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.

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.)

So from this Friday I become Chef de Cuisine (and plongeur, sous-chef, restaurant manager, sommelier and commis de rang) at Chalet Bertie, http://www.thepeacefulgiant.com.
I am responsible for everything to do with the kitchen, from menu writing, ordering and shopping to peeling the potatoes and serving the food. And taking the blame.
It’s a good step up from Les Agassins but one I’m looking forward to tremendously.
Delphine and I had a great week in Guadeloupe at the beginning of the month – I heartily recommend holidays, I fully intend to take at least another one as soon as I’ve finished up in the Alps – after I did three interviews/cooking trials in the UK.
The first trial was bizarre; when I got there it turned out there was already a chef in the job and the owner just wanted me to spy on him and work out if he was nicking stuff; the second one was for the job I’ve accepted up in Morzine and was great – good people, unlimited food budget, I get to do what I want; the third trial was in a tiny flat near Chelsea Harbour for six, no seven, no make that 11 people. No we’re 10 now. Anyway, they loved the food and promised to get back in touch and let me know by the weekend. They still haven’t, two weeks later, and bizarrely neither has the agency which sent me up there – despite me sending them several e-mails. So don’t go looking at Alprecruit if you need a job.
I do recommend Natives. They found me this job and presented me for several which pay decent money – it seems that most people work up in the Alps because they want to go skiing, not because they want to cook. Well, a little skiing now and then will be very welcome, but cooking is what I’m going for.
Cheers.

We’re going out to eat now, not because I have the energy for it but because I don’t have the energy to cook something here.
Up at 5 am this morning to leave at 6 for a 0645 exam start – which didn’t get underway until 0830 because they were waiting for one of the examiners and two of the students. Same story on Monday for our English exam, people turning up late and being let in and in front of me to do their stuff. I think I’ve eaten too much Swiss cheese because frankly, you ain’t there on time for your exam? Then 0/20 and tough shit, organise yourself idiot. It’s a big part of cooking, you know, organisation. If you can’t organise yourself out of bed I don’t want to have you mucking about with my millefeuille d’asperge, thankyouveryybutch.
So today we did fricassée d’agneau hongroise (i.e. with paprika in it) with riz créole and choux chantilly.
I had a really panicky moment at the start when I thought I wasn’t going to have enough time. I tore, almost literaly, through my lamb shoulder (thankyou, Chef, for making me practise on so many at work), turned all my veg for the stock and the service, got it all squared away and the stock on the boil and then turned around to see the other 4 in my workshop deboning their lamb shoulders. Eh? I thought, what have I forgotten to do first, how come they’re only doing their lamb shoulders now when I finished mine half an hour ago? What should I have done first that they’ve all done instead?
Turns out they were taking 30-45 minutes each to debone a single shoulder, and hadn’t even thought about veg. Which was a relief.
I had also thought to check my ingredients – we get given a box of what we need at the start, I was missing an onion and the paprika so called for them, then asked for a couple of rondeaux (large, shallow saucepans with lids) for my fricassée and rice. Two hours later some Nana comes along and tries to snaffle one, on the grounds that she needed it. Get yer own, I said, think ahead. She wasn’t happy, well tough shit.
In the end I had to send my stuff out first so I sent it all too quick, didn’t add salt to my rice and didn’t put enough sauce on the plate. And my choux buns weren’t dried enough so I should have cooked them longer. Huh.
Still. Eh?

So, yes, a month or a bit less since I last wrote anything other than ‘Two pints please’. Where does all the time go?
I’ve been working most days, usually mornings only, but even that has been tiring. But then I went to school yesterday, worked last night and worked this morning and feel OK now. Mind you I’ve just had a 90 minute nap, so that may have something to do with it.
School’s good now; we had our second ‘examen blanc’ – mock exam – last week, and I got 14.5/20 for the practical, which was OK. I was aiming for 16, but lost at least one and possibly two marks because I turned in my tricornes late – choux buns baked on a small tartlet base of pate brisé (pastry) filled with sauce mornay (cheese sauce). They were late because I put them in the oven at exactly the right moment to pull them out and have time to stuff them, but some asshole put her buns in the oven after me and left the oven door open. They were fine after 10 minutes, then she put hers in and when I came to take them out 10 minutes later were still unfinished, so I was 10 minutes late presenting them.
She, the idiot who did this, thought the whole affair extremely funny and told me not to take it so seriously. So I treated the whole thing as a slapstick comedy and put the remnants of my sauce mornay in her handbag. There – now that’s funny! And she only got 8.5/20, serve her right.
14.5 was top equal mark, two others got the same. I fell down a bit on ‘presentation’, as in talking about the stuff I was presenting as if to a potential client; School Chef discounts my charming English accent automatically, which isn’t fair – it’s a great selling point.
No, really.
Anyway. Yesterday we did sauté de poulet au paprika (oh, you can work that one out yourself) in the morning and tiramisu in the afternoon.
Now, I know a thing or two about tiramisu, let me tell you; when I worked for Frank all those years ago (well, two) at the Grange de Labahou (my first restaurant) I made two dozen tiramisus a week, and they sold like hot cakes (or cold cheese, which is what they are). So I was looking forward to a gentle cruise when Chef made us start with a Genoise, which I hate making. I cannot, for the life of me, make the damned things rise. He examined my batter and pronounced it overcooked, so I made a second batch which worked fine – although Pascal, my schoolchum, made his rise twice as high.
Then we made an appareil à bombe, which is egg yolks montés with heated sugar syrup – heated to 120 degrees Centigrade so don’t try this one at home, children. It worked in the end, but what a bloody faff.
Then whip up some cream.
Then mix the cream and appareil à bombe.
Then slice your genoise horizontally twice and stack it up in the mould with mix between, chill the whole thing in the blast freezer and decorate the whole with piped remains of the mixture.
Still, gave me a chance to practise my piping skills after f-ing up 36 little chocolate tarts the other day at work. I didn’t let the choc mix warm up first, so ended up with 36 chocolate squidges instead of 36 chocolate swirls.
In fact I seem to make a stupid mistake every day; I’ve left the mixer running while trying to warm up some butter and then had the whole machine waltz across the floor, spreading goodness (as in cake mix) all over the floor; yesterday instead of thinly slicing up some kiwi fruits I cut them, as Chef described it, into ‘Escalopes’; I forgot to put the baking powder into the cakes I was making, although did remember before I put them in the oven so was able to re-mix them. It goes on, and yet Chef still wants to employ me as a Commis. We’re testing two new potential plongeurs next week over Easter. Which is a good thing, really, I need to move out of the plonge if only because I have a hankering to end a shift not completely soaked to the skin.
Last Friday I worked most of lunch just in the kitchen, cranking out 37 covers with Chef. Which was fun and I coped, but because there’s only two of us it’s really hell on wheels (well, from my point of view anyway; for him it’s a stroll in the sun). I kept up with the orders and remembered how many to turn out and plate up (not difficult, with only two starters on the lunch menu). I do have difficulty with things like cutting up tomatoes (and kiwis)into slivers of exactly the right size, which is I’m hoping an experience thing. I used to have problems keeping up with orders, but even listening in from the Plonge I can keep up now.
We’re still looking for a new Second de Cuisine, if you know of anyone looking for a job; we had a young chap lined up but he decided to stay where he was one hour after he was due to sign a contract with us – we were just a bargaining chip, in my opinion.
Apart from Work, Delphine and I went to Saintes Maries de la Mer for a couple of days last weekend, staying in the very nice Hotel Méditerrannée (delete rs, ns and es as appropriate). I had fish soup and moules frites two nights in a row, which was nice, and amusing to see how they’re done now I know how to do them professionally myself; the first moules were excellent but the soup was tinned and thinned with too much water; the second soup was very good but hadn’t been écumé – skimmed – enough during the cooking process, leaving a film of oil on the surface. The second lot of chips were too well done, and the moules hadn’t been cleaned properly – there were bits of beard all over them.
Nice little town though, a real end-of-the-world place which will disappear one day if global warming isn’t nonsense after al.

Absolutely shitty day at school yesterday.
Everyone was either off sick (six out of 17 of us), should be off sick (me, Eric, David to name just three) or in a really foul mood (absolutely everyone, Chef included and especially).
We spent the morning from 9 to midday doing about half an hour’s work which we didn’t finish until gone 1215 because Chef decided at the last minute to get us to do some goujons of the merlan fish we’d been preparing, and make a tartare sauce to go with it. By ‘last minute’ I mean five to twelve; we’d spent the morning just cleaning the merlan and making pastry.
This meant that there was a HUGE queue at the canteen for lunch. Luckily I’ve mastered the art of queuing French-style, so I dragged Eric, David and Laurent along behind me and just pushed in at the front; luckily, again, we’re all elderly persons so the teenagers in the queue don’t have the courage to say ‘boo’ to us. And we need to be at the front so we then have time to go and get a coffee afterwards.
Straight after lunch we had ‘droit’, business administration which is the MOST FUCKING BORING class I have ever taken, and I used to get Old Tom for Physics classes, so I know what I’m talking about here. Today, we had to fill in a stationery order form. I am not making this up: here’s a Post-It from your boss (you’re imagining you’re a stagiaire in an office, right? OK, you in the zone?) saying he wants pens, pencils and shit, so fill in the stationery order form.
Bollocks.
Then after that Chef clearly had Something Else he needed to be doing somewhere other than in the kitchen with us, so he loaded us down with a good five or six hours worth of work, recipes and techniques we already knew so we didn’t need to keep asking him how to do stuff.
So we did lemon meringue tart and fish mousselines and braised endives and turned potatoes and made fumet and reduced it down for a sauce and peeled lemons ‘à vif’ and cooked FUCK knows what else and didn’t finish until half-past six. Then he told me my sauce was a ‘funny colour’ and gave me a minus mark for it without tasting it or anything else on my plate, so I just walked away and left him to throw it in the bin. The sauce, let me tell you, was BLOODY DELICIOUS and the EXACT same colour as David’s, which was ‘perfect’.
So I got the bus home (Delphine, bless her, dropped me off at school at 0745 so I didn’t have to ride my bike, I’m still not well), made some pizza dough and then went straight to sleep. I made ham and mushroom pizzas when Delphine got home, we watched an episode of The West Wing (which I like lots) and I slept a solid 9 hours, only to wake up absolutely bloody exhausted this morning.
I know I’ve been ill, but really this is ridiculous. I’m going to have to go see the doctor again.
Still. Nice night last Friday with Bob, Alex and Steve playing pool at the Cadillac Café and then eating at the Vache à Carreaux. And I cooked for Bob, Alex and their spouses on Saturday; unfortunately my Canellonni de Saumon Fumé became boring smoked salmon with a cheesy sauce because I mixed WAY too much fromage frais into the goat cheese to make it sit inside rolls of smoked salmon. But the langoustines and risotto and Sauce Americaine were good, first time I’d done any of them. The sauce USA (as Chef calls it) was not the easiest thing I’ve made but a real classic, and well worth the effort; next time I’m going to Moulinex the bones instead of just bashing them with a rolling pin, but I was running out of time.
Black forest millefeuille for pudding; one day I’m going to get this right, but it wasn’t tonight.