Author Archives: chriswardpress

Vignette: Random Thoughts on Being a Plongeur

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

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*****

Chef discovered honey yesterday. Now all the saucepans, ladles, plates, spoons and staff are covered with the bloody stuff, and it’s my job to scrape it off and flush it down the sink. And even I have limits, let me tell you.

*****

I have a favorite moan where I explain at tedious length that I have a real job, here look at my hands, that’s washing-up hands for you not the damp-but-otherwise-perfect model items you see in the Fairy Liquid adverts. Peeling skin, that’s washing-up hands for you; holes the size of Ecuador in my knuckles, that’s washing-up hands for you.

*****

Oh yes, and if you’re the person who stuck your chewing gum to your coffee cup saucer the other day – step out the back round by the dustbins and wait for me, would you? I’ll be the one carrying the baseball bat.

*****

Vignette: Soirée Vigneron and Stagiaires

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

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We did 98 covers last night for our ‘Soirée champagne’ – six courses starting with Carpaccio de St Jacques and finishing with moelleux de chocolat. We’ve been doing the prep for this for two or three days and it all went well, but I didn’t get out of the joint until gone half-past one this morning; the waitrons were still there when I turned out the light in the plonge, poor things.I often wonder what waiters think, in the same way you wonder what your dog is thinking. I reckon it goes something like this: “Hmm, where’s my arse gone? I’ll have a quick look with my left hand….nope, nothing. I know, I’ll try my right hand…nope. Ah, I know! (light bulb pops up over head) – I’ll search for my arse with BOTH hands…nope, still nothing.”Not that I’m trying to disparage waiters, you understand. They do a good enough job of that for themselves. Like, “Scrape the plates into the bin before you give them to me.” Last night I kept a 2.5 litre ice cream carton handy to dredge the bits of food and salad leaves and slices of bread out of my sink – just the ‘morceaux’ they’d left on the plates. How can you think you’ve scraped and stacked a plate when there’s a half-inch gap in the middle where it’s still covered with cheese, bread and mâche, lamb’s ear lettuce?Luckily for me I had a stagaire assigned to plate removal duty; washing 800 plates is hard enough, but carrying them all back out into the kitchen as well would be impossible. And, for once, after a few kickings and repeated explanations (that’s right, dry them AFTER they’ve been through the dishwasher…) he did OK.And luckily for me the Seconde de Cuisine and the Chef de Partie (entrées) came and helped dry the cutlery; 1,600 knives, forks and spoons take a LONG time to wash and even longer to dry.It’s a lot of plates and cutlery because they all had amuse bouches, starters (two plates), main course (two plates), cheese and pudding (a plate and a soufflée dish, chef doing his special raspberry soufflées for pudding). Which means 100 x 8 = 800 plates plus all the batterie, the saucepans and what have you to assemble all this. Busy night for me. I was reading a restaurant review the other day where I was invited to have pity on the poor plongeurs who between the three of them have to do up to 600 plates a night (a fourth one does the pots and pans). Slackers.The thing which takes most of my time is taking the cleaned pots and plates back out into the kitchen, especially difficult when the five cooks are working an assembly line to plate up those 1000 dinners and you can’t get by them but have to anyway because there’s simply no room anywhere in the plonge for the next load of stuff that’s about to come steaming out of the machine. Luckily chef and his seconde and the new chef de partie are all professional enough to take an armful of stuff out with them when they pass by, which helps a lot.The stagaires don’t, of course. We have a new one who Knows Everything – he explained his recipe which he’d invented by himself and which was his recipe and he had designed it all by himself and which was his recipe (etc…) for a dish which involves slicing a choux bun in half, sandwiching in a boule of glace vanille, putting it on a plate decorated with a little creme anglaise, adding a few more similar buns and then covering them with hot chocolate.The silence which followed the announcement of this Great New Recipe was broken by Chef saying, “So, profiteroles then?”And then he insisted on speaking English to me all night. Very, very bad English, presumably on the grounds that my French is so appalling only everyone else in the restaurant can understand it. So when someone arrives in the plonge with a hot saucepan they normally cry, “Chaud!” to warn me it’s hot. This one arrived shouting, “Cold!” I thought he was trying to make a joke, but it turned out he thought “Cold!” means “Hot”. He has an English exam on Wednesday, apparently, and offered me €100 to sit it for him…Anyway. So I finished late. And chef insisted I eat two of his soufflées which were, frankly, delicious. Choose them if they’re on the menu.

Vignette: Power cut

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

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Last night was fun; six tables reserved, about 25 covers and we’re halfway through serving the starters at 2030. I’ve just finished cleaning up the batterie of saucepans and whatnot from the prep and have half-drained my pots ‘n’ pans sink when the power goes off. I re-plug the sink and wander into the kitchen, where Chef is checking the fuses. I check my fuse box in the Plonge and it’s not us, so I go up the drive and look up and down the street. The traffic lights aren’t working, so it isn’t just us. In fact, it later turned out that about a million people throughout Provence had their electricity cut off because of a forest fire.I collect my bike lamp and back in the kitchen we’re working by emergency exit lamps, torches, cigarette lighters and candles, and continue to do so until 2200. At about 2130 Chef comes to tell me that the emergency puit, the well-water supply has failed so that quarter sink of muddy brown water I’ve been using for the past hour is all there is. I use a sieve to strain out the big bits every now and then, and the Plonge gradually fills up with plates and saucepans.But the service goes well and quite a lot of extra customers arrive when they work out that (a) they can’t cook themselves because they’re on all-electric deals, and (b) the restaurant down the road (us) cooks with gas so will have hot food. We light the restaurant with lots of candles and it’s very romantic for the customers. The Patissiers even find an old silver candelabra to light their workspace. I work by the light of my bike lamp.Then at 10pm the ‘leccy comes back on, and I push everything I’ve stacked up through the dishwasher. I’d just been discussing with Chef whether to come back in the morning or afternoon tomorrow, assuming the power ever comes back on again and this isn’t just the end of the world – not a prospect I was relishing (coming back tomorrow, my half-day off, not the end of the world).Chef sends me a stagaire to carry stuff back out into the kitchen, a very needed helper considering I have three hours worth of washing up to do in one hour. This particular stagaire is stupid even by stagaire standards; finding nothing to do during the power cut, he literally stood in a corner of the room next to the plonge, wedged between the wine fridges, for 45 minutes without moving. Weird.He also thinks that the best way to clear the trays that hold the plates I put into the machine is bit by bit, picking things out of the two or three cleaned trays and leaving stuff in each one; I fiercely tell him to clear one tray at a time and then give it back to me so I can put more stuff into the machine, and he takes this advice badly – as he always does. I’ve tried telling him before that now he’s in the kitchen he has to work by kitchen rules, but he doesn’t believe me; he assumes he’s due the same respect and so on that he got in his former life (he’s 38 and a former accountant for the Epargne, the big French savings bank). He refuses to believe that, in the kitchen, as a stagiaire he’s less than nothing and even I, the Plongeur, out-rank him. The other night he refused to believe this so much that he shouted at me in my own Plonge that I had no right to tell him to take stuff out with him and put it back on the shelves if he didn’t feel like it, he didn’t see why he had to do things like that if he didn’t want to. This allowed me to shout back at him and wag my finger in his face, as well as using lots of French and English swear words. He didn’t speak to me for two days after this, which was a blessed relief – he only knows how to talk crap.Anyway. Then the Patissier came along to help, too, having finished the puddings (and bringing me a plate of strawberries and almond ice-cream too, which was nice of him) so things really sped along.In the end we were out of the building by 2330, about the same time we’d have finished normally. I just hope the finance director doesn’t hear that we managed to do most of a service without water or electricity – he’ll want us to do it like that every night.

Vignette: My First Day in Avignon

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

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It’s great not starting work until 9 am, and then in a place that’s a two-minute drive up the road. I didn’t have to get up until 8 and it was already light. Chef was just arriving when I rolled up and it’s straight to work, really. It’s a quiet week until the weekend, when the groups start arriving – mostly people celebrating the holidays I guess, and in fine style too.So this week I’m working through a number of cleaning jobs, starting today with the dustbins and then the copper pans.The dustbins are those giant wheely bins they use in factories; dumpsters, they call them in the States. Five of them, wheeled round the back, hosed down and then scrubbed out with a special cleaner, a broom and lots of elbow grease. It takes me a good hour.Then mix up a special ‘pâté’ to clean the copper pans, all 30 of them – gros sel (coarse sea salt), flour and vinegar: equal quantities of the dry and then add vinegar until it makes a paste. Use this to scrub the pans until they gleam in and out, handles too.This goes on all day. We do a very small service for lunch, just half a dozen people, but I’m fully occupied until I finally get home at 4. And I really enjoyed it. We had a great lunch, eating up what the customers haven’t scoffed so today it’s terrine de foie gras, terrine de port aux pistaches, lots of turkey steaks and pasta, and some of chef’s fabulous chocolate mousses – there’s a secret ingredient in them which he says is absolutely not chopped up grapes. Hmm. Delicious anyway – and if this is how the staff eat just imagine what the customers get.Back this evening; chef points out that because I haven’t dried the saucepan handles properly each one has a very fine film of rust on it already – mild steel handles, you see. I say I’ll go and do them again but he says not to bother. So I ask myself what I should really do, and throughout the evening take them all and clean them again. Now they gleam. This, I think, was the right thing to do. He seems pleased.We eat again this evening, finishing up what we couldn’t manage at lunch and really I have to waddle afterwards. This stuff is good.And it was that easy and non-eventful really; no bollockings, even when I made a mistake, no shouting, nothing horrible. Just smiles, compliments, pleasant greetings. All really weird. 

Vignette: Real Work

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

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I actually enjoy the washing up. No, really, I do. There is, to me, immense satisfaction in making something clean. Really clean. As in, cleaner than the last person who cleaned it left it. So today I have at some of the aluminium oven pans which are, shall we say politely, a tad neglected. Five kilos of elbow grease later and voila, clean. Cleaner anyway, some of them are a tad beyond hope.And then Chef gets me to clean up the salmon he’s just brought in. Cut out the gills, scrape off the scales, give them a good wash.Next, the encornets – baby squids. These are even more fun: pull out the insides, peel off the tissue-thin skin membrane, separate out the body parts, cut off the tentacles, remove the cartilage. All very satisfying.And finally the greatest challenge, 50 ecrevisses, small fresh water lobsters for want of a better word. 50 live ecrevisses, that is. The secret here is to keep them in the fridge for an hour or two first, which calms them right down. Then, you remove that vein that runs up their spines (or where their spines would be if they weren’t crustaceans) by gripping and gently twisting the middle paddle in their tails and pulling the whole thing out in one go – it looks rather blue in the middle, a navy blue compared to the very dark blue of the ink of the squids.About 20 ecrevisses into the pile, the heat of the kitchen starts waking them up and they begin to fight each other. And then one of them decides to fight back against me and pinches my finger, so I finish them off working in the walk-in fridge – with a good few handfuls of ice cubes in their container to help calm them down a bit more. You can’t blame them really, I suppose – how would you react to someone trying to pull out your intestinal tract via your bottom?Yesterday I got to do some vegetables too: endives – just pull off the dirty outer leaves – and then some carrots and courgettes, cut en biseau – basically, round off all the sharp edges of the pyramid-shaped cuts to make sure the clients don’t hurt their delicate mouths.And we eat well at lunchtime again: roti de veau stuffed with foie gras; roast chicken; pate de campagne; and then a special huge brioche stuffed with sweeties of some kind.It’s not all hard work, you know.

Chapter 30: Result!

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

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I now  have a CAP Cuisine. Yes, I’m a qualified chef. Believe it or not.Those results in detail:WARD Chris né(e) le 23/10/1960

APPROVISIONNEMENT ET ORGANISATION 15.00 /20
VIE SOCIALE ET PROFESSIONNELLE 16.00 /20
COMMERCIALISATION&D.P.CULINAIR 12.50 /20
FRANCAIS 09.50 /10
HISTOIRE-GEOGRAPHIE 09.00 /10
MATHEMATIQUES,SCIENCES 14.50 /20
LANGUE VIVANTE ETRANGERE : ANGLAIS 20.00 /20
PRODUCTIONS CULINAIRES 175.0 /200
TOTAL de points 394,50 ADMIS
 

ADMIS means I pass. The numbers don’t all add up because some subjects have a ‘coefficient’ multiplier which makes them worth more than others.The important one, though, is ‘Productions Culinaires’, worth 200 points all on its own (out of 400). Fail that and you fail everything. Pass that and one other thing and you have your qualification. And effectively 175 out of 200 means I’m very, very proud of what I achieved. I note that my ‘Commercialisation’ note of 12.5 was the one given by Christian Etienne, he who doesn’t get on with my restaurant chef. Lowest mark of all. Huh.20/20 for English. Ha!Only 15/20 for ‘Approvisionnement et organization’, how I organised myself while cooking the food that scored 17.5/20. Bit of a surprise that, I’d expect it to be the other way round if anything. Still.Ah. And then the secretary of the Ecole d’Hotellerie d’Avigon where I did my CAP called to tell me that I got the best mark of all my class in our exams. 57 students in all, our class, the other adult class and all the teenagers who took it at the same time. And that my 17.5/20 for the ‘culinary production’ is the highest mark they’ve ever had in the exam.So yeah, I’m pleased with that. Proud, even. Good on me.Cool.

Chapter 29: The Exam

10 Sunday Aug 2014

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30: The examIt’s been around 20 years since I had that Exam Morning feeling – nervous, trying to read notes at the last minute, a feeling of dread in the pit of your stomach because you’re sure the one thing that’s definitely going to come up is the one that you didn’t revise.I have a week – well, three days – of exams starting on Monday, when I’m normally at school. So up at 5 am this morning to leave at 6 for a 0745 exam start all the way over in Cavaillon, about 30 kilometres away. The plan was to meet Pascal at the bus station and take a bus there, but when we arrive there appear to be No Buses Today. I don’t have a car any more since I sold it to pay my school fees, so we end up taking a €40 taxi to our exam to make sure we get there in time.And then the exam doesn’t get underway until 0830 because they were waiting for one of the examiners and two of the students. What? If you’re not there on time for your exam, everyone else will wait? What nonsense.And I then end up waiting all morning to do my English oral exam because of that missing examiner. At midday there are three of us who haven’t been examined yet and the two examiners who did bother turning up have gone, so I wander round and find the secretary’s office. Ah, he says, kindly interrupting his chat with the missing examiners, sorry, your examiner didn’t turn up so come back next time.Next time I say? Tomorrow?No, he says. Next year.Next year? I repeat, a little loudly it must be said, and then launch into a big rant. He has the good sense to look a little uncomfortable and, reluctantly, agrees with me about the injustice of the situation which, unlike him, I do not think can be resolved with a shrug of the shoulders.I appeal to the two examiners still there and ask them to examine us. There’s only three left, I explain, it won’t take long.Ah, says the woman reluctantly, but you have to have 20 minutes to study the text and then 20 minutes each to talk about it so that will take me an hour.Right, I say, I’ll go first without any warm-up which means it’ll only take 40 minutes. Deal?Reluctant deal.So into the exam room and she gives me a text to read out loud about mountaineers leaving rubbish on Mount Everest, which I read through pretty quickly.OK, she says a bit nervously – I’m starting to think that my French is better than her English and she may not understand everything I say in English.. Do you think people leaving rubbish lying around is much of a problem here in Provence?I give her both barrels about litterbugs, whom I hate, and gabble on for five minutes.Right, she says, a little dazed. That seems to be fine. You can go now.Total time elapsed: 8 minutes. I’d better get a good mark for this.Tuesday’s the same story. It’s the presentations of our history or geography projects. I’ve done the influence of geography on food (a subject which I now teach for a living), and the importance of the press in promoting the restaurant industry for my history project.The order in which we’re to be examined is posted outside the exam room, and several students haven’t turned up when it’s their go – we were all supposed to be in place by 9. My turn comes up three times, only for me to be invited to wait as those who’ve turned up late can now have their turn. Same as yesterday – I think frankly, as far as I’m concerned, if you ain’t there on time for your exam then 0/20 and tough shit, organise yourself idiot. It’s a big part of cooking, you know, organisation. If you can’t organise yourself out of bed I don’t want to have you mucking about with my millefeuille d’asperge, thankyouveryymuch.After lunch we do our written French exam and then maths. For the latter I pull out my mobile phone to use as a calculator, as we’ve been told we can. Except this examiner thinks I’m going to be using it to ask someone else the answers and tells me to put it away, so I have to do all the calculations by hand. Luckily they’re not too difficult, but still. I haven’t done a formal maths class in….hmmm…30 years now.Wednesday and we have our practical cookery exam this morning, then the written paper this afternoon.The practical exam is a Big Deal: Fail it, you fail the entire exam. Fail any other exam, you can make up the points exam. It’s ‘Eliminatoire’, as they say here.We have four hours to make fricassée d’agneau hongroise (i.e. Lamb stew with paprika in it) with riz créole (rice with a few bits of pepper in it) and choux chantilly (cream buns).I had a really panicky moment at the start when I thought I wasn’t going to have enough time. I tore, almost literally, through my lamb shoulder (thank you, Chef, for making me practise on so many at work), turned all my veg for the stock and the service, got it all squared away and the stock on the boil and then turned around to see the other students in the kitchen with me all busy deboning their lamb shoulders. Eh? I thought, what have I forgotten to do first? how come they’re only doing their lamb shoulders now when I finished mine half an hour ago? What should I have done first that they’ve all done instead?The observing Chef is a friend of my restaurant Chef. I casually asked, when he passed to observe the state of cleanliness of my workstation, in a jokey voice ‘What are they doing that I’ve forgotten? Ha ha ha….’ It turns out that they were taking nearly an hour each to debone a single shoulder, and hadn’t even thought about veg yet. Which was a relief. ‘Don’t worry,’ said friendly Chef, ‘you’re doing fine.’I had also thought to check my ingredients – we get given a box of what we need at the start – and I was missing an onion and the paprika so called for them, then asked for a couple of rondeaux (large, shallow saucepans with lids) for my fricassée and the rice. Two hours later Nassima from my class comes along and tries to snaffle one, on the grounds that she needs it. In fact she just picked it up from under my counter and started to walk off with it. Get yer own, I growled, think ahead. She wasn’t happy and said she’d complain to ‘someone’. Well tough shit. Get yourself together at the start of service, it’s all there in the year-long course we’ve been doing. Try paying attention, miss, and think of this as payback for all the grief you’ve cause me this year…Yes, this was the one who kept swapping name labels on dishes in the chilling room to take my dish as her own. Well, now it counts karma’s a bitch, miss.The cooking went well, too well almost. I had lots of time to turn my vegetables nicely as required by the photos in our text books, to make some decent stock, to carefully time everything so that it came off the heat at the same time.But in the end I had to send my stuff out first when I’d been anticipating sending it 15 minutes and three people later. Again, Someone Else wasn’t ready so Friendly Chef asked me to step up and keep the examiners happy.So I sent it all too quickly, forgot to add the final salt to my rice and didn’t put enough sauce on the plate. And my choux buns weren’t dry enough so I should have cooked them longer. Huh. Luckily as I was carrying the choux out to table, Friendly Chef stopped me and asked, almost casually, ‘Are you planning on serving them without a dusting of icing sugar? That’s very brave of you…’ Icing sugar was listed on the recipe and, hence, a vital ingredient. Thanks again, Chef.Still. Eh?And then I got Christian Etienne as my Marketing Presentation chef. He knows and dislikes my restaurant chef – they’re rivals in Avignon – and when he learned where I’d been working all year immediately wrote down my mark even before I’d started my Marketing spiel. It was my lowest score in the entire exam, 12/20 – my average was 16.5.We had lunch in the school canteen in Cavaillon and then did the written paper this afternoon. It was harder than I thought, demanding a greater knowledge of traditional Escoffier-type dishes than I have. I said that the mystery missing ingredient in the Sole Dieppoise recipe was fumet de poisson (it’s cream), but did remember that it takes 20 minutes to cook a fumet (not 2 hours as everyone else told me afterwards).I think I’ve passed, and I’m certainly not going to do it again if I haven’t. I’ll just lie instead and say I passed, it’s easier and cheaper and I’ve never been asked to produce an exam certificate in my life.Restaurant and School chefs both tell me later that they’re sure I’ve passed, based on what they’ve ‘heard’ from the examiners (Avignon is a small town when it comes to chefs), but more than that I don’t know.Three weeks until the results.

Chapter 28: Week 26: Last day at school

08 Friday Aug 2014

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Last day at school today. We cook poulet chasseur, chicken in mushroom, tomato and wine sauce, pommes au four (roast potatoes) this morning and do it without having to be told much. This afternoon we spend going over a few basic techniques, ideas and problems to revise for our exam next week. Chef says he’s pleased with us and doesn’t think anyone will fail. I’m nervous, not because I think I’ll fail but because I don’t think I’ll succeed well, which I want to do both for him and for Jean-Remi my restaurant chef.I have mixed feelings about the year; I’m very glad I went, but the whole process has literally worn me down to a state of permanent and total exhaustion. I’d originally intended to go on and do a second year straight away in Patisserie or Traiteur, but (a) I don’t think I’ll ever be good enough to be a patissier and (b) sod that for a way to kill yourself, Armagnac is much more fun.Really, 10 months of having just one day of rest a week is not recommended, don’t try this at home. Tonight I’ve just got back from school half an hour early and, unlike last week, don’t have to go to work. Last week I got only Thursday off and spent all that writing two ‘dossiers’ – reports for my exams. And not cooking exams either, I have to do French, Maths, Physics, Geography and, best of all, English. My first exam, in fact, next Monday – a 20 minute English oral exam. I shall be complaining if I don’t get 20/20.So, what next?Well, Les Agassins (not the Chef, the management) are buggering me about this year over contracts and it looks like I simply won’t be able to work there after September for financial reasons (i.e. they won’t pay me). Much as I’d love to stay, it’s really time to move on. I don’t want to let Chef down now so I think I’m going to do my very, very best to finish the season unless something super-startling turns up.Then my plan is to find something, anything to do until the winter and then go and work in the Alps for the season there. Dunno if I want to do a restaurant or be a Chalet cook-and-maid. The latter attracts me more but I would probably learn more doing the former. We’ll see.Still, back in the restaurant I’m now a proper cook. Chef de partie des entrées, it says on the newest line of my CV. I’ve even managed to persuade Chef to put something on the menu – smoked quail eggs. OK, it’s only one item in a dish with a number of other ingredients, but hey, you have to start somewhere. We smoke the eggs ourselves and serve two (one cut into quarters, the other plopped inside the star-shape created) in a nest of alfalfa sprouts surrounded by ‘waves’ of smoked salmon. Looks very pretty, the nest presentation was my idea, too.Yesterday we did 70 covers for lunch, me, Fabien – the new Second de Cuisine – and Carole, the stagiaire patissier who, for once, is within simmering distance of competent. It was Chef’s half-day off (he chooses carefully) and I’m proud to have gotten through it without forgetting or f-ing up anything. The waiters, on the other hand, were all over the place – especially when the group of 13 from Radio France (who should have sat down to eat at 12h30 but who arrived at 13h30) announced that they were going to be eating outside, necessitating 20 minutes of table and cutlery moving. A-holes, I didn’t even send out their starters until gone 2 o’clock.Tonight was even worse. Everyone turned up at half past seven, when they normally arrive between 8 and 9 in discrete lumps. I was in the middle of farting about with my Trilogies (dried tomato, goat cheese and aubergine caviar in layers) and hadn’t even put my amuse bouches in place.Luckily Chef was there to jump in and do my orders for me and he managed to do just about everything while I was just cutting up tuna for six tartares. Embarrassing and an indication of just how much I have to learn still, notably Get Your Arse In Gear.If it had been the plonge I wouldn’t have had a problem, partly because the mise en place is easy (Squeezy bottle full of washing up liquid? I’m good to go!) and partly because, having done it for 18 months, I know how to do it quickly. I’ve been in the kitchen doing services less than 18 days, so that’s a good excuse. Reason. Whatever.Still, it felt shitty not keeping up. I later learn that 45 covers last night didn’t leave until 4 am in the morning, inconsiderate a-holes. It was a wedding party, so in France 4 am is a pretty early finish. This is why I’m glad I’m not a waiter. Still, I’ve learned the very hard way that getting my mise en place in place BEFORE service starts works well, along with putting all the amuse bouches onto dishes before service starts. That way I can keep up with the flow of orders, I think.Lunch is easier as the menu has only two starters – evenings there are up to six starters, depending on what kinds of guests we have in the hotel, which can go out as Menu items (miserly portions) or à  la carte (splendiferously generous portions).Then again, I managed to embed a box containing litre of cream inside €180′s worth of foie gras tonight (although it was Chef’s fault), so perhaps I should shut up.School is only the beginning; I’ve had a great opportunity and feel in turns over-confident and full of self-doubt. I see what I can do compared to some of my classmates and I’m clearly better than them; then my chef takes over my station and does in five minutes what I’ve failed to do in half an hour. And he does it better. That level of competence can only come with experience and I’d like to gain it here but know I won’t.

Chapter 27: Week 25: A little cheffy common sense

08 Friday Aug 2014

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If you’ve never started your day by sticking your hand up a chicken’s bottom I heartily recommend it as a way of waking yourself up, clearing a muzzy head and getting yourself to the head of the queue for the loo.Well, it’s not that bad really. Today we’re doing ‘Habiller une volaille affilée’, dressing a drawn piece of poultry – in this case, a chicken. Volaille almost always means chicken, but can mean turkey, guinea fowl, even rabbit – which is very handy for serving rabbit to those who think they won’t like it but who will, once they’ve tried it. As in ‘volaille surprise’ – which looks like breasts of chicken wrapped in bacon and served with a tomato sauce. The surprise, of course, is that it’s rabbit not chicken.We learn how to ‘vider’, empty the chicken – most of the guts are gone, it’s just the heart, lungs and delicious liver left. I do like a good chicken liver salad, sautéed until they’re just pink inside and deglazed with some raspberry vinegar.Tasty.And we also get to learn how to tie up a chicken with the giant darning needles we all bought at the start of the year because they were on the list of ‘must have’ kit. Actually I didn’t buy mine, my Restaurant Chef gave me one of his since he had several spares. He’s kind like that. We learn how to do this even though it’s now been taken off the list of required things to know for our CAP exam – nowadays all chickens are tied up with elastic string which is cheaper and quicker. You can also slip off the elastic to poke around inside an allegedly PAC, Prêt à  Cuire (ready to cook) chicken to make sure it’s been properly emptied before seasoning the inside and then slipping the elastic back on to hold it all tightly together. The idea is to hold the legs and wings tightly together so that you have as compact an item as possible which will cook evenly – if you leave extraneous wing tips and feet sticking out they’ll cook more quickly and even burn before the rest of the bird is done. Perhaps not too important at home, but in a restaurant where you serve every bit of the chicken, it counts.It’s just a detail and one I hadn’t really thought about before; I’ve bought hundreds, even thousands of chickens in the past all tied up like this and never really known what to do with their bondage gear – leave them tied up, set them free, what’s the difference? It never says anything on the label about the string so I’ve always considered it optional. But a little cheffy common sense points to the right answer, so leave it on it is.We roast these chickens – and thanks to my Restaurant Chef I already have this one down pat; 15 minutes on one thigh, 15 minutes on the other, 15 minutes on its tummy and finish off with 15 minutes on its back to crisp up the skin over the breast. This avoids cooking the breast too much, exposing the thighs to more heat – when we do a dish with a chicken cut up into portions we cook the breast for 12 minutes and the thighs for 15, since they need it more.To go with the roasts we do Pommes Dauphine, a mix of pâte à choux and mashed potato, both of which we’re now expected to be able to produce without any further information from our School Chef. He wants us to add 400 grammes of mash to a choux pastry based on a quarter of a litre of liquid, which ends up as a roughly tant pour tant mix – equal amounts of each. My Restaurant Chef thinks this is wrong, we should be putting a quarter choux to three quarters spud. Last year’s Seconde de Cuisine had it the other way round. Oh, how the French do love to argue about recipes. All agree though that these are piped into attractive shapes on a baking sheet and baked, unlike last week’s recipe in which we piped a different pastry/potato mix into a vat of oil.Lunch, and the fried fish in the school canteen at lunchtime has gone through all four levels of the Kitchen Kids ‘Make it inedible’ regime, and they’ve succeeded once again. France’s future cooks – I’m bringing sandwiches. Luckily, most of these individuals won’t be let loose on my lunch without the supervision of a proper chef.We start this afternoon with a nap. Sorry, with our Hygiène class, talking all about Water and its various roles. Its first role is Plastique, one of those Faux Amis French words – it doesn’t mean plastic. Indeed, I’ve never really got any sort of handle as to what it means. In this case it means that water aids in the construction of our billions of cells and in repairing wounds, so I guess it means something to do with building. Water also has, it turns out, a role to play in blood. Yes, it’s the water in blood that makes it so liquid. Well, you learn something every day. If you’re 16 and stupid, that is. For a classroom full of adults it’s not the best way to start an afternoon in a sunny classroom after lunch which may have included a glass or two of red wine. Well, unless you like to start your afternoons with a siesta, that is, which it seems most of us do.

Chapter 26: Week 24: A white exam

07 Thursday Aug 2014

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More omelets this morning, followed by an ‘examen blanc’ this afternoon. ‘Blanc’ as in ‘pretend’ – so a ‘mariage blanc’ is a fake marriage undertaken for the purposes of gaining French citizenship, a ‘nuit blanc’ is a sleepless night and so on.The omelets are interesting because we get to use poitrine salée, salted pork belly or streaky bacon, as we say in English. The French have a cut of cured pork called ‘bacon’ which isn’t bacon at all; it’s more like dried ham, similar to but drier than prosciutto or Parma. Bacon as in sandwiches can be bought but is usually sliced so thinly and so filled with water that if you try to fry it you end up with shoe lace-sized strips of tastelessness.In the restaurant, and at school today, we’re provided with 30 cm square chunks of salted pork belly. At the restaurant we cut it up to make lardons, bacon bits, so I’ve done this lesson already – as so often now, my restaurant chef prepares me at work the week before school by putting items on the weekly menu or staff meal list so I can practise beforehand. So I’ve already skinned and chopped up my fair share of poitrines this week, and have learned how to remove the skin pretty efficiently with my new désosseur, my deboning knife.I now own several knives, in fact; the désosseur, a 25 cm chef’s knife – both Spanish Arcos brand knives with which I’m very pleased indeed. There’s a good Coutellerie, a knife shop in Avignon just round the corner from Les Halles indoor market and the coutellier gives sensible advice and doesn’t simply recommend that you buy the most expensive knives he sells. I explained that I was starting at cookery school and wanted something durable, decent and above all cheap and he showed me the Arcos range. Spanish steel is, he says, very good quality, plenty of carbon to make sharpening easier but not so much that the blades rust. So Arcos it is.I’m less pleased with the Sabatier filet de sole knife I picked up in Metro while shopping with Chef one day. Sabatier has a good reputation, in the UK anyway, but in fact there are different grades of knife made by different branches of the Sabatier family. The filleting knife I bought simply won’t keep an edge, even with enthusiastic use of a good steel (‘fusil’ in French, the same word for rifle – it comes from the name for the ramrod used in the past to ram gunpowder and bullets into muzzle-loading guns) so I’m going to buy a new one one of these days.All of which is academic because, even though I knew I’d be skinning pork belly this morning and doing an exam this afternoon, I’ve left all my knives at home. Duh. I realised quite early on during the day – when I started setting up on my workstation, in fact – and initially resolved to catch the bus home to pick them up. But then I’d miss the morning, so borrowed knives here and there and ended up with enough blunt objects to keep me going. Why don’t people sharpen their knives? I have friends in the UK who bought a hugely expensive set of foreign knives – German, Swiss, Japanese, whatever – that have never been sharpened. I scared them by sawing at my wrist with the unsharp edge once, wondering how on earth I was going to kill myself with something so blunt.Anyway. Omelets and lunch out of the way it’s exam time. Chicken chasseur, tarte fine aux pommes – chicken in mushroom sauce and posh apple tart. Which calls for a decent-sized knife to cut the chicken into portions before frying it off, a sharp knife to slice mushrooms and the same sharp knife to peel and then thinly slice the apples. Oops.But I get through on borrowed knives and turn in my dishes. The format of the afternoon is similar to how our proper exam will run later this year: we’re given the recipes and a box of ingredients and told to get on with it, and are judged on lots of criteria. ‘Travail propre’ – work clean – is a big credo instilled in me by both my current chefs, and it’s something for which you can easily lose marks in the exam itself so I spend a fair amount of time just making sure my work surfaces are clean and tidy.We also get judged on our planning and the order in which we do things – so don’t start cutting up the meat, then do the apples, then back to the meat, then the veg. Do it all in a sensible order. But what is the correct order? We all spend the first few minutes of the exam pretending to write out a menu plan of what order things need to be done, but in reality we’re all furtively looking around wondering what everyone else will do.I start by cutting up my chicken and frying it off, and cutting up my veg while that’s happening. But when I look around about half the class are making their pastry first for their apple tart. Erk! Should I have done that first? Me and the others who’ve commenced with the chicken are obviously having doubts – as are those doing the pastry first.I plunge on with my plan, getting my chicken and veg fried off and into a casserole dish ready for the oven, then make my pastry and, while it’s blind baking, cut up my apples. Which I now see could be the wrong order – pastry, apples, veg, meat would be a more intelligent use of my cutting board. But then I wouldn’t be able to fry off my chicken while cutting up my veg.All this, I have come to realise, is a large part of what working in a professional kitchen is all about: planning, planning, planning. Checking through your ingredients box while reading the recipe to make sure you have everything you need, working out the most sensible order in which to cook things, making sure the cooking order gets everything onto the plate at the same time without keeping the vegetables cooked and waiting for the meat to arrive. I want it to be intuitive, but it’s not, certainly not at the start anyway.I have most trouble with the tarte fine – the apples should be sliced millimetre-thin and laid in pleasing circles on the surface of the tart, but slicing millimetre thin isn’t easy at the best of times. It’s less easy with a blunt, borrowed knife. Talk about failure of planning! Argh! But then I look around and see that some of my classmates aren’t even trying to slice their apples thinly, they’re just cutting their apples into eights. Man, does that look ugly, by comparison my tart is a work of art.After four hours of cooking we have 30 minutes to present a plate for each course, with points awarded for similarity to the photograph of the plate in our official text book. Which, of course, we’re not allowed to consult.So I get the sauce wrong by putting it both on and around the meat, my carrots are turned wrong – I’ve tried to be a smart arse and done the cut we use in the restaurant rather than the official one – and am reduced a further point by putting a sprig of parsley on top. Pretty? Not sanctioned.I end up with 13 – out of 20. For incomprehensible reasons the French almost always mark out of 20 rather than giving a percentage. Recently a stagiaire at the restaurant asked me what sort of mark Chef would give him at the end of his stage with us. “Four or five,” I replied. “Ah,”, he said, “here in France we mark out of 20, not 10.” “Oh,” I said, “I was marking out of 100.” Poor lamb, he believed me too. Stagiaires are so gullible.So. 65%. Not very good, I think, and only third-best in class. Then Chef spoils it all by saying that he’s marked us more severely than we would be marked in a proper exam. And then telling me that he’s marked me even more severely than the others because ‘I expect more from those like you who are capable of doing the best work’. Right. So that’d be, what, a 19 or 20 out of 20 in my real exam then? Neat. This may not be the effect he was trying to achieve.As for the correct order in which to do things, he’s cool with starting with either the pastry or the meat. The idea is to make us think about doing things logically and to have reasoned our way through why we’re doing them like that, not to say that there is a right and wrong order. Although he himself would have started with the pastry, he says.Harumph.