in sight. The street was a small one, so I walked all the way up it and back down, thinking that maybe I had the wrong building number (I couldn't remember the name of the restaurant) or that I had been shut out for being late. The lunch was a requirement, so I broke into a sweat of panic (plus it was kind of hot) as I realized that I didn't have any phone numbers for the school or my classmates. Walking the length of the street again, I turned around to head home when I recognized three classmates approaching the locked door. As it turns out, I was the first person to arrive--before any other students, any of our hosting chefs, and any student service organizers--because in Paris 15 minutes late is still too early.
The rest of the group slowly trickled in while I got to know my other early-arrival table mates--two of the only French students that I've met at the school and a nineteen-year-old kid from the States whose whole family became expats to France. We had the "tasting menu" which consisted of cod with guacamole, turbot with tomato confit, celery root puree, and tonka beans, Bresse chicken with carrots, and a Napoleon mille-feuille for dessert. The meal began with an aperitif and each course came with a different wine so that by the time dessert arrived I was the only sober person in the room. The meal was disappointing--not as good as our basic lunch on the Seine River boat--but the three bones that I found in my Turbot fillet made me feel a little better about the number that I tend to miss in my practicums.
Wednesday
The coq au vin practicum began at 8:30 AM and finished by 10:30 AM--of all our dishes it required the least amount of preparation because the chicken was pre-cut and sitting in the marinade for the past 24 hours. Mid-semester evaluations with the chef were at 12:30, so I took my food home for a quick brunch before heading back to school.
Most of my group decided to skip evaluations altogether, and when I arrived at the school only two people were ahead of me. Unfortunately, one of those people was Brian. Brian is a nice kid from China who did his basic certificate about two years ago before coming back this semester. His problem is that he asks more questions than a three-year-old child to the point that chefs and translators roll their eyes and students audibly groan and develop almost a mob-like mentality whenever he raises his hand. The questions aren't necessarily dumb, but usually they're irrelevant and time-consuming.
Brian went into the meeting immediately before me as I stood outside and waited... 30 minutes. A normal meeting takes five minutes. When he finally left and I went in, both Chef Poupard and the translator were laughing and shaking their heads. My grade was less hilarious--3.31 out of 5--passing, but below the class average of 3.33. Poupard pointed out my weakest areas of presentation and organization, but when I replied, "Yes, I'm always last," he just shrugged and said, "Someone is always last and someone is always first--you shouldn't let that bother you."
I still had over two hours before my next class. I again made the trip home and back before going to our pastry demonstration on milk chocolates. Chef Cotte showed us the art of tempering the chocolate and used it to make muscadines, rochers, pralinés, and mendiants. Except for the mendiants, all of the candy fillings were some combination of mostly chocolate and hazelnut praliné (similar to Nutella), but the rochers were my favorite--they contained crispy feuilletine made from crushed Gavotte crepes. Anyone who's had Ferrero Rocher will understand.
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| Muscadine; Rochers; Pralinés; Mendiants |
In the pastry practicum that followed we were making only the muscadine and praliné chocolates. While we waited outside the kitchen classroom Chef Jordan (a.k.a., mean chef) walked by and we all exchanged looks that said, "Oh, please, no." The last thing that anyone wanted to attempt with Jordan was chocolate tempering, so when sweet old Chef Walter came up a minute later he actually received some applause and I had to resist the urge to hug him. He ended up doing most of the work for me by "helping" with everything, and my chocolate come out perfectly. I also finished really early. Perhaps I should have been insulted when a classmate sounded overly surprised as she exclaimed, "You're finished so early!" or when Chef declared my chocolates to be the prettiest and people gasped and clapped, but I kind of beamed the whole way home. Chef's doing or not, the grade could only help the terrifying mid-semester evaluation in pastry next week.
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| My (slightly chef-assisted) muscadines and pralinés |
Thursday
Chef Poupard began our morning by making asparagus in a puff pastry with a mushroom flan. He followed it with braised lamb chops and leek cannelloni (leek stuffed with mashed potatoes), ending with chocolate fondant and pistachio ice cream for dessert. Surprising us all, he spent no time talking about the Île-de-France region, probably because we were living in it and its cuisine tends to be a melange of all of French regions. The asparagus was wonderful--just the smell of it cooking had my mouth watering all through class.
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| Asparagus puff pastry and mushroom flan Lamb chops and leek cannelloni Chocolate fondant and pistachio ice cream |
Our next class was the cuisine practicum but it didn't being until 6:30 PM. I used my free afternoon to visit Dehillerin and buy long tweezers (good for the delicate placement of food on a plate), a triangle scraper (good for tabling chocolate), and kitchen scissors after someone took mine earlier in the week (the school sold them for 22€; Dehillerin had some for less than 6€). Back at the school, we got through the lamb chops in practicum quickly--another dish far too easy to be on the final exam.
Friday
The next morning we had our pastry practicum with Chef Olivier, back from his vacation in India and acting unusually chipper. He cranked out six Douceur Chocolat (Heavenly Chocolate) cakes--a hazelnut dacquoise sponge cake covered in the crispy rocher filling and then topped with chocolate mousse, a milk chocolate disk, more chocolate mousse, and another chocolate disk. It had well earned its name.
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| Douceur Chocolat |
I looked forward to the practicum afterwards to prove to myself that I could temper chocolate without the help of the chef. We had Chef Pascal--someone who terrified me the first time that I had him but then kind of grew on me later--for the first time since we were in basic pastry. My half of the room, usually the slower ones, got a head start when the other half of the room discovered that someone had poured salt into their bowl of sugar and they all had to remake their dacquoise. The chocolate tempering went well, too--mine wasn't as shiny as Chef Olivier's--but Pascal's only critique of my cake was that the disk layers were too thick. The rocher filling was by far the best part. I saved what I had left over and another student gave me hers, and then I ate it for breakfast the next morning with a spoon. Vive la France!
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| My thick-disk Douceur Chocolat |
After the practicum we joined the other cuisine students in a demonstration with Chef Caals on the Champagne region. While I absolutely loved the leek and Chaource cheese tart starter, the main course combined two of the things that I hate the most about French cuisine (after aspic jelly): vegetable flans and fish mousseline. The sole fillet was stuffed with pureed whiting fillet and the flan was made of oyster mushrooms, creating something that had a nasty texture, disgusting color, and bland flavor. The madeleines for dessert were nice and the Champagne sorbet finished too late for the tasting.
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| Leek and Chaource cheese tart; Sole fillet and whiting mousseline paupiettes with mushroom flan; Champagne sorbet and madeleines |
Saturday
Our cuisine practicum was the only class of the day but didn't begin until 6:30 PM. Chef had three practicums that day and was as anxious as we were to get out quickly. I was the cuisine assistant all week which up to this point hadn't been too difficult. When I picked up our class food trays from the basement kitchen, however, I noticed that we were missing the whiting fillet, we had turbot fish instead of sole, and the principal sauce ingredient, Champagne, was missing. The basement kitchen chef said that our chef had it, but when I ran up the three flights of stairs to the classroom, our chef insisted that I needed to recheck the refrigerator in the basement.
Meanwhile, our chef managed to switch out the turbot for cod, splitting it with the class next door who was doing the same dish and having the same issues of missing ingredients. Returning to the basement, I searched in vain for the missing box of ingredients until both chefs from upstairs joined me and found it in another refrigerator (to which students don't have access). Running up the stairs again I finally joined the rest of my group, but when I went to get my cod, they were all gone. Our chef had miscounted and given mine to the class next door. Some classmates offered to share some of their fillets, but this recipe is an exam dish and I knew that if I didn't practice filleting the fish myself I would definitely pull it on exam day. For the third time in the first half-hour I made the trip down to the basement and back up again, cod in hand.
Fortunately I was able to clean my fish in record time--Chef Caals showed us a nifty little trick for quickly ripping off all of the skin by hand--and I finished everything last as usual, but not as far behind as I thought that I would. It helped that we shared the preparation of the flan and mousseline--as we do with most recipes that involve using the classroom's one food processor or blender--although the other assistant threw away all of the leftover flans before I plated. The flans were terrible anyhow--overcooked in addition to being just a gross recipe--and nobody wanted to take them home, so someone whom the chef had just evaluated handed me her flan to finish my plate.
That evening while most Parisians that I passed on my way home were bundled in jackets and scarves and the outdoor seating areas were empty, I wore a t-shirt and savored the lovely breeze from the cold front blowing in, a beautiful relief from the steamy, sweaty kitchen. Sunday morning dawned cold and cloudy, and on my walk from the metro station to the church I caught a scent for the first time--fall. Saint-Denis has more trees than Paris, and the sidewalks were littered with damp, rotting leaves. It was... lovely.
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