29 Monday Sep 2008
Posted in Stuff
Our internet connection is down, has been for the past couple of weeks and probably will be for another week or so. And at the same time I’ve been having e-mail problems so, although I can now read emails and reply on my shiny new iPhone I’ve probably missed a fair few over the past week or two. So if you’ve written to me and I haven’t replied, do please try again.
Cheers
23 Tuesday Sep 2008
Posted in Stuff
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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, 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 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 unsharpened 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 de 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 of 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.
13 Saturday Sep 2008
Posted in Stuff
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Normally we do a couple of recipes a week at school. Today, we do five, just to keep ourselves busy: Gnocci à la Parisienne, Millefeuilles, beignets de pommes, omelettes and pintadeau rôti sur canapé.
Lots of interesting stuff there. Parisian gnocci are potatoes mashed, mixed with choux pastry batter and then deep-fried in churro-length portions. Millefeuilles are, well, millefeuilles, sheets of puff pastry interspersed with crème patissière. Beignets de pommes are apple circles deep fried in batter. Omelettes are omelets, this time with mushrooms. And pintadeau rôti sur canapé is guinea fowl roasted and served on toast. Canapé, it turns out, is not what you eat with your evening cocktails but the small slice of toasted bread on which you serve it. Who knew? Apart from every French person to whom I point out this remarkable fact, that is. Duh, they say, You Eenglish peeple, you steal all our words.
French people are like that because they’re used to all their words having several meanings. The French language has the smallest vocabulary of any European language, a fact which they will vehemently deny – even when you prove it to them. They get around this first, as I say, by using each word several times over, and then nicking lots of words from English (as we nicked many of our words from the French back in the Norman invasion days). Even when they’ve already got a perfectly good French word for whatever they’re talking about – instead of using ‘grignoter’ to describe snacking between meals they now talk about ‘le snacking’.
Chef’s idea today is to get us to do an entire meal from hors d’oeuvre (‘outside the [main] work’) to pudding, which sounds cool although his choice of menu wouldn’t necessarily be mine.
The Parisian gnocci are popular, but then what’s not to like about any form of fried potato? And not really difficult to make either, just equal quantities of mashed spuds and choux pastry batter, piped into hot oil from a plastic piping bag, cutting appropriate lengths with scissors. Actually it turns out to be easier to do this in pairs, one squeezing the piping bag and the other working the scissors.
The crème patissière for the millefeuilles is one of those recipes that looks simple – it has only four ingredients, flour, eggs, milk and sugar after all – but which can go horribly wrong if you don’t pay attention and do it properly. It’s all too easy to end up with tile cement or yellow water with lumps in it, so keep stirring! And I discover that it’s much, much easier to cut puff pastry into interesting shapes before you cook it, rather than afterwards. And that no matter how sharp your sharp knife may be, a serrated knife is what you need for cutting cooked pastry.
Beignets de pomme are also very simple. I’ve done them at home using cider instead of water in the batter, and very good they are too. Just core and slice your apples, dip in flour, dip in batter, fry, coat in sugar. We churn out a few hundred and send them on over to the school canteen so we can eat them for lunch ourselves – not that we have enormous appetites since we’ve been stuffing ourselves on Parisian gnocci, millefeuilles and apple fritters all morning. And then omlets, the last thing we do before our own lunch break, and everyone has their own way of doing these things. Meh. I like to just mix three eggs, salt and pepper, oil in the pan, nice and hot, pour in the eggs and drag mix from the outside to the centre with the back of the fork I used to mix the eggs up. When it’s setting, pop on the fried mushrooms and fold over and then fold out of the frying pan onto the plate.
Being French, Chef tells me that the omelet I’ve produced it too coloured – they should be yellow not browned, he says, nul points. Huh.
Our after-dinner nap is the complicated version of the Fiche de Stock we started the other week. Good grief. No really. Apparently we can use the ‘Méthode PEP, Premier Entré Premier Sorti’, first in first out, or ‘Méthode de court moyen pondere’ which I don’t even pretend to understand. It’s something to do with working out the average cost of stock because it all costs different amounts depending on when you buy it. Apparently. Anyway, first-in, first-out sounds much more sensible so that’s the one I’ll be sticking with.
We finish off jointing our pintadeau, browning and then roasting them and serving them up on slices of toast. Personally I think a smear of Marmite or marmalade is more manageable on toast than a quarter of guinea fowl, but what do I know? The toast works to mop up the juices dripping out of the fowl, apparently, and it’s a very old-fashioned way to serve up such delicacies which we have to know because all good French cooking is Very Old. Well, a century old anyway.
Stood the test of time though, hasn’t it?[ad]
02 Tuesday Sep 2008
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Delphine drives me to school this morning. I’m not up to cycling at the moment, so she drops me off on her way to work and I’ll get the bus home this evening.
I apologise to Chef for missing last week and he checks to make sure I’ve been given the recipes they worked on while I was away. I’ve already copied them from Mr Whippy – Pascal, the guy who shares my workstation and who can whip anything into a better froth than I can. Including, obviously, the genoise they made last week. Chef moves on. I can’t tell if he’s mad at me for not coming last week or disinterested – he doesn’t seem impressed at my tales of the doctor wanting to cart me off to hospital. Clearly, unless you’ve lost entire limbs, preferably more than one at once, you should come to work. Not being able to work out which way is ‘up’ is no excuse at all.
So today we’re doing ‘Poulet à l’americaine’ and, like so many things given foreign names by the French, it bears little resemblance to anything Americans might do to a chicken. Well, that’s not true – essentially American-style chicken in this case means quartered and grilled with a tomato sauce, but Americans aren’t the only ones to treat chooks thusly. Mind you, Americans get away lightly – just about the only food the French have named after the English is crème anglaise which is really nothing like custard at all (no powdered eggs, for example). Everything else à l’anglaise is really quite rude – try checking out ‘J’ai les anglais qui arrivent’ or ‘Filer à l’anglais’ if you have a strong stomach.
American chicken starts, as do all good French recipes, with some good stock; chicken, in this case, or ‘fond brun de poulet’, chicken stock made with roasted bones. At the restaurant we make our own but, since we don’t have enough time at school, we use the powdered stuff. Add in a little tomato concentrate, carrots and onion and we’re good to go.
Well, good to start going. You take this sauce, reduce it down and then ‘diablé’, devil it by adding chopped shallots, white wine, white wine vinegar and ‘poivre mignonette’ which, literally translated, means ‘cute little pepper’ but in practise means cracked black pepper. ‘Diablé’ because anything vaguely hot in French gets a wicked name – the French simply cannot cope with hot, spicy food and need to give it a name that says ‘Warning! Warning! Danger!’
Wimps.
So then we actually get down to grilling the chicken, first scrubbing the hot grills (cast iron plates that sit over a couple of gas burners) and then, well, grilling the chicken on them after seasoning and oiling the meat. This makes pleasingly large flames to frighten the girls, which is always fun.
We grill a few tomatoes and mushrooms too, and finish the whole lot off in the oven. Which sounds like a simple idea but is something that had simply never occurred to me to do before I started cooking professionally. Grilling things on hot pans gives them a nicely coloured exterior (Maillard reactions! Look it up!) but then goes on to burn the meat if you leave them on the hot gas. You can turn down the gas and keep turning the meat repeatedly, but it’s simpler to whack the whole thing into the oven and let it finish off there at a lower temperature, cooking the inside through without burning the outside. Good tip there, food lovers.
Midday today and I eat a quick lunch to give me time to copy up notes from last week’s classes – the people involved in the justice system (judges, lawyers, bailiffs and so on), plus ‘La fiche de stock’, stock sheets which is how you’re supposed to keep track of what’s in the pantry by checking stuff in and out. I’ve never worked in a big enough kitchen to warrant using such a thing – they’re all small enough to stand in the pantry or cold room and say, ‘Hmm, need some more flour and aubergines I see.’ Much less complicated than the enormous sheets Chef has handed out where you need a minor degree in accounting just to work out how much olive oil you have and whether you should order some more. Yet another thing that, if you need to have it, would be easier to do on a computer but all the French restaurants I’ve seen bar one have used exactly no computers at all. And that one used wireless handsets to take orders which were then printed out and passed around the kitchen.
Then on into a Hygiene class where we learn more about bacteria, including the fact that it takes just two hours for them to multiply in whatever food you leave lying around to reach critical mass, the point where they gain sentience, rise up from your work surface and suffocate you in a glooping mass of grey goo. Well, I exaggerate slightly for effect but that’s the general idea. It seems obvious to me that some things will go off more quickly than that while other things can be left out for a lot longer than two hours, but again for the purposes of passing this exam the limit is two hours. We also learn about ‘sporification’, whereby the spores of bacteria can survive even boiling and that the only way to kill them so they can’t hatch into new, baby bacteria and fill your life with grey goo is to sterilise them at temperatures over 140 degrees Centigrade.
And then you can re-contaminate stuff by, say, letting beetles crawl over it when you leave it uncovered sitting on a windowsill. Good grief. All fine stuff but it doesn’t take an hour for a grown adult to understand it.
See the picture here for some idea of what I do for the next 50 minutes after I’ve grasped the meaning of this week’s lesson (which, don’t forget, is being given in French so I have to translate it first before I can understand it. The text at the top is my notes on bacteria. ‘Aglandau’ and ‘abeulau’ refer to two different types of olives from which olive oil is made – David and I were having a discussion about the merits of each instead of paying attention to teacher. ‘Beur-ger King’ is the name of a new, Arabic chain of burger bars recently launched in Paris, ‘Beur’ being an Arab word. The sums are me working out my wages and tax owed thereupon. The drawing bit is me doodling.).
We do Quiche Lorraine this afternoon. The quiche is fine, any fule can fill a pastry case with flan, vegetables and bits of bacon. Bacon, of course, is counted as a vegetable in France so Quiche Lorraine is a vegetarian dish over here. I jest not; I’ve since worked for a couple of weeks in a restaurant where the ‘vegetable of the day’ was regularly ‘flan aux lardons’, flan with bacon bits in it. When I explain that, of all the ingredients – milk, eggs, bacon – none come from the food group known to the rest of the world as ‘vegetables’, I’m told ‘There’s salt in it!’. Well, salt isn’t a vegetable either. But flans are, apparently, so Shut Up.
Back home on the bus. Bus routes are the same all over the world – this is my first trip on a bus in Avignon and its route planners have followed the rules used by bus route planners everywhere: check departure point, check arrival point, draw straight line between two, then visit every other place you can think of within three kilometres of that line so the journey takes an hour instead of 10 minutes. And above all when you’re within 500 metres of the arrival point make sure you take an extra detour so as to frustrate passengers to the maximum.
And then back to bed. Standing up all day from 8 am to 6 pm has done me in.
29 Friday Aug 2008
Posted in Stuff
Week 20: Pulling a sickie
Today, I should have been cooking a Genoise cake, making my own noodles and filleting trout to cook in red wine.
Instead, I spent it being poorly. Properly ‘You should really go to hospital’ poorly.
Back in 1997 when we were first looking for a house to buy in the South of France, I fell very ill one night in the B&B where we regularly stayed.
It started out as a flu-like symptoms with my right leg swelling up, then developed into a frightening bout of the shakes as I heated up and cooled down in turn with a temperature a couple of degrees above normal. That night I woke up and tried to go to the bathroom for a glass of water and found I couldn’t stand up. I got out of bed and immediately fell to the floor, and simply couldn’t get up again – I was unable to work out which way was ‘down’ to push against the floor to pick myself up. Very frightening.
We called a doctor and he couldn’t find anything wrong, but did rule out having been bitten by something. The day before we’d been house-hunting in the Camargue and I feared I’d been bitten by a mosquito and had contracted malaria. Malarial mosquitos, said the doctor, are a few thousand miles away in Africa – has this man never heard of A Mighty Wind blowing them across the Mediterranean? And what about those little red spiders that are supposed to live in the vines around here? They’re poisonous, everyone who knows nothing says so.
After a day or two the fever went away and I was fine until the symptoms came up again a couple of years later, again without a doctor being able to diagnose the problem despite me undergoing various tests. And then I got another bout of the mystery illness about once a year, so when the problem came up this weekend I rushed round to the doctor immediately. I’ve come to recognise the symptoms early now, particularly the swelling of my right leg, so she was able to order a blood test while the problem was in full flow.
I have, it turns out, an ‘erisipel’, a blood infection. I have – have always had, since my early childhood – athlete’s foot which comes and goes and I control with topical creams to kill the ‘champignons’, the ‘mushrooms’ as the French so delightfully call the fungi. Every now and then they get into my bloodstream via a cut or break in the skin on my foot and infect my whole body – my leg swells up as it’s nearest the site of infection.
My doctor says the best thing is to go to hospital immediately since this is a very serious problem and I could die if I don’t get it sorted out. Ha! Has she never heard of the Cook’s Code of Conduct? Rule 1: Always Go To Work, No Matter What. Rule 2: See rule 1.
The restaurant is officially closed at the moment, but I’m working with the Chef on a few passing groups and our resident group of Gendarmes (groups of CRS Gendarmes, the French riot police, are regularly stationed away from home all over the country and we have a permanent group staying in the hotel). So as it’s just me and him there’s no question of me leaving him to work alone so I tell her to find another solution.
Hmm. Well, you could take this, and this, and this and use this cream and this special soap and lie in bed at home and a nurse will come round and give you twice-daily injections in the stomach to try to stem the infection, she says. Eight prescriptions? I must be poorly. In France, others judge your real level of illness by how many items you’re prescribed – one or two and you’re clearly faking it. Three or four and yes, well, OK, you might be a bit sick but it’s not serious. Five or six items and you’re definitely poorly, take the day off. Eight items, plus a nurse coming round morning and evening to give you an injection? Now you’re definitely sick, lie down straight away.
So I go with this option, except the only nurse I can find in the yellow pages who will take me on doesn’t do home visits so far away from home (she’s a five minute walk from my flat) so I have to schlepp round there twice a day. Me, who’s supposedly so ill I should be on a drip in hospital.
Anyway. So I do that and continue going in to work too, collapsing in bed as soon as I get home. Delphine is working at the moment but, sterling trooper that she is, manages to drive me to and from work most days and I get the bus the rest of the time rather than taking my bike – I’m really not up to cycling the five kilometres to the restaurant.
And the Cook’s Code of Conduct, she rules sternly, doesn’t apply to school and I get to spend the whole day in bed. I do go in to work in the evening, but it’s only for a couple of hours so it’s almost a complete day of rest.
28 Thursday Aug 2008
Posted in Stuff
My very old friend Simon Grosset – we’ve known each other since 1980 when we met at the offices of the London Student newspaper, he as a photographer and I as a reporter – has taken some stunningly brilliant photos of our wedding last weekend. http://www.q-photography.co.uk/CDprints/
It does help that he’s a professional wedding photographer now, of course.
The ‘official’ pictures are being processed at the moment by Walter, of Studio Italiano – another great photographer with a great website, http://studioitaliano.fr/
26 Tuesday Aug 2008
Posted in Stuff
A microbe, our teacher tells us in our ‘Hygiene’ class today, is an infinitely small living being visible only through a microscope. I want to tell her that anything that is ‘infinitely’ small is, by definition, not visible through anything, let alone a microscope, but desist. No one likes to be corrected by someone older and wiser than they are when they’re pretending to teach 16-year-olds.
Which is one of the recurring – indeed, perhaps the only – problems I have with this course. That is, it’s really designed to be done by young adults stepping out into the world for the first time, not smart-arsed 46-year-olds who are already more highly qualified, not to say intelligent (and modest to boot) than their teachers. But classes on hygiene, as it’s called, and law and so on are part of the course and will come up in the exam and so yes, they have to be done.
What is also annoyingly starting to become clear is that I may also have to do all the other exams the 17-year-olds do when they take their cookery exams, i.e. In French, maths, geography, history and so on. When I signed up for this course last year I was told that, since I already have a higher exam qualification in the UK (my degree, in fact, poor though it was) I would be excused all but the cookery exams. Now, it turns out, the French educational system farts in the general direction of the English educational system and refuses to recognise it as in any way worthwhile whatsoever. “Ah doo nat recognaize yorr deggree,” it says in its heavily-accented English, much in the style of the French soldiers in that Monty Python film. I can appeal, of course, a process which will (a) take for ever, (b) cast a bad light on me and (c) will be won by the French so I might as well do the other exams and get it over with. As Delphine says, even if they agree now to recognise my English Degree they could decide not to in a few years’ time and take my CAP away, so just knuckle down and do the other exams.
The problem is that the other adult education students in my year come in on Tuesday mornings to study these other subjects (the teenagers are at school full-time and take two years to complete the course) and I now have to glean, second-hand from them details on exactly what these examinations may be about.
This one will run and run.
Like some of the cheeses we start talking about amongst ourselves in our hygiene class. It’s usually Eric who starts these discussions – he’s a bit, but not much, younger than me and runs his family restaurant just outside Avignon. He often manages to get our Hygiene teacher going on another subject than the one she’s teaching us (how much more fat there is in a tablespoon of mayonnaise than a tablespoon of vinaigrette is one of her favourites) and the ensuing discussions often serve to wake us all up. Which is not necessarily a good thing, but anyway.
The important thing we take away from today’s class (says our teacher) is that MOs (Micro Organismes) have five conditions essential for their life: something to eat, particularly proteins; at least 40% water in their environment; an agreeable temperature of 37 degrees centigrade; neutral pH of 7; and either an oxygenated atmosphere for aerobic bacteria or a lack of it for anaerobic ones. I, being a clever dick, think about those bugs that live inside volcanic vents in the ocean, inside frozen food and elsewhere these conditions don’t apply, but that’s just me being a clever dick. For the purpose of this exam, bugs like the conditions that apply inside our bodies, full stop.
Today’s cooking is a Gibelotte de Braconniers, essentially a hunter’s stew made on this occasion with rabbit. I’ve worked with rabbit a fair bit in the past; at my first restaurant we made rabbit terrine by stewing rabbit thighs with a few onions and then picking off the meat to stuff into aluminium ramekins, topping them up with the cooking juice and thyme laced with gelatine and allowing them to set. At my current restaurant chef sometimes puts rabbit on the weekly menu and I’ve had a go at cutting them up a few times.
Today we learn how to divide the body into six portions (some of them fairly mean ones it has to be said, there’s not an enormous amount of meat on a rabbit after all) and David impresses us by producing a series of côtes de lapin, rabbit chops which they serve as amuse bouches in the restaurant where he works (which is even posher than the one where I work). Hey David, no one likes a smart arse…
This afternoon is a ‘Charlotte aux fruits confits’. The ‘Fruits confits’ turn out to be tinned strawberries, which is fine. Charlottes are cream puddings set either by the addition of fruit or gelatine and, to be on the safe side, we use both, and they work fairly well since most don’t turn out too runny and several are definitely edible. And it’s good practise for me since it’s Delphine’s birthday this weekend and we’re celebrating at home in Avignon by inviting the family round. Delphine wants a charlotte – she’s celebrating in conjunction with her brother who’s birthday comes soon – and traditionally they have a charlotte, so I’ve promised to make a gigantic one.
We finish off the day making something much more interesting – salmon profiteroles with beurre blanc. Beurre blanc – translating it as ‘white butter’ doesn’t really have the same cachet does it? – is a favourite of mine, easy to make, great tasting and it seems to impress people a lot. Every time I go to see Nick and Amanda in London I have to make it for them, with Amanda practising hard to perfect it herself. Here’s a tip: you can’t keep it in the fridge and use it again the next day, Amanda…
Of course, this being France and the recipe only having four basic ingredients – chopped shallots, wine and/or vinegar, salt and butter – the inverse square law of arguing about how to make it applies. That is, the less ingredients something has, the more different ways there are of making it. The arguments in class centre around how the proportions of wine and vinegar change depending on what you serve it with. Me, I just go for a 50-50 split but this is, clearly, the Easy, Foreign way out. What if you’re serving it with sole? Salmon? Surely you need more vinegar with the salmon…
The salmon profiteroles are simple by comparison: poach the salmon in a little cream, season, stuff into the choux buns you made earlier. Choux buns I do enjoy making, especially now I’ve got over the temptation to cook them too little – they always need more time in the oven than you think to dry them out properly. For which you also need an oven with vents that open to let the steam out – this may be why your choux buns don’t work at home, the oven is sealed shut and keeps all the moisture inside, preventing your choux from stiffening suitably.
Now there’s a tip…
17 Sunday Aug 2008
Posted in Cooking, Restauranting
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French bureaucracy is complicated for a number of reasons, not least the fact that it’s charged with keeping French bureaucracy going. In the UK, 11% of the workforce works for the government in one capacity or another – policemen, nurses, bureaucrats, whatever. In France, the percentage is 24%. Twenty-four percent! A quarter of the workforce which does nothing productive at all, just spends its days providing fodder for the nation’s stand-up comedians and moaners. Blimey.
So today at school we spend an hour learning about the French judicial system which, according to the bureaucrats who organise the French educational system, I need to know about before I’m safe to unleash on the omelette-and-chips buying French public.
Like much of the civilised world, French government is divided into Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches (are you asleep yet? Try reading this in a hot, stuffy, sunlit classroom after getting up at 6 am, working in a hot kitchen all morning and then stuffing yourself with stodge at lunchtime) and the separations thereof “As detailed in the 5th French Constitution of 1958, the fundamental text of the Republic, of the state of law and democracy,” I noted before nodding off. And then I woke up and drew this huge diagram of the French judicial system, the eight tribunals and all the rest of it. Blimey. No really, blimey.
Anyway. Luckily this morning was much more interesting. The cookery we learn at school is very traditional; the recipes largely date back to Escoffier and the early 20th century, some beyond that. It’s the basis of French cuisine from which everything since has sprung – this is how Escoffier made a fond de veau, veal stock, no one has found a better method so this is how we do it now is what we are told at school. The French are, quite rightly in my view, very proud that their cuisine is the foundation of most cookery in the Western world and, naturally, insist that theirs is the best version of it available.
In a way it’s reassuring; these methods have been tried and tested by generations of chefs over more than a hundred years so they work and work well; equally it’s discomfiting to realise that, if your recipe doesn’t work it really is your own fault and it’s really you who’s done something wrong.
I am most discomfited by things which are supposed to rise and foam, everything from whipped cream to bread. So today I have the cold sweats as we approach the pâte à brioche which we are going to use to make a favourite snack dish of many French people, the saucisson brioché, sausage in a (brioche) bun, i.e. posh hot dogs.
Frankly I’d much rather make the saucisson, a process that interests me much more than baking simply because I know I can do it. I’ve already written about how Pascal, the nice chap with whom I share a workstation at school, whips my cream for me while I cut his potatoes into pretty shapes. My inability to make things rise extends to bread too I’m sure, since every time I’ve tried making it myself at home – either manually or in a bread machine – I’ve managed to produce only doorstop-quality lumps of flour and water so unleavened the ancient Israelites would be proud of me. Although if one of my loaves fell on them out of the sky they’d end up with concussion rather than a decent feed. I have no idea why I can’t make bread or decently-risen cakes; I have warm hands, I have acid sweat, I am stupid – all are possibilities and, indeed, true in at least two of the three cases. The fact remains that, in the rising stakes, I’m a non-starter.
So brioche, Chef Garnier assures us, is easy. Anyone can make it. It’s almost as easy as profiteroles, he says. My profiteroles always end up as flat as my Yorkshire puddings, I tell him, and have no reason to think that my brioche will be any different.
We’ll see, he says.
The lesson starts with a discussion of flour types; today we’re using what is known in France as Type 45 or Farine de Patissier, since it is very rich in gluten, the protein which gives it the strength to stay up once it’s risen. “This is very white flour,” he tells us. “Even whiter than English skin.” Har har, whatever would he do without the English guy to tease? Anyway, the higher the number the less gluten the flour has, Chef tells us. Right.
So we sieve the flour and form it into two adjacent rings, one large and one small. These are fontaines, which literally means fountains but translates better as wells, to receive, in the large one, the majority of the liquid and eggs; the smaller one takes the yeast dissolved in a little of the warmed milk; the large well takes the sugar and, importantly, the salt. Mix the salt and yeast and the former kills the latter and your dough will not rise. Hmm. Perhaps salt from my sweaty hands is killing the yeast? But then why am I equally incapable of making cakes rise when using levure chimique, baking powder?
Anyway. We mix up the two wells separately for a couple of minutes, adding the salt, sugar and eggs to the large well before mixing the two fontaines together. The mixture, we are warned, must be neither too dry nor too humid; it must have body, Chef says, and you give it body by battering it against the steel worktop, throwing it down and lifting it up like some sort of alien blob, thumping it down to Give It Body. It’s done when it no longer sticks to the counter, apparently, but the fault in the process here is that, until it no longer sticks to the counter, it sticks to the counter. And your hands, clothes, hair, face and anything else it touches. So much for Escoffier’s great recipes.
But eventually I wear my dough out enough so that it gives up (most) of its hold on me, my clothes and the worktop and I add little parcels of softened butter (beurre en pomade en petits parcelles) before leaving it to rise for half an hour at 30-35 degrees. At which point we ‘chase out the carbonic gas’, as Chef translates it (badly) for me before allowing it to rise again.
Roll it out, wrap it round your sausage (Missis!), paint it with egg yolk and everything in the oven for 45 minutes or so until it looks just like the ones they sell in the shops. Well, a misshapen version of one they sell in the shops, one which only my mother could love and even she would be caught selling it surreptitiously to the dog under the table when she thought I wasn’t watching.
Still. Chef deems them all Good Enough to let us out to lunch and we trek off to the school canteen to eat, well, saucisson brioché. What a coincidence. I am careful to choose a slice from one not made by me and quite tasty it is too, if you ignore most of the pastry and eat the bought-in saucisson inside.
And avoiding the stodge is a good idea, it turns out, since there’s that aforementioned class on the French legal system immediately after lunch.
We eventually escape with our lives after a nice nap to spend the afternoon making ‘Chou de ménage’, household cabbage. What?
Household cabbage, it turns out, is a cabbage cut into quarters and then used by Chef as an example of ‘Braiser par expansion’, braising by expansion whereby the delicious taste of the cabbage expands out into its cooking medium (can you spot the fatal flaw in this argument, children? Can you?)
Anyway. Trim your cabbage, cut it into four equal quarters, rinse it in vinegared water to kill the beasties, blanch in boiling water for a few minutes, refresh in iced water, drain, cut off the root which you’d left to hold the whole thing together while it cooked (oops), fry off your Garniture Aromatique (onions and carrots cut into a nice macedoine), add the cabbage wrapped with bacon or couenne (the membrane which surrounds a pig’s stomach – very useful for holding together things which would otherwise float off and do their own thing – pop it into your casserole dish and cook it in the oven at 200 degrees Centigrade for an hour and a quarter. Blimey. All this for braised cabbage? Ah, but the lessons are about braising and wrapping and making a macedoine with everything the same size. It’s just a shame that we couldn’t have learned these lessons on something edible.
Still. We finish off the afternoon with some Pommes Fondants, melting potatoes. The object of which, of course, is not to finish up with melted potatoes. Well, not until they arrive in the client’s mouth that is. We start with large potatoes, 7-8 centimetre jobbies which we cut in two and then turn so that they’re all the same size and seven-sided shape and then cook in a buttered dish in the oven, moistening it regularly with ‘fond blanc’, white chicken stock (i.e. stock made from unroasted chicken bones – as opposed to fond brun, which is made with roasted bones) so they sit up to their waists in it. Except that, at the end of the cooking time (an hour or so) the liquid should all be just evaporated and your spuds barely coloured. So get that one right or turn your pommes fondants into pommes on fire.
26 Saturday Jul 2008
Posted in Stuff
I’ve been marvelling at myself recently, marvelling at the skills I have now that I simply didn’t have four or five years ago. Last night, for example, I sliced up some home-smoked salmon with which to make some smoked salmon, dill-cream lasagnes (long story about how I got to the point of making salmon lasagne in the evening to follow one day) and was amazed to see how thinly I can now slice a filet of smoked salmon.
Ditto slicing up juliennes of red pepper to decorate a salad, or a brunoise of lemon peel. So actually I suppose it’s my knife skills that are impressing me most right now, even though I have always been easily impressed.
Where did these skills come from? The past four and a bit years of working in professional kitchens, obviously, earning my living doing what I like doing.
Five years ago if I didn’t buy smoked salmon ready-sliced it was going to be served in chunks, and the nearest thing I’d heard of to julienne of red peppers was probably Julian Clary. Now I can do both myself, and make a cracking beurre blanc, cook your steak bleu, à point or, if you insist, bien cuit and serve 55 people their starters inside an hour. Blimey.
But I still love writing, which is why I’m here at 7 in the morning trying to crank out some book chapters. Or rather, here avoiding cranking out some book chapters by pretending that this diary is a way to earn money when it really isn’t.
Ciao.
20 Sunday Jul 2008
Posted in Scarlett
No kissing before the age of 27. At least. Scarlett has been warned and seems to have taken my orders on board – she spent a lot of time screaming at Rémi last weekend when we visited Delphine’s cousin Julie and her partner Laurent at her (Julie’s) mother’s house in Sauve.
Rémis is now six months old and twice the size of Scarlett, poor thing; no wonder she’s terrified of the big bruiser.
We were over in Sauve to meet various family members and see our Pasteur/Pasteuse/Pastrice – lady vicar who will be officiating at the imaginary-friend portion of our nuptials this summer (August 23, you’re all invited). We’re supposed to be choosing hymns and texts for the service, and some will be in English and others in French. I’ve chosen the great protest song Jerusalem as the English hymn and a text from Winnie the Pooh
Most Excellent! 