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Chapter 15: Week 12: Self-examination

06 Sunday Jul 2014

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We have our first all-day test exam today, with written papers in the morning and practical this afternoon. It’s the first time I’ve done any exam papers at all for 20 years – and back then, at the age of 25, I sat in my final exam and calculated that it was exactly my 50th public exam (not counting the probably hundreds of test exams I’d sat at school and university). I promised myself on that day that I would never, ever sit another exam paper for the rest of my life.So here I am taking my 51st exam. All in French.The written parts are all based on previous CAP (Certificat d’Aptitude Professionel) exam papers but only covering what we’ve studied in the past three and a half months (three and a half months already?). So there’s a hygiene paper where we get asked about the five conditions necessary for the development of bacteria (37 degree heat, water, protein and the presence or not of oxygen), a business practices paper (calculate how much money Monsieur Marsaud has left to spend after he’s paid his rent and mobile phone bill every month) and a kitchen technology paper.The latter is the hardest for me, partly because all the vocabulary on this has been new to me this year, and partly because the photocopied photograph of a kitchen range on which we’re supposed to label everything is smudged into an indistinguishable grey mush. So that thing down the end is either a deep-fat fryer or a bain marie. I plump for the latter, and it turns out to be a sauteuse. There you go.The practical this afternoon is what we all see as more important. It’s the only ‘failing’ section of the exam – fail any other part and you can still make up the marks you need elsewhere; fail the practical and you fail the exam completely. Which is as it should be. Continue reading →

Chapter 14: Week 11: A side of English

06 Sunday Jul 2014

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A side of EnglishThe French people with whom I work are always smugly pleased when one of the two English-named (or so they think) dessert dishes they know of comes up. The first is crème Anglaise which they translate as English Cream and English people translate as Custard. The French make this by beating together 8 – 10 egg yolks with a little sugar, stirring in a litre of almost-boiled milk then returning the whole lot back to a gentle heat until it reaches the thick coating stage. If they’re trained professional patissiers like me (OK, five minutes’ coaching by my Chef but it amounts to the same thing) they only add half the boiled milk to the yolks and sugar, whisk well and then return it to the pan – this avoids the mixture getting too cold.The English make Custard completely differently, I explain. They open a packet of Custard Powder – Birds in the yellow and blue and red packet is the traditional one – and add a couple of tablespoonfuls of milk from a pint to the powder along with a random amount of sugar, stirring it into a sticky goo. When the milk boils, they mix it into the goo with a spoon and then re-boil the whole lot. Birds’ custard powder contains, as far as I can tell, powdered eggs and cornflower and nothing of any nutritive or flavour value whatsoever. But it is yellow and sweet.The other English dessert French people go on and on and on about is Pudding, pronounced ‘poodeeng’. This, they fondly imagine, is called ‘pudding’ because it’s what English people always eat for dessert after a large dish of over-roasted beef and too-boiled potatoes, in much the same way that the French live exclusively on garlic-laced snails, frogs and baguettes. Well, if you’re English or have ever eaten in that country, see if you recognise this: Take all your leftover bits of ‘biscuit’ (this means sponge cake, not real biscuits); soak them in milk; add a few beaten eggs; pour in a little rum; pour the whole lot into a terrine mold and bake in a bain marie for an hour until it’s perfect, with ‘Perfect’ in this instance meaning ‘gooey mess’. Might be nice with some custard, I suppose, but the French will insist on serving it cold.So we do crème anglaise at school today, to go with the Genoise sponge we also make. I have problems with this once again, mostly because of my old journalistic injury – messed-up carpal tunnels. I had the left one operated on at the start of last year and it only hurts occasionally, but the one in my right wrist needs doing to return my whisking hand back to decent, frothing form. This means I find it hard to whisk stuff like egg whites and genoise sponge mixtures long and hard as one needs to do, so my sponge failed to lift as much as it should have done. This is one area where Pascal, the chap with whom I share a workstation at school, excels over me – his right hand is a blur of motion as he beats away…And again, this is one area where we do things differently at work – at school we beat the genoise over a bain marie; at work it’s directly on the hotplate.But my crème anglaise is fine and I manage to slice my genoise into three layers despite it being Not Very Thick (thank you, Chef, I had noticed that in fact) and fill it with apricot jam (the French love apricot jam and treat it as if it were edible).While all this is going on, our stock pots are bubbling away in the background. Stock is something I’ve sort of always known to be important, and indeed we made a pot of it during our first week at school. Now we make it every chance we get, and today we’re practicing making a fond brun lié with the carcasses of our Poulet Sauté Chasseur. Which is, in the end, a lesson in why Stuff Tastes Nicer in restaurants than it does when you try to make it at home: it starts off by being made with decent stock and finishes off by being, er, finished off with real butter.The chickens – two of them – we learn to cut up raw, removing the suprèmes – the breasts with a wing attached to each – and the legs, complete with the ‘sots y laissent’, the ‘idiots leave behinds’s, what in the UK we call the Oysters, the small round oyster-shaped bits where the legs attach to the body. The idea is to take all the skin and flesh and leave the bones – for a fond brun.Brun – brown – because we roast the bones in the oven first until they’re brown with a garniture aromatique of carrots, onions, garlic, tomato paste and a bouquet garni. The ‘lié’ – liaison – part comes when we add some powdered stock powder which contains cornflower. Quite why we need to do this both I and David, the only other chap in my class who’s working in a posh restaurant, agree is impossible to know so we both leave it out and get the thickness required by reduction and, if necessary, a little Maizena, regular cornflour, at the end. No no, says school chef, we need to know how to use PAI, Produits d’Alimentation Intermediare or mid-way food products (mid-way between raw ingredients and finished items, i.e. something which has already had something done to it and which needs something else doing to it to make it edible – like frozen peas). These are becoming Very Big in the French catering industry, he tells us. Indeed as I’ve said before, there’s a huge discussion going on about how the entire qualification I’m doing, the CAP, should concentrate on using PAIs instead of how to make stock. This is because the big chains like Accor who have a lot of money to lobby the government like using PAIs because they get cheap consistency of product (‘product’ is what chains call food) on their dining tables. It may go that way, but it won’t be me opening the packets for them.So while my chicken portions are roasting in the oven (12 minutes for the suprèmes, 15 for the thighs) after being browned on the stove top, I make my Sauce Chasseur from the Fond Brun lié with some chopped tomatoes, finely chopped shallots, mushrooms, fines herbes, white wine and cognac. Reduced down to a decent napping consistency I then monter it au beurre to give it a really delicious taste. A handy tip this for working on sauces at home – never be afraid to whisk in a little (or even a lot) of unsalted butter to many sauces. You reduce down the liquid part of your sauce and then whisk in cubes of cold butter one or two at a time until your arteries clog up and your doctor has a heart attack.

Chapter 13: Week 10: In the soups

06 Sunday Jul 2014

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There are, it turns out, rather a lot of soups. Going back to the days of Escoffier and earlier, rather than calling soup with carrots in it, ‘Carrot Soup’, the French call it ‘Potage Crècy’, named after either Crècy-la-Chapelle in Seine-et-Marne, or after Crècy-en-Ponthieu in the Somme. Both claim they grow the best carrots and the best soups, both claim Potage Crècy (and anything else containing carrots) as their own whilst declaiming the others as lesser, impostering, worthless, tasteless, rank rubbish-vendors. The French are never prouder than when boasting about the superiority of their local produce.I mean, just look at the table we got given today; there are potages where you start with carefully sized vegetables, puréed vegetables, puréed dried vegetables, with creams and cream-liasions, consommés (aka clear potages), bisques, cold potages, regional specialities…”You need to know all the families plus one or two examples of specific soups within them,” says school Chef. So yes, we have to know that split-pea soup is really Potage Saint Germain and not just split-pea soup, that a Consommé Madrilène (served with straw-diced red peppers) is chicken consommé with chopped fresh tomato pulp in it, and that if you really want to start an argument in a room full of Provençal cooks you start telling them what to put into a Soupe au Pistou – man, the guys and gals in class went over that one for a good quarter of an hour. It’s a good job our knives were across the other side of the building in the kitchen, otherwise blood would have flowed. Not least mine for suggesting that, like bouillabaisse (fish stew), it’s really made up of whatever vegetables and herbs you have lying around. Blimey, you’d have thought I’d asked for a well-done steak.So, over in the atelier we do a Potage St Germain aux Croutons – split-pea soup with croutons, as I think you say in English (I’m remembering fewer and fewer words of your language with each day that goes by. Désolé.) It has the washed and blanched split peas, blanched and fried lardons of bacon, leeks and white veal stock.Then we do a Velouté Dubarry, which is ‘velvety’ veal stock with cauliflower, cream and egg yolks. With both I learned something I’d never thought of before – after mixing them with the giraffe (the large, hand-held mixer you plunge into the saucepan and which, in our industrial-sized case, is about the size of a decent pneumatic drill) and then passing the mix through a chinois, you should re-boil it again since you can’t guarantee the cleanliness of the giraffe and chinois.This afternoon – after a singularly unappetising lunch in the school canteen of very wishy-washy cod mornay (we’ve discovered that the stuff we cook on Mondays is usually served on Tuesdays when the school director makes a big deal of eating in the canteen with the plebs instead of in the private staff dining room or the gastronomic restaurant next door where the final-year kids get to cook) – it’s Entremets Singapour. What’s an entremet? Well, the fact that the Larousse Gastronomique feels it necessary to devote nearly half a page to the subject should clue you in to the potential problem here. The word means ‘put between’ and basically, it’s anything served after the meat course. Generally it means puddings, but in big restaurants the entremettier will do savoury soufflés, pancakes and pastries plus sweet entrements like sweet omelettes, rice puddings and ice creams. But then Taillevent reckoned to also include things like oyster stew and almond milk with figs and “swan with all its feathers” in the list of possibilities, although this latter item is apparently not something we’d be expected to produce for our final exam.Instead, Singaporean Entremets are a Genoise sponge (this is a very international dish) cut into three horizontal layers with crème patisserie between the layers. Again, I have trouble getting my Genoise frothy enough because of my RSI-ed wrists. I must think about having an operation again when the restaurant is closed in January.Talking of the importance of regional produce, back in the restaurant we had the Frodd Squodd (Frodd is how the French mis-pronounce Fraud) from the Service Veterinaire (which is what the French call the Health Inspectors – no, I don’t know why) the other day. They were checking that our Poulets de Bresse really are from Bresse and not some hut up the road. This is very important in a country where, if your lentils aren’t from Puy, they’re inedible. Well, that’s what French people think, anyway. Same with most things – cherries, almonds, ducks, lamb, salmon (must be from Scotland – you know, that place to the North of England from which no English person would buy salmon any more as it’s all poisoned, apparently), everything has its origin. There’s even the AOC (now IGP) system to regulate this sort of thing – AOC applies not just to wine but butter, milk, olive oil, you name it.So the Frodd Squodd spent half an hour reading our menus and checking our bills and labels and the contents of fridges and cold rooms, and pronounced us nearly clean. We need, they said, some way of indicating the origin of each mouthful of beef rather than just having a line on the menu saying it could be from France, Holland, Belgium or Germany. A blackboard at the entrance, perhaps, they suggested. Can’t see it happening, somehow. In the same way that Chef refuses to acknowledge their advice on keeping eggs (he keeps them in a kitchen annexe rather than the fridge), I can’t see us erecting a ‘Today’s Specials’!’ blackboard in the dining room.

Chapter 12: Week 9: Vacuum-packed

05 Saturday Jul 2014

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Pancakes up first today. Well, crêpes really; French people generally disdain ‘pancakes’ as overly-thick American creations (as in MacDo breakfasts) suitable only for use as fire blankets and airplane wheel chocks.So, crêpes are lace-thin pancakes, as you probably already know. And, as most of us in class are either French or cooks or both, most of us have already made the odd one or two in our lives. So today’s competition is to see who can make the most crêpes with the half-litre of mixture we make up. I get 24, Eric – who makes these damned things every day (note I’m getting my defence in early) – managed 30. but they weren’t all complete, and didn’t taste as nice as mine anyway. So there.We use them to make ‘Aumonières Normandes’, small parcels with butter-fried diced apples inside. Very yummy and, for once, we get to eat them as we take them over to the self-service cafeteria where some of us eat every week.The quality of food in the cafeteria is, as I may have mentioned before, variable. This week’s it’s edible, though, veal chops with mixed vegetables. The veg look very regularly diced into a lovely brunoise from a distance, and tasting confirms that they’ve come out of a tin. Our class doesn’t get to do TPs (Travails Pratiques, practical work sessions) in the caféteria kitchen, but the youngsters doing the same course as us but full-time over two years get regular sessions there. Some, it’s obvious, like it more than others.There’s a big debate going on in the French catering industry that this qualification, the CAP (Certificat d’Aptitude Professionnel) should be more oriented towards opening cans and microwaving vacuum-packed mush. A debate led, of course, by Big Business, the sort that have large chains of restaurants where economies of scale (the scale economy of employing low-talent droids to push microwave buttons instead of people who know how to prepare fresh veg) are important. The small businesses want cooks who can cook, of course, but lots of little voices are drowned out by the few big, loud ones.Me, I’m happy to be getting a classical French cooking training in the heart of Provence from a great school chef and an excellent restaurant chef. I count my blessings daily, knowing that French cuisine is slowly changing and not for the better.Or at least my weekly blessings. Not during, for example, our ‘Droit’ class, which we have this afternoon. Today we learn about “business partners” – clients, suppliers, “l’état et les organimsmes sociaux” financial partners, banks, investors, you name it.And then, just for fun, we do a household budget – work out that, if Monsieur Marsaud spends X on electricity, Y on food and Z on his mobile phone bill then he has only 38 cents a month left to live on. Or something like that. Perhaps he can eat microwaved meals in a local chain restaurant.This afternoon we do Carré de porc poélé ‘Choisy’ – Choisy in this case meaning ‘containing lettuce’. Our lettuce is first poached in hot water (départ à chaud) – I’m learning about what vegetables to cook in hot water or cold water, and how important it is to refresh in iced water immediately after cooking to preserve the vitamin and mineral content, enhance the colour and halt the cooking process before it turns to the sort of mush you get from microwaving vacuum-packed rubbish…(OK, I promise to stop going on about this. Can you tell my Chef has been indoctrinating me? Although we use sous-vide – vacuum-packing – a lot in the restaurant, he hates the microwave and doesn’t actually have one in his home kitchen. The one at work is used for defrosting breadcrumbs.Then we have to form the lettuces into a ‘fuseau’ which is either a spindle, or one leg of a pair of ski pants, so I’m going for ski pants and achieve the required effect (if you wear huge, baggy ski pants like I do). This is then cut in two lengthways and braised in the oven at the same time as the Carré de porc, the section of pork ribs we each have to de-bone and cook.We were going to have a run of four ribs to de-bone and cook whole and my restaurant chef has been ordering them in all week for me to practise on. Which, as it turns out, means I’ll be the only person doing such a thing this week since our school ones arrive frozen and already sliced into individual chops. We do get to cut one of the bones off each chop, but it’s no real challenge.We do try following the rest of the recipe (cooking the pork in the oven with a regular GA, garniture aromatique of onions, carrots and a bouquet garni) but it seems slightly futile to try and re-assemble the chops into a joint at the end. So we don’t do that.The lettuce is very good, though, I’d never really thought of using them as a cooked vegetable. Like radishes, which we also cook at the restaurant. 

Chapter 11: Week 8: English cooking

03 Thursday Jul 2014

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The French are initially surprised to find an English person cooking at all. There’s a famous TV advert here for After Eight chocolate mints which shows a group of BCBGs (French for ‘yuppies’) eating After Eights with their post-dinner coffee and finding them distinctly edible, if not positively quite nice. “After Eights,” the tagline runs, “they’re English – but they’re good!”Then they start asking about ‘La Cuisine Anglaise’ – English cooking – and what sort of stuff English people cook at home. Well, here we’re leading the French, I tell them – we’ve been buying cooked/chilled ready meals by the tonne and nuking them in the microwave for more than a couple of decades. French people are doing their best to catch up now, I tell them, and then they start talking about the Traiteurs they have – shops where you buy freshly-made (well, normally freshly-made) portions of restaurant classics and, er, zap them in the microwave. And anyway, traiteurs are closing down all over the place because they can’t get the staff and they’re too expensive to run and the supermarkets are filling up with cook/chill dishes…And then, after a quick detour to laugh at ‘Lamb with mint sauce! Ha ha ha!’ they say Ah! Oui! Légumes à  l’anglaise! Vegetables cooked in the English style means boiling them in salted water. So now they remember that English people boil the crap out of just about everything, usually all in one giant vat-like pan for three or four hours. Which isn’t that far from the truth in some cases – one of the few stories I know about my great-grandmother Loseby was that she used to boil tripe and potatoes in the same pan. For three to four hours.So today at school we’re cooking Merlan à  l’anglaise, which turns out not to be boiled but to use that other great traditional English cooking method, frying in a pan of oil. Merlan is similar to the English Whiting and American Silver Hake and is a member of the cod family. We use it often at school because it’s cheap – we don’t serve it to customers at the restaurant, although it does feature sometimes in staff meals.To prepare it à  l’anglaise you have to remove the gills first and drag the entrails out with them through the gill slits, without cutting open the belly. This is easier to do than it sounds, fish turn out not to be very attached to their insides. Then you open it along the spine, rather than along the belly as is more normally done, removing the bones as you do so. Then you fan it out but leave the head in place. The body is coated in flour, egg and breadcrumbs and pan-fried, leaving the head in place to stare up accusingly at those about to eat it. I can’t see English people ever eating fish like that these days – most think that fish swim around shrink-wrapped in polystyrene trays if they think of fish swimming at all. And normally, I tell my French friends, they eat only the fingers of the fish these days, an idea that amuses French people no end since they, like Americans, eat fish sticks not fish fingers.By now I’ve done lots of fish at work so I don’t find the whole procedure too difficult; it’s really a way of practising various knife skills, I realise, since this is now a very old-fashioned dish which you wouldn’t see in any restaurant even over here – too much effort to start with and the French, especially younger ones, are starting to not like things that stare back at them from their plates. Many people have real difficulties cutting out the spine and then de-boning the still-joined filets, and end up with something that looks like it’s been given a good kicking by Manchester United fans. Still, that’s why we have breadcrumbs, “Pour cacher la misère” – to hide the misery, as my restaurant chef puts it, normally when he’s surveying something I’ve messed up in the patisserie. Be very suspicious if you buy a pudding in a French restaurant and the sauce/custard is poured over the tart/pie/whatever instead of in an attractive pattern onto the plate around it – it means the patissier has really messed it up and is hiding his errors from you or, more likely, his Chef de Cuisine. Two nice thick coats of breadcrumbs and we’re ready to go.We also do Petits Pois Paysanne, little peas peasant-style, in which peas are the least of the ingredients – there’s carrots, turnips, baby onions, lettuce and bacon bits in there outweighing the peas two-to-one. Which is fine if you don’t particularly like peas and want to hide them – but then you’d probably be better off cooking the whole recipe and just leaving out the peas.
 After lunch we have our regular fortnightly Hygiène class, this week talking about Glucides – sugars. Which apparently should represent 55% of our diet, particularly from ‘glucides lentes’ – slow sugars – such as those found in pasta and, apparently, bread. As little as possible should come from pure, refined sugar. Glucides, we learn, are where we get our energy from for our muscles and nerves, and we need 100 grammes per day. We also need 15% of our diet to be protein and 30% lipides – fats. 
Right. So I’d better put that pain au chocolat away, then?We do légumes à  la Grècque this afternoon, vegetables cooked the Greek way, which means slowly in a little water and olive oil after cutting them up into attractive shapes. Artichauts, artichokes first – these confuse many of my culinary student colleagues who end up with something the size of half a ping-pong ball full of fluff. But, again luckily, I’ve done these at work so understand that the idea is to remove the leaves on the outside and the fluff on the inside and put the rest into acidulated water (i.e. with half a lemon squeezed into it and then the lemon chucked in for good measure). Then there’s cauliflowers cut into ‘bouquets’ which just means bite-sized pieces, escaloped mushrooms (cut into quarters on a slant, although even our school chef says he finds this idea impossible to accomplish), diced onions, chopped garlic, a bouquet garni and a ‘sac aromatique’ to prepare. The ‘aromatic bag’ is a bit of cloth with any interesting-looking spices you can find bunged in, which turns out to be a bit of old nutmeg and some peppercorns, being the only things left lying around the school kitchen. And since each vegetable needs to be cooked on its own it means a bouquet garni and ‘sac aromatique’ for each pan. And as there aren’t that many saucepans in the room we have to group our cooking, which is fine by me unless we then have to present a plate to be marked – not everyone turns their vegetables as well as me and I’ve been marked down before for featuring vegetables from someone else on my demonstration plate.Still.
 A la Grècque cooking turns out to be very similar to our teacher’s favourite way of cooking most vegetables – à  blanc, i.e. in a sautoir with a little sugar, salt, pepper and butter. Remove the sugar and replace butter with olive oil, cover with a circle of silicon paper and you’re good to go. 
And in the end there’s no need to make up a plate for service, so my superior English turning isn’t seen by anyone.

Chapter 5 Recipe: Veal Stock

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

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Ingredients5 kgs veal bones – many butchers give them away. This is easy to say, but the idea of asking for something like this may frighten you. Don’t be frightened. Most good butchers – all good butchers – like customers who like interesting bits of dead animal. They literally throw away tens of kilos of bones every day, and they’ll be interested that you want to do something interesting with them. So don’t be afraid to ask. You want the good, thick, meaty ones from legs, about 5 cms long – do get the butcher to cut them on her bandsaw for you, it’s impossible to do this on your own at home and there’s no way you’ll fit a 70 cm leg bone into the average kitchen’s biggest saucepan.500 grammes carrots, scrubbed or peeled – your choice. Gordon Ramsay and Anthony Bourdain say you’re lazy if you don’t peel your carrots. Me? Meh. Scrub them clean, which was the original purpose of peeling, and you’ll waste less. Tough skins? Nope. And – especially in potatoes – lots of the good stuff is just under the skin.1 kg onions – Two or three big ones – peeled and quartered500g of celery – a couple of sticks –  roughly choppedAny other bits of root vegetables you have lying around like turnips or parsnips but no potatoes. Potatoes thicken your stock but not in a good way, they’ll also make it cloudy. The total should be around a third to half of the weight of the bones.Some herb stalks. When you use parsley or thyme or whatever, use the leaves as normal and then put the stems in a plastic bag in the freezer, pulling them out by the handful when you want to make a stock.Couple of bay leavesA few peppercorns, wholeMethodWash the veal bones – some boil them, but this is an exaggeration. You’re going to be boiling them for many hours so a quick rinse to get the worst of the muck and blood off is just fine. If you want brown veal stock, roast them in the oven at 180C for half an hour or so with half the above quantities of vegetables cut into a mirepoix – pieces about the size of the tip of your little finger. If you want white stock, don’t roast them. Bourdain adds tomato paste to his roasting bones, at school we didn’t. It adds a bit of umami (look it up, it’s the good stuff).Put the bones in your biggest pan and cover with cold water. Add in the roughly chopped vegetables and herbs. Bring it almost but not quite to the boil and allow it to simmer very gently. By gently I mean, with a half dozen bubbles popping the surface every minute or two. This is a slow cooking process, if you boil your stock it will emulsify the blood and proteins in the water and give you grey goo.Every 30 − 60 minutes skim off the layer of fat and scum floating on the surface. Do this with a BIG spoon or a ladle – press it gently onto the surface of the stock until the lip just goes under the surface, allowing the scum to float into the ladle. Repeat across the surface until it’s clean again.Top up with water as necessary to keep the bones covered. Stir a bit once or twice to change the order the bones are stacked in. Leave it as long as you can – 4 hours is a very strict minimum, 8 is much better, 10 is best.When you can’t stand it any longer, remove the bones and then strain the liquid through a sieve, a colander or, best, a muslin cloth. Do this at least twice, more if you like doing this. 5 times won’t hurt. 10 times if you have a stagiaire in your kitchen.Store it in small batches in the freezer. You may have 3 − 5 litres of liquid. You can also reduce some of it down by half or three quarters and store it in ice cube containers and then plastic bags in the freezer to give an instant lift to your packet soups (only joking, if you’re caught eating packet soups I will be round to cut off your fingers). It’s a great lift for sauces, gravies and soups.

Chapter 10: Week 7: Making progress

23 Monday Jun 2014

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I get the whole idea of progressions; I understand why we do them and I even think I understand how to do them. But, to start with, I find it hard to actually write one down. A progression? It’s literally how you plan to progress through the day, in 5, 10 or 15 minute increments, all written down neatly on a proper form so your chef can write on it in red exactly where you’ve gone wrong.See, standing in the restaurant kitchen at 9 am it’s easy to see what needs doing first and why – square away the meat and put the roast in, make pastry for the tart cases, finish up with veg prep and the staff meal. Unless we’re roasting chicken for the staff, in which case we need to think of doing that at 1015 so the chicken will be roasted and rested by 1130. And if we’re making puff pastry that needs to be started first to allow the rests between turns. And of course if chef wants to cook the potatoes in their skins then that needs to be organised by 10 to give them time to roast and then cool a bit before peeling them.OK, OK. So it’s not obvious, unless you’re Chef and you’ve been doing this for 18 years and you don’t need to write anything down.But I do get how to do it: you start from the end and work back, starting with what you plan to serve at midday – for example – and then work backwards towards the start of the day. Whatever takes the longest to cook, do that first. Then work through your meat, fish, veg and patisserie in an order which allows you to keep your workstation clean and free of contaminants, doing everything of one type all in one go and then moving on to the next. SimplesWe get a choice of progression sheets at school; I find them both pretty easy to use, although School Chef reckons the one-column version is easier for us beginners – not so much chance of us trying to get ourselves to do two things at once, I suppose.So, progressions done today we’re supposed to be doing ‘Cotes de Porc Charcuterie’ – pork chops with a cooking juice and stock reduction and gherkin sauce – and ‘Oeufs pochés bragance’, poached eggs sitting in half a tomato covered with a béarnaise sauce. This is French Cooking As She Was Done By Escoffier, and don’t you forget it my lads. If it was good enough in 1905, it’s good enough in 2005 now shut up and make that bizarre sauce.On my progression form this means cut up the chops from the the whole ribs into portions of 4 ribs each, Frenching the bones – cleaning off the meat residue to make them look pretty – then do the veg prep while roasting the ribs, make the béarnaise while cooking the veg and reducing the cooking jus and poach the eggs when everything else is done and keeping warm for five minutes.But the pork hasn’t arrived so we start poaching eggs, which I think will be leathery in three hours time but there you go.Then the pork does arrive, but it’s not in whole ribs – they’ve been cut up into individual chops. Whilst they were still frozen. With a band saw. So, they’re not pretty and it’s a much too easy job to cut off what remains of the mangled vertebrae for us. In theory we: Remove the vertebra; de-nerve and de-fat; aplatir (tenderise by beating, apparently not the same thing as beating recalcitrant children), manchonner (oops, School Chef forgot to order the ‘paper condoms’, as Restaurant Chef calls the little hats you stick on rib bone ends) and reserve. Then we pan fry them, put them to one side to keep warm, recover the caramelised sugars from the pans and add some instant powdered stock to make a bit of a sauce, add in the julienned gherkins, monter au beurre et voilà , main course.Poaching the eggs is easier than scrambling them as we did last week; salted water just barely simmering, drop in the eggs one at a time one after the other, remove when cooked. When are they cooked? Harold McGee has an interesting idea about how if you get the percentage of salt exactly right in the water, you drop the eggs in and they rise to the surface at the moment they’re done. I’d love to tell you what that percentage is, but Chef’s borrowed my book at the moment (Restaurant Chef, that is). He doesn’t understand most of it and reckons McGee would make another fortune if he had it translated into French.After lunch we have Droit. Every week we, the students, ask each other “Is it Droit or Hygiène this week?”, then groan at the answer, whichever it is. We hate each one more than the other. This week: Business partners! So that’s banks, other financial partners, staff, the government, suppliers and clients. Who’s the most important? Duh. There are also ‘indirect’ partners – fashions, opinion leaders (journalists! The scum!)…it sort of goes on a bit, I think.Still. Back in the kitchen we go over ‘dégraissage et deglaçage’ – defatting and deglazing, or Getting The Most Out Of Your Cooked Meat. This is something I’ve never really thought about before. It’s something I’ve always automatically done with roasted meats – make a gravy with the bits that stick to the pan – but have almost never done with pan-fried meats, apart from making a mustard sauce in the pan in which I cook chicken breasts. And even then never really thought of it as the same sort of thing (reserve the chicken, deglaze with a large serving/soup spoon of mustard of your choice per portion, add two spoons of cream when the mustard bubbles, mix, season, serve).Choux pastry this afternoon, something else I’ve already practised in the restaurant. In fact, I know it quite well because RC is keen on it, and all our stagiaires have to know the recipe by heart (and so frequently stop by my plonge to ask me to remind them what it is): half the flour to the quantity of water, half that of butter, 16-20 eggs per litre depending – add the last one or four only if needed.I show School Chef the technique Restaurant Chef learned from the Patissier at the Martinez in Cannes for drying the détrempe of flour and water – with your sauteuse on the corner of the forneau, push the paste to the side of the pan furthest from you and then chop and drag it towards you in small pieces across the bottom of the pan. This may leave a crust on the bottom of the pan, but this doesn’t matter. When you’ve dragged it all towards you, turn it over and start again. It works better than just aimlessly smashing and stirring at it, ensuring that every bit gets an even chance of being dried out.We make Profiteroles with the Choux, filling them eventually with crème patissière – unfortunately, a good 10% or so are judges ‘unfit for service’ so we have to eat them ourselves. Ahem. The sacrifices we make…After that I got the bus home (Delphine, bless her, dropped me off at school at 0745 so I didn’t have to ride my bike, I’m still not well), made some pizza dough and then went straight to sleep. I made ham and mushroom pizzas when Delphine got home, we watched an episode of The West Wing (which I like lots) and I slept a solid 9 hours, only to wake up absolutely exhausted the next morning. Luckily I can go to work and spend 15 hours washing up for a bit of a rest. Lovely. 

Chapter 9: Week 5: Quiet for the time of year

23 Monday Jun 2014

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It’ll soon be Christmas and although the season has wound down completely and we have no more than a couple of rooms occupied in the hotel at any one time (if any at all), we’re still fairly busy in the restaurant with Christmas lunch and dinner groups. December was supposed to be quiet because the directors didn’t bother employing a sales manager this year, intending to do all the publicity themselves, something they then forgot to do leaving us with no reservations. In the end it turns out that everyone wants to celebrate Christmas in our restaurant.Last week I worked every day as normal, after a week in the UK with my lovely, indefatigable gurus Steve and Caroline (thanks!) which WAS a lot calmer than we’d expected, so we ended up eating and drinking in pubs and (French-run) restaurants instead – Pebble Beach is highly recommended, although you pay UK not French prices for French food – venison especially highly rated).Last Friday was the last Soirée Vigneron of the year, a Caviar/Foie Gras/Truffles/Lobster special for €100 a head, AVC compris (Aperitif/Vin/Café included). Chef had devised special ‘menu dégustation’ to go with each of the seven wines brought along by the various wine producers, which means seven courses, two with ‘doublures’ – under-plates. This is important to me because, with 50 covers, that gives me an extra 100 plates to wash. Thank you, Chef. Although it’s not as bad as our old Dutch Seconde de Cuisine who managed to find a way to use four (count ’em! 4!) plates for one dish during the summer. I’ve refused to tell Chef how she did it because he’ll only go and do the same.So we finished at about 1am on Saturday morning; Chef came into the Plonge and stuck his hand into the water in the dishwasher and said, “Hmm, what’s this?” Now, the machine’s been a bit dicky recently and the repairman’s been out a few times; right now it’s over-filling with water on occasion, and at this moment there was about a two centimetre overfill. I told him this, and he said, “No, I mean why have you emptied the machine and refilled it?” I hadn’t, and told him so. “Yes, but this water’s clean!” he said. That, I explained, is because I don’t put anything dirty in it. I wash everything first in the sinks, I said. “I know,” he replied, “but after all the covers we’ve done I thought it would be at least a little bit dirty”It wasn’t, but then I’m a good dishwasher (please imagine a self-effacing grin here). In the kitchen I don’t just want to do the best that I can do, I want to do the best that ANYONE can do. Which is why I wasn’t happy with the Hollandaise sauce I did for him last night.We’re currently down to two stagiaires, from the four we’ve had for the past three weeks. Only one of them, the German (natch) was any good; right now we have a chatty Portuguese grand-dad and the usual French teenager in the patisserie (although this one does show some signs of waking up now and then); the rule with stagiaires is that two do half the work of one regular cook, and four do a quarter of the work of one cook between them. So while Chef was busy showing them how to cut grapes in half to decorate the dessert plates he asked me to make a Hollandaise for the lobster he was serving last night.At cookery school we do this over a bain marie, but in the kitchen it’s direct onto the hotplate. You keep the saucepan at the right temperature as you’re whisking up the egg yolks (six, in this case, with a tablespoon and a half of water) by holding your hand on the side of the pan; if you smell burning flesh, it’s too hot. You whisk in a figure of 8 until you can clearly see the bottom of the pan, then you ladle in the clarified butter (one Pochon – a small ladleful – per yolk) slowly off the heat. Now, I started on the butter when, as at school, I could CLEARLY see the bottom of the pan as I drew the whisk across it; but Chef checked one ladleful of butter in and said the yolks weren’t foamed enough. Still, we checked to see if it would glaze by putting a spoonful onto a torpille (a torpedo-shaped metal serving plate) under the salamander, and it came out fine. So, OK, continue with the butter but next time foam those yolks more. And in the end it was a good Hollandaise, the junior French stagiaire told me so (jealously, I have to add, he hasn’t been let anywhere near the stoves in the two weeks he’s been here to do anything other than burn milk).Because Chef is the only proper cook left in the kitchen (we have no Seconde and the Chef de Partie des Entrées left three weeks ago) I’ve been getting to do more and more of the advanced prep and even some of the cooking, which is fine by me; beats washing up anyway, although I do still have to do that at the end of it all.For the soirée Vigneron I got to prep the lobster and the foie gras, and de-bone the filets mignons of venison that were served as the main course and de-skin the two joints of poitrine, pork belly, that we used to lard the filets – something I’ve actually already done at school – it’s not too difficult if you remember (a) to keep the skin pulled tight and (b) not to cut yourself.I enjoy all that sort of stuff a lot, enough to make me think that I’d enjoy working garde-manger in a large brigade; but then I do a bit of patisserie and enjoy that a lot, too. And then I also get to work the hot side and enjoy that as well. After a year and a half in professional kitchens I’ve gained a lot of experience in a variety of bits of the job and don’t know if I want to specialise or not.I’m thinking of doing a second year at school, assuming I get my Diplôme this summer. They offer a CAP in Patisserie or Traiteur-ship, and the idea of both interests me. For one crazy moment I thought of doing both at the same time, since they’re taught on different days, but I’ve come to realise just how much more tired I’ve been since September than I was even during the height of the summer. The problem is that, with two days off a week, I’ve been spending one of those days working in a kitchen again, effectively giving me just one day off per week. And since September the restaurant has been closing mostly only for half-days at a time, so often I’ve been going in to work on Monday evenings after school, giving me 17 or 18 hours out of the house at one go, and then only two half days during the rest of the week to recuperate. Which really isn’t enough, and now I’m just completely knackered. Yesterday the restaurant was closed for the midday service and I’d intended to spend the day working on the repainting of our new front room. But after I’d gone out for bread and eaten some breakfast I found I was literally incapable of doing anything else at all other than lying in bed and, at most, reading a little. The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak, unfortunately.The restaurant officially closes from December 23 until February 14, and doesn’t re-open fully until March. Even then I don’t know what I’m going to be doing; I certainly don’t want to do another full season as plongeur, but would love to go on working with Chef because he’s been so good to me. I’ve learned lots and lots and he’s a great teacher, but (a) I don’t know (and nor does he) if he’ll have a budget for a Commis Chef and (b) in any case I’m not experienced enough to do that job in that restaurant, in my opinion; I’m certainly not experienced enough to do, for example, the entrées, where he will almost certainly have a budget to hire someone.And, while he’d probably love me to come back to the plonge I, as I say, don’t want to do that; I may come back a bit at the start of the season if I haven’t found anything else, but I don’t want it to become a regular gig. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed doing it for the past year, but there’s other aspects of the job I enjoy much, much more and, frankly, a year washing up is enough. 

Chapter 8, Week 4: Puffing and panting

23 Monday Jun 2014

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Once again Chef (restaurant – as opposed to Chef (Ecole)) came up trumps by getting me to make a few kilos of puff pastry in advance of this week’s school session. Normally in the restaurant we use bought-in sheets of frozen puff pastry, one of the very (very very) few ready-made things we use, for several reasons: It’s good quality; it’s not expensive; and we don’t have a chef-patissier. Chef spent three months at the start of the year looking for a decent patissier, and even thought he’d got a good one signed up until, at the last moment he instead accepted a full-time contract in a restaurant on the Cote d’Azur in one of the Palace Hotels down around Nice. There is a HUGE lack of cooks in the entire French catering industry – not just in restaurants. Overall the country is about 70,000 cooks short, and good patissiers are worth their weight in truffles, the real ones not chocolate ones. We were offering a large salary and good benefits but someone even richer offered him more – so, if you fancy working in France, bone up on your pastry skills – there’s work waiting for you.The only caution I’d offer is that its virtually essential to speak French at least a bit, simply for your own comfort. We’ve had stagiaires who didn’t speak French and, luckily for them, my Chef is easy-going and prepared to work his schoolboy English, but they’re not all like that. There are, unfortunately, chefs too stupid to realise that in a market where there’s a lack of talent you have to treat the talent you can find nicely – which is how come I was able to have a blazing row and quit my last job with a chef traiteur in front of a shop full of customers (“Je m’en fous de ce putain de merde de travail! Je démission!”) and walk into a good job the next day.So, a couple of kilos of puff pastry last week gave me a head-start on doing it at school this week and, again, an interesting insight into different techniques of doing things; at the restaurant I mixed the détrempe, the flour and water mixture, in a big bowl; at school it’s direct on the worksurface, which made more mess for no apparent gain. We also used margarine at school instead of the ‘beurre fin’ (butter with less than 16% water content) at the restaurant. The margarine was easier to work but gave a much poorer quality taste at the end. But it is cheaper.We used the puff pastry to make some sardine tarts, so we also got to practise our fish gutting skills again; a Chef I know in England has told me about his old Portuguese kitchen porter who could disembowel and de-bone a sardine just by running his thumb up along through its guts and then ‘sort of twisting it’, but I can’t work out how to do that so have to stick with the knife technique I do know. A quick ‘tomate fondue’ (sweated shallots, concassé of tomatoes and a touch of garlic all stewed together) makes a base and finishes off a simple tart.We start the afternoon with another ‘droit’ class, business administration; this is the most boring thing we do – the teacher, who normally teaches recalcitrant 16-year-olds, thinks that the best way to teach us anything is to read stuff from the text book at dictation speed so we can copy it down into our own exercise books; I’ve short-circuited this process by simply buying the text book for myself and I read along with her. As our final exam will be based exclusively on exercises drawn from this book, most of us have started using this class as a time to tidy up and correct our recipe books. Or for having a nap.More interestingly we do a mayonnaise this afternoon, our first ‘sauce émulsionnée. I’ve made it a fair few times in my life before but today it just does NOT want to work. No obvious reason why, it just won’t take and stays runny. My cooking partner wants to throw it away, but I show him how to take another egg yolk and use the runny rubbish as if it were oil, and this time it works fine. Chef was impressed I knew how to do that, too.The rest of the afternoon we spend making a ‘tarte fine aux pommes’, a posh apple tart with the other half of the puff pastry we made this morning. A ‘tarte fine’ has crème patissière on the pastry base and then poshly-sliced apple on top. Again, it’s all about knife skills, cutting up apples into thin slices rather than giant chunks, which is much harder than non-cooks think. But my workstation partner, who never, ever cooks apart from in our lessons, has a hard time doing this sort of stuff because he simply never handles a knife anywhere else. He’s only doing the course because it gives him a wage increase at work (he works in a hospital canteen ‘conditioning’ the food prepared elsewhere, i.e. freezing/defrosting/reheating it for patients and never gets to cook – nor does he want to. Eating at his home is done via a microwave, takeaways or in a restaurant) and while I get on great with him and like him dearly, it’s maddening to be always next to someone for whom food is just fuel and cookery simply a way to get a pay rise rather than make something others want to eat.We put our tarts in the cold room to chill while we clean up and then chef gives us our marks afterwards. I only get 7 out of 20 which is very disappointing, until I realise that someone has swapped dishes with me to get my 15. Hmm. Something like this happened the other week when I got marked down on some vegetables we’d turned, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time.Still.Then this evening they have a big group in the restaurant and Chef has asked me to come in to work, so I cycle up there from school. It turns out to be a bit more difficult than I thought it would be to do this, since one part of the route is along a dual carriageway flyover with no pavement, so I get badly shaken about by passing lorries. In the end, I get there just in time for the staff meal – roast chicken and ‘pommes de terre coin du rue’ (potatoes cut in quarters lengthways then into a large dice, sautéed very quickly with some chopped garlic and parsley and bunged into the oven for 20 minutes – the name means ‘street corner potatoes’), one of my favourites and Chef’s, too. He suffered during the summer when our (Dutch) Seconde de Cuisine (or Sous-Chef) always cooked potatoes and roast chicken on his days off so he never got to eat them. Now every time we have potatoes everyone makes a point of moaning about how they can’t face any more because we ate so many over the summer; it never fails to get him going in a good-humoured sort of way, so it’s worth the effort.The 47 covers don’t finish eating their puddings until gone midnight and I have to wait for their dessert plates but can leave the waiters to put their coffee cups and saucer into the soaking bowl to finish overnight and get home just before 1 am. I left home at 0715 this morning, so it’s been a long day. Delphine, my girlfriend (she’s a florist in Orange about 20 minutes up the road) is already fast asleep, and I manage to get into bed without fully waking her. Luckily for me she’s very understanding about this sort of thing and works public holidays and weekends herself, so restaurant hours don’t bother her at all.I’m a lucky chap. 

Chapter 7, Week 3: First presentation, top marks

23 Monday Jun 2014

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In my diary today I wrote, and I quote: “Journée excellente à l’école aujourd’hui; Filets de Rouget, sauce bonne femme avec légumes glacés à blanc”.I didn’t realise I’d written it in French until I read it later. I’ve started speaking and thinking in French almost all the time, even when I write my diary. Apart from half an hour on the ‘phone to my mother every Sunday I almost never speak English at all these days.We were due to cook more Merlan at school this week but they didn’t have any, unfortunately, so we got rougets – the cheap kind, not the ‘de rochers’ type Chef buys at the restaurant, which have pointy, not rounded noses. The pointy-nosed ones live in among the rocks where they feast on whatever lives inside the cracks in the stone, hence the usefully pointy noses. They taste better as a result, so check your rouget’s nose before buying.On average I clean (de-fin, scale and gut) about a hundred rougets a week in the restaurant, so cleaning and filleting 10 today wasn’t much of a hardship, really. We were supposed to do three or four each, but school Chef knows I know how to do fish so he gave me all the extra left-over ones to do. Which I enjoy doing anyway, so that’s fine and I’m pleased he has confidence in me to make me do them.To go with the rougets we learn sauce Bonne Femme. It’s made with a “réduction glacé”, a reduced glaze of the fumet de poisson, the fish stock we made with the rouget bones and a handful of onions, shallots, leeks, vegetable trimmings and whatever you can scrape from under your fingernails. A glacé means reducing the cooking fluid (after cooking the fillets for seven minutes in the oven in the fumet) down to a syrupy consistency, then monté it au beurre – stir in lots and lots of butter (a hundred grammes in about 50 ccs of fumet).We also had to cook three vegetables to go with the fish: carrots, turnips and more courgettes all “turned” – cut into pleasing shapes. The same shape for all three, of course. With minimal waste, too. You not allowed to start with a 100 gramme carrot to make a single, beautifully-turned 15 gramme presentation piece and they all have to be 2.5 centimetres long, oval-shaped and with no blemishes.Today is also the first time we’ve had to present our work on a plate to Chef, and I’m extremely pleased to have got great marks for everything except for my courgettes, which apparently didn’t have enough salt in them. Chef is a demon for salt, however, and ‘enough’ for him is ‘blerk!’ for normal people, so I’m not too worried about that; still, know your client and cook accordingly. His problem is that he’s a smoker, and smokers really can’t detect ‘correct’ quantities of salt – they need about half as much again as everyone else.He marked us plus or minus on seven criteria – overall presentation, cleanliness of the plate (ha! I was the only person who thought to wash their provided plate before serving, and then to heat it up in the oven), warmth of the dish, taste of the fish, sauce and vegetables. I got a plus in everything except the courgettes, which he marked  plus-minus, and the overall presentation which got a double plus plus as the most original of the day. Cool. I served it with the two fillets back-to-back in the middle of the plate, vertically, with the veg (two each of three veg – carrots, turnips and courgettes) arranged along the sides like rays of sunshine, the sauce at either end but not between the veg, then a long line of chopped parsley dribbled vertically up the plate and right over the edges. Looked nice I thought, anyway, and so did Chef. We’re supposed to go for height, too, but I’m really not into building towers and propping fish fillets up with lumps of turnip. I’m happy with my masculinity as it is, thankyou, but still, know your client. Especially when they want you to dribble chopped herbs across your plate – very old-fashioned these days, says my Restaurant Chef. He wants single, appropriate leaves poised delicately on dishes, not large amounts sprinkled willy-nilly on plates.It’s here that cooking resembles my previous career, journalism; in principle in both jobs you’re writing or cooking for a large audience of consumers. In practise, you’re cooking for one person, your editor or chef. S/he is the person who decides what the consumer wants, and it’s your job as the writer or cook to match the vision of your boss. Only when you get to be an editor or chef do you get to decide what the punter wants.