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.
See, standing in the 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 the 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 bottom and work up, starting with what you plan to serve at midday – for example and then work backwards towards the start of the day.

(We get a choice of progression sheets; 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 today we’re supposed to be doing ‘Cotes de Porc Charcuterie’ – pork chops with a reduction and gherkin sauce – and ‘Oeufs pochés bragance’, poached eggs sitting in half a tomato covered with a béarnaise sauce.
Which to me means cut up the chops from the the whole ribs into portions of 4 ribs each, 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 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 item 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. 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 ‘degraissage 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 – 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…

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

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

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