A quick note: I’d hoped to get this up to date during January when the restaurant was closed for a month. Unfortunately I went down with an ‘erisipel’, blood poisoning from streptococcal bacteria which apparently got in through my foot – my foot and leg swelled up enormously and I couldn’t walk for the first week of my break. Then I was simply ‘crevé’ as they say in French, completely exhausted and unable to get out of bed. I even had to sit down to brush my teeth, it was so tiring.
So, I did very little at all during my month off, although I did manage to get to school all but the first week of term. Doing so meant I spent the next three days lying down, recovering. The restaurant re-opened on Valentine’s Day, although we’re mostly doing just lunches at the moment, unless we get a group booking for evenings or weekends. And there’s just me and Chef working, too, apart from the 14th when we had a couple of ‘extras’ in to work the service. This means I get to do LOTS of prep and work in the kitchen during service, too. Luckily we’re not too busy right now so it’s not a major problem doing that AND the plonge. Chef will be hiring a new plongeur after Easter so I get to work full-time as ‘Chef de Partie des entrées’, now there’s posh.
OK, we now return you to your regularly-scheduled programming…

So scrambled eggs the hard way and cute puff-pastry baskets are on the menu this morning at school.
The hard way means cooking them over a bain-marie, same as doing a sauce hollandaise; in fact, Restaurant Chef has already taught me a much better method of doing things like this which need a bain marie according to the cook book – do them on the fourneau, that part of the cooker which I believe may be known as the ‘flat top’ in the US. Or perhaps it’s a reach-in – talk about two cuisines separated by a common language.
Anyway. RC’s patented method for cooking stuff which mustn’t get too hot is to put it on the edge of the fourneau and keep a hand on one side of the pan; when you smell burning flesh, the pan’s too hot so move it away from the heat a little until the sizzling noise dies down (NB: This is a joke, don’t try this one at home).
It works, too, for hollandaise and scrambled eggs, although the breakfast staff who actually cook the scrambled eggs at the hotel aren’t too keen on the idea of singeing their flesh…
At school, of course, we have to do this Properly with a capital ‘P’, so bains-marie are mounted all over the kitchen as we set to; it takes absolutely ages and ages to prepare eggs this way, I can’t imagine breakfast clients waiting this long, I think to myself as I stir and stir and stir, thinking of the faff if we had to do 48 covers this way. Still, as I’m learning today we have to do things the way they’re shown in our text book, not how you might think it’s better to do them in real life.
The scrambled eggs go into the puff-pastry baskets we made with the pate feuilleté we produced first thing this morning – détrempe then refrigeration, then battering in the butter and the first two fold, refrigeration, two folds, more refrigeration, two more folds, yet more refrigeration and then rolling it out to about a third of a centimetre thickness and cutting out the baskets and folding over the corners…it’s harder to do than it is to describe and it’s impossible to describe. But my baskets rise nicely, thanks to the practice I’ve had back in the restaurant making puff pastry – although the marble counter top there does make it easier to keep the pastry cool, I have to say.

(The scan here is from my notebook, the page where I copied SchoolChef’s diagram on how to make the puff pastry basket. I take all my notes in French – it helps me when I try to remember the French technical terms for what we’re doing and improves my written French, which is pretty rotten since I don’t actually write in French all that often. We were supposed to ‘use our imaginations’ in making the baskets, but we know by now that they have to resemble the pictures in the textbook or we get docked points.)
We make a little fondu de tomates to put on top of the scrambled eggs, giving us Paniers aux Oeufs Portuguese, which we send out to the self-service cafeteria for staff and students next door as a lunch entrée. We can eat in the cafeteria too, for €5 a week (four courses, usually, a starter, main course, cheese and pudding) but the quality is variable, depending on which class has been cooking which course; if we get the youngsters who are just starting out, it tends to be simple fare prepared…well, prepared below the standard you might like to find even for €5; if it’s our class, you’d be happy paying up to €6 <g>.
In fact, I’ve discovered that those of us doing the ‘continuing education’ course one day per week spend as much time in the kitchen in our one year as those doing the same course over two years (normally the 15-17-year-olds). They get one ‘TP’ – ‘Travail Pratique’ or ‘Practical work session’ per week, which lasts for the equivalent of one service or half a day – four hours. They’re also limited by law to working a 35-hour week – Restaurant Chef tells me that, when he did his training, they worked a 53 hour week (and, probably, also lived in a cardboard box in middle of t’ road) and did four or five TPs in their school’s restaurants and loved it, too. This story was easily topped earlier this summer (we heard it more than once from Chef over staff meals when he was telling the latest crop of stagiaires just how lucky they are) by our Second de Cuisine, Christian – he’s in his mid-50s, and when he started out on is apprenticeship at the age of 14 his first duty every morning was to fill the stoves with coal – yes, coal-fired stoves as used by Carème and Escoffier!
So, obviously: Young people today, blah blah blah…
Then it’s our ‘Droit’ class, Business Administration (Droit strictly translated means ‘Law’, but since French has the smallest vocabulary of any European language some words have to double up on meanings). As usual, we get 10 minutes worth of information spread out over an hour – teacher is more used to teaching recalcitrant 16-year-olds than attentive adults, and it shows. The hardest part of this class is staying awake – that and working out its relevance to cookery half the time: yes, it’s useful to know about the different types of limited companies one can form, but as I say, it’s 10 minutes worth of information. Then we discuss ‘Partenaires de l’Entreprise’ – clients,, suppliers, banks, the State, accountants…There is, I’m almost sure, a reason why we are being told this stuff.
Still.
Fumet de poisson this afternoon – how to make fish stock, which we do with the remnants of the rougets, the red mullets we trim, scale, gut and fillet. Again, this is something I’ve done at work – dégorger the bits (leave them in a bowl under running water to remove the blood), sweat the GA (Garniture Aromatique of onions, shallots, leeks, carrots and mushroom peelings), raidir the fish bones – sweat them a bit too – moisten with just enough white wine and water to cover the whole lot and simmer for just 20 minutes. I thought stocks took longer, but this is where we learn that yes, veal and beef stock take hours. Fumets take tens of minutes, though. We filter, re-boil and then put the fumet into the rapid chiller to bring its temperature down to under 10 degrees centigrade within two hours.
This fumet is the basis of the court mouillement we’re going to use to cook our filets of rouget; it turns out that the English for ‘court mouillement’ is ‘court bouillon’, which seems strange – replacing one French word with another. Court bouillons, according to both Chefs, are spicier than court mouillements, and the latter may also contain poshly-cut GA since it may be eventually served to clients.
We also turn carrots and turnips and cook them slowly in a little water, butter, salt and pepper – ‘Glacé à blanc’. The idea is not to colour them at all but to leave them with a nice, glossy finish. We achieve the same effect in the restaurant by blanching them as normal, then reheating and finishing them in hot water laced with a little olive oil, a process that is much easier as far as I’m concerned. Still, the text book says…
We’re also supposed to tourner our mushroom caps, giving them a sort of spiral finish. Hmm, is the conclusion here: no one, not even Chef, manages to do this one convincingly. Another one to practise at home.
We cook the rouget filets and reserve them, then reduce down the cooking juices to make a very nice sauce; the whole lot gets wrapped and chilled for lunch for tomorrow’s students, lucky devils, as Filets de Rouget Sauce Bonne Femme.
And even though we seem to have done lots today we have half an hour left to discuss ‘progressions’, sheets we need to fill out at the start of our exams showing what we plan on doing for the four and a half hours of the event in 15 minute sections. It’s quite hard to get your head around this idea to start with, but it is blindingly obviously important – you need to have worked out at the start if something is going to take three hours to cook, rather than realising this 15 minutes before you’re due to serve it. Chef gives us some blank forms and tells us to pick a few recipes out of our text books to practise on for homework.
So next week: Progressions and pork squares plus choux pastry.