Author Archives: chriswardpress

Until I find you….

08 Tuesday Jan 2008

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That is, John Irving’s new book, Until I Find You – what a great read. Really, very highly recommended. I haven’t enjoyed and been moved by a book so much since William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, which you should buy at the same time as Irving’s new one. A huge novel encompasing decades of Jack Burns’s life from his memories travelling in search of his music-tattooed, organ-playing father around Europe with his tattooist mother to his later return to those same cities in search of the truth about those earlier memories.

There seems to be something very personal of Irving’s in this book; while assembling his usual misshapen cast of characters – including the now obligatory wrestlers – there’s also an enormous amount of emotion packed into every chapter; Jack is always the bewildered little boy, asking ‘But why? But how?’

Until I Find You will seize you on a fundamental emotional level; I loved reading it so much that at times I devoured it until the early hours of the morning, at others put it aside for a day or two to postpone the inevitable end when the story would be finished.

Honestly, I’ve read and loved every single thing John Irving has written, but this book is better than all the others put together. Order it today and set aside next weekend to read it, money back if disappointed.

Home for a bit

04 Friday Jan 2008

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Back in Avignon after three weeks cooking other people’s Christmas, New Year and other festive meals. In three different countries, no less; England, Scotland and Switzerland – the hateful, right-hand, German-speaking-only-you-vill-obey! part of Switzerland, too. The part that’s a four hour train ride from the civilised, left-hand, un croissant monsieur? French-speaking part.

I cooked lots of interesting things; pheasant deux fa̤ons, for example Рconfit the legs and roast the crowns and use the bits you rip out of the crowns to make a nice stock for the gravy. Pheasant, like much poultry and game, needs one cooking time for the breasts and a bit longer for the thighs and if you leave them whole and cook for the thighs the breasts are too dry; vice-versa and the legs are too rare. Confiting slowly (I used goose fat) and at a low temperature allows you to leave them pinkish (as they should be Рcook at 60 degrees or so) but still cooked through. Halve the crowns at service, everyone gets a leg and a breast portion and is happy with that. First time with pheasant for me, worked very nicely.

I also made up some wild mushroom casseroles, which works very well with the dried variety; soak them appropriately, scoop the mushrooms out and filter the liquid, fry off a couple of shallots then add the mushrooms and cook until they stop steaming; gradually add back the soaking liquid – just cover them, allow that to almost evaporate, barely cover again and repeat until all the liquid has gone; then repeat the process with the alcohol of your choice – port, sherry, Noilly Prat, something nice and fortified – three or four times; then repeat again with some good stock – I like veal, it gives a nice meaty flavour. Finish with enough stock to make the casserole liquid, monter au beurre, then turn into individual ramekins and cover with a circle of puff pastry, decorated with posh leaves and a few holes to let steam out. Bake at 180 for about 20 minutes, delicious. In fact I think this is my favourite new starter.

An old starter revisited was seafood risotto. Make the risotto (fry off shallots in lots of butter, add rice, faire nacrer – sorry, don’t know the English for that, it means let the rice go transparent) with preferably fish stock, although this time in Switzerland I used the vegetable variety and very well it worked too. Then when done throw in a few hundred grammes of chopped smoked salmon and, at the very last moment, a couple of handfuls of roquette salad. Decorate on the plate with baked prawns and a few more roquette leaves. I served this with a prawn sauce – shell the prawns (never, ever buy cooked, you can’t get the alimentary canals out and who wants to eat prawn shit?) and make a stock with the heads and liquids therein (very, very tasty indeed that green stuff, don’t throw it away). Pass the stock through a moulin à legumes if you have one (those French potato mashers where you pour stuff into the giant funnel-shaped machine and turn the handle at the top) to smash up the heads, or if you’re lazy give it a whizz in the robotchef to chop them up, then filter them through a fine sieve. Reduce this down by half, stir in fresh cream, season, voilà almost free, truly delicious sauce.

In fact, as usual I like doing starters more than mains or puddings (although bread and butter pudding made with real Italian Pannetone cake and whole-egg cr̬me anglaise Рit puffs up to twice its resting size Рis a new winner with me), as I have since I was Chef de Partie des Entr̩es at Les Agassins with Jean-R̩mi. Mains always seem to end up as protein, veg, starch no matter how you play. Perhaps I should open a Tapas restaurant?

I’ve worked for some delightful people and in some interesting kitchens; two of them had Agas which, apart from a couple of weeks with Steve (and thanks to whom I know how to use the things – cheers Steve!) I’ve never used before. Now I love them and, come the glorious day, we’ll have one in our kitchen. Perhaps.

I used to travel with tonnes, almost literally, of kitchen equipment; now I’ve learned to make do and travel with just my knives, madeleine silicone moulds and a couple of cheffy mouling rings. Even more restrictive airline baggage weight limits don’t help, I have to say. And in fact I’m doing my best to never, ever, ever travel on Ryainair again – I’ve already booked on Easyjet from Marseilles for my next two return trips, so badly have Ryanair pissed me off. I get that they want to maximise their profits, and get that they’re doing so by pretending to help their passengers pay as little as possible. I also get that they’ve failed to do this in any sort of fashion which makes you think they regard you, the paying customer, as anything more important than a dog turd. Flights advertised on their website as costing €0.02 actually cost nearer €50 because they fail to include the compulsory airport taxes we’re all obliged to pay. Also, they limit checked baggage – checking in a suitcase sir? That’ll be a fiver! – to 15 kilos where everyone else allows 20. This is a real problem for me as my suitcase itself weight 7 kilos and my knives 6; add in a pair of knickers and my kitchen shoes and I’m overweight in more ways than one and have to struggle to cram all my clothes into a carry-on rucksack. And then, last time I travelled from Montpellier having carefully obeyed all the rules an ASSHOLE couple got onto the plane last carrying – I am honestly not making this up – 17 (yes, SEVEN FUCKING TEEN) different items of luggage, including an entire hi-fi with three large speakers. Did anyone say, “Erm, one piece of carry-on luggage each, Sir and Madam”? Did they fuck. Instead the cabin crew squished up everyone else’s coats and carryons to make room. And the one actual suitcase they carried on was so heavy that the cabin steward was physically incapable of picking it up and so had to store it in one of the unused food lockers. So, I hate Ryanair because they make it plain I’m a worthless piece of shit. Message received and understood, roll on the day Easyjet take over even more of your routes.

And, hurrah! Easyjet will be flying out of Montpellier from next spring! Oh, frabulous joy!

I had three flights on British Airways over the holidays and it was a real shock to be given free food – albeit a sandwich and a nudge-nudge Breakaway bar – and FREE booze! Gin and tonic, bottle-ette of red wine, fizzy water and a tea all at no extra charge! Bargain! Especially as my clients paid for the tickets.

And on a personal note:

17 Monday Dec 2007

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So that last post was all me, me, me. What a selfish human being I am. Neh. Get over it.

On a personal note, I’ve had a very happy year; very happy indeed, in fact. With the final ending of the Late Unpleasantness in March (best use of 24 hours non-stop driving I ever made) Delphine said ‘Yes’ when I proposed marriage to her in our favourite restaurant in Avignon, La Vache à Carreaux. We’re getting married on August 23 next year, you’re all invited. The wedding will be in Sauve, where her parents live, the reception up the road in the function room at the Domaine du Grand Chemin, a winery recommended by Languedoc’s foremost wine expert, Alex.

Shortly before this – three months or so, in fact – we’re expecting our first baby; Vincent if it’s a boy (pronounced the French way, Vahnsonn) or Scarlett (two Ts) if it’s a girl. At the moment, anyway.

All of which means we’re both very happy, apart from the fact that I’m spending a month over Christmas away from home – not an optimal choice but, doing the personal cheffing thing, (a) I have to work when people want me to and (b) I earn as much over Christmas as I’d earn in several months back in the restaurant, so I can spend more time at home in the long run.

There is a chance we’ll be moving away from Avignon in the next few months, although that’s all up in the air at the moment. Certainly it seems that if I want a permanent job as a personal chef such a move will be obligatory. I – we – really don’t want to leave the South of France but choices look limited at the moment; Delphine will be able to take almost a year’s maternity leave from early next year, and up to three if we have a second child, so now would be a good time to go, earn the money, build up the CV and save for a triumphant return to run a B&B restaurant somewhere nearer Montpellier.

Anyway. Merry Christmas to everyone. We had ours last Tuesday – thankyou, darling, for the Homer Simpson beer mug! And to an even happier 2008 – thankyou again, darling, for making my life so great.

Busy year

11 Tuesday Dec 2007

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Well, I say ‘busy year’. Lots of interesting things have happened but from where I’m sitting I seem to have spent most of the past year either cooking or sleeping.

When I finished cooking in Morzine in April I was really done for; stick me with a fork, I’m finished and ready for bed and I reckon that I spent most of May sleeping. Five months of six-day, 16-hours-a-day weeks was too much. Did I do much skiing? Yeah, right. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed all the work and the cooking, but I wouldn’t do it again – not least because Delphine and I got to see each other for, on average, 36 hours every two weeks with her making some heroic treks up the mountains from Avignon. I did learn about my limits though, how much I can do without falling over too often. Sleep is the secret and, like working in the restaurant, I found that I ended up in bed snoring every afternoon. In fact, it was harder than the restaurant because at least there Jean-Rémi insisted we had two consecutive days off every week; in Morzine we had only one day off each week, and that was a real killer, torn between the desire to catch up on sleep or go out and do something interesting instead. Going out usually won, but that was often a really bad decision; the lovely – no, really – people with whom I worked were younger, a lot younger, than me so their idea of ‘going out’ was 17 pints of lager and a quick vomit. Which is fun to do once a year but not every day off. Especially when the 17 pints are consumed at the top of a good hour’s ski away from home. I will never drink again.

We went on holiday in May to Crete, with our favourite holidaymakers Nouvelle Frontieres and their Paladien chain of all-inclusive hotels. The hotel was great, as good as if not better than the fantastic one we stayed in last year when we went to Guadeloupe, but Crete was a disappointment; well, not a disappointment but just not different enough from home. The countryside was just the same as at home, the sea filthy – I refused to swim in it at all after the first day’s grim toll of floaters – and the prices outside our hotel ridiculously expensive. €50 for two fish lunches? Please.

Then in June I did my first stint for a French family in St Tropez, which was great. Nice, polite people who wanted interesting food. St Tropez was something else, the original tourist trap with made-up prices suggestive more of telephone numbers than the actual cost of whatever it was you’re trying to buy. A really lovely fishing port turned into a hateful, money-grabbing pit full of all the sorts of people you’d pay good money not to be with. The quality of the produce was excellent and I met some very nice shopkeepers and suppliers and I understand their point of view that they have a 10-week season in which to earn their money. But it doesn’t mean I have to like it.

I went back to St Tropez in July and worked for the same family, this time with their regular chef in tow. She’d come along supposedly to keep an eye on the children and have a break, but in fact to boss everyone else around. As the ‘senior’ member of staff everyone else was automatically Wrong. Doesn’t matter what you do, it’s wrong. She was one of the most hateful – and hated – people I’ve ever met, her mission in life – according to her as well as everyone else – being to get all the other staff sacked and replaced by members of her own family. She’d already got the family’s Parisian housekeeper replaced by her sister and the chauffer (a nice English chap) was next on her list (and, in fact, this has now happened I’ve since learned). Really a truly bitter, twisted and horrible woman – I haven’t loathed anyone as much as her since the traiteur in Nimes; possibly not since 1990 when I had my cuttings stolen. Anyway.

After St Tropez I went up to the mountains behind Grasse to work for a lovely English family in their old olive farm. They liked proper food (well, they did – the children had special needs) and appreciated everything I cooked, which was nice. And one of their guests gave me a €100 tip, which was very kind. The problem with this gig was the distance from the shops – half an hour to the nearest town, a three-hour round trip to the supermarket, farmers’ market, butcher, baker and fruit and veg specialist shop every single day. Which meant leaving the house at 7 am every morning. And then doing lunch and dinner and cooking with the children this afternoon please? Again, cook-sleep-cook.

I’ve spent the autumn doing a day here, a weekend there and several job interviews and trials, looking for a permanent gig and getting some jobs lined up for Christmas. I did a trial in Monaco for a lovely English family which was interesting – would have been dinners only, normally just family, entertaining twice a month and all school holidays off as they travel. It wasn’t enough money for me, and the accommodation was a single bedroom with a shared bathroom which wouldn’t have suited Delphine and I anyway – we’d have been forced to rent or buy in the area and Monaco isn’t known for its cheap real estate so I’d have been commuting in from the other side of Nice, and in the end we’d have been worse off than staying in Avignon on the dole. And I didn’t get the job, it went to a local Italian chap who already lived in the area and who wouldn’t need accommodation. But the lady of the household did everything correctly – telephoned me personally to tell me the news, paid for my time and travel expenses and treated me extremely well throughout.

Unlike a complete asshole who found my CV online and summoned me over to Villeneuve-Loubet, birthplace of Escoffier. John Sellers read my CV and understood the part where I explain that I work for private families and am looking for work along the same lines to mean that he could have me as his sous/Chef/Exec (pick a title, any title) in his grilled chicken restaurant. I disagreed and we parted our ways with him owing me 35 euros. Well, that’s the short version anyway.

The full version is worthy of an entire dinner party, if not a book on ‘How not to open a restaurant and how not to pick your chef’, but the highlights:

I arrived and got 20 minutes of his story about being a recovering lung cancer victim; then 15 minutes of life story (apprentice FoH Savoy, Ritz, Barclays) in mid-70s, then 18 years in Azores as governmental tourism adviser, then 6 years in Uganda as failed coffee plantation owner (chased out by ‘business partner’ the Foreign Minister, walked out with just the clothes on their backs via Kenya), then – first mention of cooking – six years around Nice/Antibes giving private cookery lessons in Asian cuisine to French people (my clients all love me).

Then six months ago his wife (nice Indian lady) sees an ad for a restaurant for sale, they buy it with savings from Uganda which they’d hidden in Switzerland.

His six years teaching Asian cookery have taught him that (a) French people like Asian food and (b) French restaurants sell rubbish roast chicken because they don’t put enough salt on them (no really – any fule kno this). So he’s opening a restaurant based around this fantastic new chicken grilling machine which he’s found which will cook 27 chickens in 30 minutes, three lots of nine chickens with different marinades/rubs/spices. The secret will be that the chickens will be brined for 2 hours before being spatchcocked and nuked (lots of salt!).

He will also be serving three kinds of moules (French only eat marinieres, they love all my new spicy recipes), three kinds of saté (French love etc etc) and a French ‘plat du jour’, which is where I come in – I get to build up a database of 90 different PduJ so that in 18 months time he can start selling his concept as a franchise!
Me (having spent nearly an hour trying to work out what’s in this for me): “So, you’re not looking for a personal chef for your family then?”
Him: “No no, you’re the person we want to run the restaurant, you’re perfect, you’re grown up, you’ve had the right experience” etc etc etc.

So he drags me to see the restaurant, stopping at the bank on the way to get some cash to pay my 95 euro travel expenses (which I had to ask for – it’s a sign of a good interview when they offer to pay without prompting). The restaurant is upstairs from a Tex Mex/Barbeque restaurant and well hidden by their gigantic signs. It’s next door to a fish restaurant, the only building between it and the pebble beach at Villeneuve-Loubet. Over the road is an immense Chinese/Thai restaurant (est. 1977) which does 120 covers on quiet Wednesday evenings, Sunday lunch it turns its 100 tables three times.

Just down the road is a French bistro restaurant. Next door is a HUGE ‘Moules Frites à volonté 12 euros’ restaurant.

So his plan is to do better Asian food than the 30-year established Chinese/Thai over the road, better barbeque than the Tex Mex downstairs, better fish (you know how to cook fish, Chris?) than the fish restaurant on the beach, better Moules than the all-you-can-eat warehouse next door, better traditional French bistro food than the bistro next door. “We’ll beat them all at their own game”.

The restaurant is still very, very much ‘under construction’ – builders have been on holiday, were due to start back this week but were very absent on Monday. Opening in three weeks.

John has all the recipes and is going to mastermind the kitchen, but wants me because since his two cancer ops and four chemotherapies he can’t lift heavy weights. There will be a commis and a plongeur. There will be a choice of half a dozen desserts du jour, all made in house by his wife.

Me to her: “Ah, so you’re a patissier?”
Her: “Well I cook a lot at home, cooking in a restaurant is just a question of scaling up what you do for dinner parties.”

Me (in my head): AAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Final kicker: as I’m leaving he hands me my travel expenses, “Sorry I’ve only got 60 euros, the cheques I paid in at the weekend haven’t cleared yet, I’ll send you a cheque.”

Right. And apparently I shouldn’t worry about my salary because although officially it’s only half what I’ve been used to earning for the past year (a third, actually, but I only know that because I can do sums) “There will be plenty of cash from the daily takings, we’ll be skimming off that to make up your salary.”

Perhaps needless to say, despite them both assuring me that I’m the man for the job and that they’d be making a decision within seconds I haven’t heard a word from them since – least of all about the €35 they still owe me. They haven’t replied to e-mails or telephone calls or even a recommended letter – which I know they received because I got the signature confirmation slip back here.

So, if you’re ever visiting the birthplace of Escoffier in Villeneuve-Loubet do NOT, whatever you do, dine at John’s restaurant – it’ll be a ripoff if it’s anything like my experience with the place.

Since then I’ve done two job trials in Ireland. The first was a real disaster – I’d been invited over for a week and ended up back at home having spent barely 36 hours with the family. I came home on the Saturday morning instead of the following Wednesday (having left on the previous Thursday) because they were going off early to the USA. The whole thing was, from my point of view, an almost complete disaster from start to finish with the exception of the actual cooking.

It got off to a bad start when Aer Lingus left my suitcase in Paris while taking me to Cork on Thursday; I didn’t get it back until Friday evening at 10.30 pm – and I left on Saturday morning at 7.30 am so didn’t even bother opening it. It contained my knives, other kitchen equipment and my whites. All I had with me was one apron and the clothes in which I’d travelled so I had to cook in a denim shirt, chinos and Timberland boots. Not a very impressive start.

I’d been due to start cooking on the Friday, the day after I arrived but the family were in residence when I arrived on the Thursday evening, and wanted me to start cooking immediately so I had no time to acclimatise myself, get to know the kitchen, do some shopping and prepare some food. Of course I did start cooking immediately and gave them a snack and then a three-course dinner with the ingredients I found in the kitchen.

Things went on going wrong. The original job offer included a cottage in the grounds; the family’s secretary informed me I’d be able to stay in it that night, sharing it with one of the decorators working in the house, and then would move to the gate lodge to share it with the chauffeur/handyman as that would be where I would be living if I were to be offered the job. I asked why they’d changed this and she said the family wanted to keep the cottages free for visiting workmen. I told her that I had been given to understand that the job came with the cottage and that this changed everything for me and asked if my fiancée would be expected to share a house with the chauffeur too when she moved to be with me?

Apparently they didn’t know about Delphine and the original offer was reinstated. Hmm.

I met Monsieur, for want of a better name, several times that evening and again the next day when I cooked him no less than eight different meals (special diet, you see). His wife, who had very particular and special nutritional needs from both personal and medical points of view, refused point blank to speak with me until almost the end of my stay, and then it was to make it clear that she saw me as some sort of weird interloper, if not a child-molester (they have a six-month-old baby). Weird experience all round.

And then at the end of the day announced that I must go home first thing the next morning as, er, we’re going to America. Yes, that’s right. America. Right now. Off you go.

With hindsight it seems clear they just wanted to get rid of me, or at least she certainly did – I’ve remained in touch with their butler (hired the same day I arrived, fired two weeks later because – er, We’re going to America. Yes, that’s right. America. Right now. Off you go) and he said they stayed until the day they were originally due to leave and lived on takeaway pizzas and Indian curries after my departure.

And then they queried my bill and expenses, despite everything having been agreed in advance and finally took a month to pay – this from a family who are easily half-billionaires in any currency you care to choose.

The motto: never, ever work for New Money. Ever. Good motto and one which I’ve found to be very true over the past year; people who are used to having staff since their own childhoods treat you properly; those to whom staff are a new thing – and perhaps I was their first ever ‘servant’ – tend either to expect you to do literally everything for them 24 hours a day, or want to help you, peel the spuds, do the washing up and get you to join them at the dining table. Neither is a practical option really.

Most recently I’ve had another job interview and trial, again for someone in Ireland, but this time for someone much more used to employing staff. And we got on very, very well indeed; as I write this I’m expecting a call any minute and hoping, half-expecting even, to be offered the job. Off to Ireland?

Week 16: Get over it. What I did at cookery school on January 23 2006

04 Thursday Oct 2007

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One of the things that encouraged me to take up cooking professionally was Anthony Bourdain’s book ‘Cooking Confidential’. I enjoyed his swashbuckling stories and formulated a plan to learn to cook and travel the world, mixing it up with fellow kitchen workers from Mexico to Mauritius, living out of a suitcase, three months here, a week there…But then this was at a point in my life where I’d declared that I had only two ambitions: either to become a pirate (which I rejected when I realised that having a leg amputated was a pretty permanent career move) or to pick a fist fight with a clown. Neither came to anything (not many clowns live in rural France), and as it happens I didn’t get to travel the world either, instead I settled down in Avignon instead with the new love of my life; but I did take other ideas from Bourdain, especially his maxim that ‘You always go to work no matter what’. I was particularly struck by his line on the suicide of Vatel (he killed himself when the fish order didn’t turn up in time for the banquet he was organising which his boss was throwing for Louis 14th): “Vatel punked out over a late fish delivery and offed himself like a bad poet. Somebody had to cover his station the next day.”
So I haven’t punked out, I’ve been at work for half of the last week with my doctor saying I should at least rest if not check into hospital because I have blood poisoning and a leg and foot of even more elephantine proportions than normal – I’m having real problems getting my cooking shoes on and even more problems taking them off. The Work Ethic has really gotten into me and everyone else here has been regaling me with their own tales of coming to work while fatally injured; the Maitre d’ worked a New Year’s Eve banquet with a temperature of 104 (Centigrade, probably); Chef did two services with a broken finger and carried on working with it set so badly that it’s now permanently bent at 30 degrees to the normal. Stories of stabbings, cuttings and enough blood spurtings to make a decent black pudding abound.
Feh. Cooking is more fun than lying in a hospital bed eating crappy hospital food. Most things are more fun than eating crappy hospital food, in fact, which even Pascal, my school workstation companion agrees with – and he’s one of the individuals responsible for cooking that hospital food in Avignon.
Pascal is a great chap, as slim as I’m not, and as incapable of cooking as I seem to be able; he’s doing his CAP Cuisine (Certificat d’Aptitude Professionnel – the exam we’re taking at the end of this year) so that he gets to tick a box in his professional life, get a bump in his payscale and, in 30 years time, receive a slightly larger pension than he would have if he didn’t spend Mondays and Tuesday mornings in 2005 at catering college.
The one thing that Pascal can do better – much better – than me is whip cream and egg whites; 25 years tapping at computer keyboards as a professional journalist have left me with crippled hands and wrists, carpal tunnels furred up like a McDonalds’ straw stuffed with pipe cleaners, nerves swollen to the size of sticks of rhubarb; I can’t whip anything with a whisk manually for more than 15 seconds at a time without having to change hands, and this is after the operations to relieve the pain in my wrists. Pascal, being a ‘fonctionnaire’, a French civil servant, gets 10 weeks paid holiday and a 32 hour week and has never had to do a hard day’s work in his life. Not that I’m complaining, if I could get a job cooking for the French Government and become a fonctionnaire myself I’d jump at the chance; urban legend in France has it that the very, very best place to eat in the whole country is at the Elysée Palace, official home of the French President. No one there worries about the price of raw ingredients and if you want foie gras on your cornflakes, well, Chef will even make it taste nice for you.
So last week when we were whipping cream for our Bavarois, I got Pascal to whip up mine as well as his own; this week I’m turning his potatoes (pommes chateau – each one has to have seven equally-sized sides, each potato must be the exact same size as all the others) and de-boning his veal for him, both things I happen to love doing – and he’s happy to find something he can do better than me anyway, so we’re both happy. Until Chef arrives and castigates us for not practising the things we can’t do ourselves; he’s unimpressed by my argument that I will never have to whip anything by hand, being able to use electricity to whip stuff in kitchens (what happens when the power goes out? What if you’re cooking in a mud hut in Africa?) and Pascal impresses him even less by explaining that all he has to do is put gastros into a steam oven for 11 minutes and check the contents are at 73 degrees when they come out (how will you do your exam if you have to debone a joint of veal?). He’s right, but then Chefs are always right. Even when they’re wrong.
Today we’re cooking a blanquette de veau, which I can only translate as ‘veal blanket’. I have to confess that it isn’t one of my personal favourites to eat. The idea is that everything on the plate is completely white – the meat, the sauce, the vegetables, everything. Which isn’t attractive, at least not these days anyway; any cook’s natural instinct is to make the plate look more attractive, add a splash of colour here and a dash of contrast there. Not with veal blanket, it isn’t. You’re not even allowed to put a couple of carrots on the plate to alleviate the snow-blindness.
De-boning the veal shank isn’t too difficult, although I wish now that I’d bought a more flexible de-boning knife when I started doing this cookery course. The one I have has a very solid, non-bendy blade from Spain which is fine for carving stuff, but doesn’t really hack it, as it were, when trying to trim meat off a bone. Chef – restaurant chef – has a much nicer, really bendy knife that works more like a filet de sole, a fish filleting knife but shorter; press the blade against the bone and it just glides along to separate it from the meat. Easy.
When I talk about this with my school Chef, though, he calmly takes my knife from me and deftly removes half the bone with just a few knife strokes; poor workmen blame their tools in French as well as in English. It’s easy to get hung up on the hardware of cooking, and the chef forums I read – including the ones at Cheftalk – are full of starter cooks obsessing about whether they should buy a Japanese or German knife, time that would be better spent using a cheap knife to build up their basic knife skills. But, boys and their toys and so on; what can you say?
A blanquette, we learn, is meat cooked by poaching from a cold start – poché départ à froid. Cold starts allow the item being cooked to warm up gradually so that it’s cooked through evenly from surface to interior – this is why you should always start potatoes off in cold water, Chef tells us, so that the outside doesn’t cook more quickly than the inside and go all mushy and flake off before the interior is done. Makes sense. In this case it also stops the veal taking on anything other than a deathly palor.
This is also ‘cuisson par expansion’ which, not surprisingly, means ‘cooking by expansion’. Not of the meat itself but of its juices and flavours, from the meat out into the poaching medium; the opposite is ‘cuisine par absorption’, cooking by absorption whereby the cooking medium – say, a stock – penetrates the tasteless lump you’re trying to make interesting. School meals in the 1970s, for example (apart from those cooked by my mother, of course). And then there’s ‘cuisson mixte’, mixed cooking where the meat’s flavour expands out into the cooking medium and the medium’s own flavour penetrates the meat, as in a ragout or a daube (mmmm, daube..).
Blanquette de veau is cooked in a béchamel, which I’ve enjoyed making since I was a kid. I learned to cook as a young teenager when my mother became a top school chef – she produced 1,500 covers a day completely from scratch (including making bread), a feat which impressed me not at all then but now impresses the hell out of me. The last thing she wanted to do when she finished work was cook for the family, so I learned to cook in self-defence really; my sister was younger than me, my father isn’t a cook in any sense and so it was down to me. Béchamel I learned because I loved cheese sauce, although back then I had never heard the words ‘béchamel’ or ‘mornay’.
And my restaurant chef has ideas about béchamel too – like, cook it in the oven for an hour. It works, too – after you’ve brought the butter/flour/milk mix to the boil cook it in a slow oven, it makes a really creamy, silky-smooth sauce. If you’ve got an hour and a slow oven to spare, that is.
In school our blanquettes need to be out in time for lunch to feed the hungry staff (we’ve discovered that our good stuff gets diverted to the staff canteen instead of feeding the students), so there’s no hour-long baking for my béchamel today.
While the blanquette is cooking we do some white vegetables; turnips and cauliflower ‘glacés à blanc’, white-glazed; this means cooking them slowly in water with a hint of lemon, covered with paper circles. No hints of colour for them.
And, naturally, the whole is served with rice; just plain rice.
The assembled plates look, well, boring, but it’s a good test of technique; instead of searing and colouring everything at the highest possible temperatures it teaches us control and restraint, never bad ideas in a restaurant. But it’s not a dish I’d ever serve myself, not without adding a couple of carrots at least to liven the plate up a bit. And a few peas.

Week 15: Poorly. What I didn’t do at cookery school on January 16 2006

25 Tuesday Sep 2007

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Delphine drives me to school again this morning; by the time I get to the classroom I’ve already been out of bed longer than I have been for a week. Since I was med-evaced out last week I’ve been doing nothing but lying in bed, being visited by the doctor and a nurse every day.
But missing one week is enough and I need to get back on my feet; tomorrow I’m back at the restaurant for three days – the hotel is opening specially for a group of tourists and it’s me and chef catering three meals a day for 30 people on our own.
And while I feel tired I manage to keep up with this morning’s recipe, “Appareil à Bavarois aux oeufs”. English for ‘Bavarois’ appears to be ‘Bavarois’ – I’m already largely losing my ability to talk in English much of the time. Well, you can call it a ‘Bavarian cream’ if you like, but that probably means less to most people than ‘Bavarois’. Although officially the French acknowledge it as a Swiss – not Bavarian – invention, it was a famous part of the repertoire of Marie-Antoine Carème, the world’s first celebrity chef. Escoffier, the world’s second celebrity chef, reckoned it should more properly be called a Muscovite since – back then – after the mixture was poured into a hermetically-sealed mould it was set by being plunged into a container of ice and salt. Nowadays it’s easy to make such things, but a hundred years ago unmoulding such an item before one’s guests must have been an impressive sight.
You can make two sorts of Bavarois, set either with gelatine or with fruit pulp; frankly, to my inexperienced mind the idea of setting anything vaguely jelly-like with fruit pulp sounds beyond unlikely and our school chef is in agreement for novices such as us; we’re going to be using both fruit pulp and gelatine.
We also get into a discussion about pineapple; apparently you can’t set pineapple anything into a jelly because, well, pineapple jelly doesn’t set. Chef doesn’t know why, it just doesn’t. Later I check this out in the new edition of the magnificent Harold McGee’s ‘On Food and Cooking: The science and lore of the kitchen‘ and it turns out that pineapple contains some sort of enzyme that breaks down gelatine’s setting molecules. Use agar agar if you need to set pineapple jelly (or Bavarois).
We make almond tuiles to go with the Bavarois; these I know already, I’ve been making them by the hundred at the restaurant for the patissier, and having lots of fun with them too. We sometimes make them slightly larger than the standard ‘decoration’ size and slip the burning-hot tuiles straight from the oven into champagne flutes to make them into cornets, which we use to serve the ‘cornucopia de sorbets’ and other desserts. Very pretty and a good way to improve the fire-resistant qualities of your fingers.
Lunch is another unremarkable experience in the student-catered canteen until the return walk across the car park; some complete idiot of a girl careers across the pavement loaded down with a chum riding sidesaddle on the rear of her scooter and smacks straight into me from behind. Smack into my bad leg, in fact, and I go down heavily.
She’s hurt my leg, which is painful, but has also managed to push my whole foot about two centimetres forward in my shoe, crushing my toes against the internal steel toe cap. My foot was already swollen and painful, now I can barely get my shoe off and, when I do, it keeps on swelling.
Good grief.
The school receptionist takes an injury statement while a taxi arrives and ferries me to the doctor and then on home; more bed rest is prescribed. Huh. I need to work tomorrow and the two days after that, so I load my injured limb down with bags of ice and frozen peas and manage to sleep not at all. Brilliant.
Tuesday morning and Delphine drops me off at work. I can walk OK now and my swollen foot has gone down enough to allow me to at least get a shoe on. I don’t say anything to Chef, if I did he’d make me go home and end up trying to do 30 covers all on his own, so that’s not on obviously.
It’s not as bad as it could be, anyway; the party coming in are a cheap bunch of English tourists who are eating for €15 a head. Wine included. Considering that our cheapest menu for three courses is normally €25, we’re not serving them the full gastronomic experience so, while it’s good (we even get a couple of ‘Compliments to the Chef’ messages via the Maitre d’) it’s not what we normally do.
I get a bus home after lunch and another back in the evening, and again the same for the next couple of days before just collapsing back into bed. When I’ve had this illness before it’s laid me up for weeks at a time, so it’s lucky that the restaurant is, mostly, closed at the moment and I can save my energy for going to school.

Waste of an interview

13 Thursday Sep 2007

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So this chap calls me up. He’s got my details from a website where I’ve put my CV saying I’m looking for a job as a personal, family chef. He’s down between Antibes and Nice and has, he says, “A very interesting proposition” and I will love the job. It doesn’t occur to me to think that he wants anything other than a chef for his family, so we agree that I’ll see him the next daty.

Short version: He wants me to be sous/Chef/Exec (pick a title, any title) in his grilled chicken restaurant. I don’t, we parted our ways
with him owing me 35 euros.

The full version is worthy of an entire dinner party, if not a book on ‘How not to open a restaurant and how not to pick your chef’, but the highlights:

I arrived, 20 minutes of his story about being a recovering lung cancer victim; then 15 minutes of life story (apprentice FoH Savoy, Ritz, Barclays) in mid-70s, then 18 years in Azores as governmental tourism adviser, then 6 years in Uganda as failed coffee plantation owner (chased out by ‘business partner’ the Foreign Minister, walked out with just the clothes on their backs via Kenya), then – first mention of cooking – six years around Nice/Antibes giving private cookery lessons in Asian cuisine to French people.

Then six months ago his wife (nice Indian lady) sees an ad for a restaurant for sale, they buy it with savings from Uganda which they’d hidden in Switzerland.

His six years teaching Asian cookery have taught him that (a) French people like Asian food and (b) French restaurants sell rubbish roast chicken because they don’t put enough salt on them.

So he’s opening a restaurant based around this fantastic new chicken grilling machine which he’s found which will cook 27 chickens in 30 minutes, three lots of nine chickens with different marinades/rubs/spices. The secret will be that the chickens will be brined for 2 hours before being spatchcocked and nuked.

He will also be serving three kinds of moules (French only eat marinieres, they love all my new spicy recipes), three kinds of sate (French love etc etc) and a French ‘plat du jour’, which is where I come in – I get to build up a database of 90 different PduJ so that in 18 months time he can start selling his concept as a franchise.

Me: “So, you’re not looking for a personal chef for your family then?”
Him: “No no, you’re the person we want to run the restaurant, you’re perfect, you’re grown up, you’ve had the right experience” etc etc
etc.

So he drags me to see the restaurant, stopping at the bank on the way to get some cash to pay my 95 euro travel expenses (which I had to ask
for, always a bad sign when they don’t offer it automatically).

The restaurant is upstairs from a Tex Mex/Barbeque restaurant and well hidden by their gigantic signs. It’s next door to a fish restaurant, the only building between it and the pebble beach at Villeneuve-Loubet. Over the road is an immense Chinese/Thai restaurant (est. 1977) which does 120 covers on quiet Wednesday evenings, Sunday lunch it turns its 100 tables three times.

Just down the road is a French bistro restaurant. Next door is a HUGE ‘Moules Frites à volonté 12 euros’ restaurant.

So his plan is to do better Asian food than the 30-year established Chinese/Thai over the road, better barbeque than the Tex Mex downstairs, better fish (you know how to cook fish, Chris?) than the fish restaurant on the beach, better Moules than the all-you-can-eat warehouse next door, better traditional French bistro food than the bistro next door. “We’ll beat them all at their own game”.

The restaurant is still very, very much ‘under construction’ – builders have been on holiday, were due to start back this week but were very absent on Monday. Opening in three weeks.

He has all the recipes and is going to mastermind the kitchen, but wants me because since his two cancer ops and four chemotherapies he can’t lift heavy weights. There will be a commis and a plongeur. There will be a choice of half a dozen desserts du jour, all made in house by his wife.

Me to her: “Ah, so you’re a patissier?”
Her: “Well I cook a lot at home, cooking in a restaurant is just a question of scaling up what you do for dinner parties.”

Final kicker: as I’m leaving he hands me my travel expenses, “Sorry I’ve only got 60 euros, the cheques I paid in at the weekend haven’t cleared yet, I’ll send you a cheque.”

Right. And apparently I shouldn’t worry about my salary because although officially it’s only half what I’ve been used to earning for the past year (a third, actually, but I only know that because I can do sums) “There will be plenty of cash from the daily takings, we’ll be skimming off that to make up your salary.”

So anyway, I start September 1 as Executive Almighty God Chef in Johns (no apostrophe) Restaurant in Villeneuve Loubet.

(This is a joke – no, I’m NOT starting there. And now, two and a half weeks after the interview he hasn’t replied to any of my calls or e-mails about the €35 he owes me. Not even to the registered letter I sent asking for it. So, if John Sellers contacts you to offer you a job – RUN AWAY, he’s a scammer.)