http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu9A0LlLyvo

Finished my last exam at 1030 this morning, got home at 1130, ate a sandwich and slept until 1700 this afternoon.
Said that the mystery missing ingredient in Sole Dieppoise was fumet de poisson (it’s cream), but did remember that it takes 20 minutes to cook a fumet (not 2 hours as everyone else was telling me).
I think I’ve passed, I’m certainly not going to do it again if I haven’t. I’ll just lie instead and say I passed, it’s easier and cheaper and I’ve never been asked to produce an exam certificate in my life. So I already have 10 O-levels, 4 A-levels and a BA degree in Geography. Believe it or not.
Now I have a CAP Cuisine.
Believe it or not.

Christian chefs? God has called me to this industry?

Just about to leave the house for my practical exam, so wish me luck.

Last day at scool today.
I have mixed feelings about the year; I’m very glad I went, but the whole process has literally worn me down to a state of permanent and total exhaustion. I’d originally intended to go on and do a second year straight away in Patisserie or Traiteur, but (a) I don’t think I’ll ever be good enough to be a patissier and (b) sod that for a way to kill yourself, Armagnac is much more fun.
Really, 10 months of having just one day of rest a week is not recommended, don’t try this at home. Tonight I’ve just got back from school half an hour early and, unlike last week, don’t have to go to work. Last week I got only Thursday off and spent all that writing two ‘dossiers’ – reports for my exams. And not cooking exams either, I have to do French, Maths, Physics, Geography and, best of all, English. My first exam, in fact, next Monday – a 20 minute English oral exam. I shall be complaining if I don’t get 20/20.
So, what next?
Well, Les Agassins (not the Chef, the management) are buggering me about this year over contracts and it looks like I simply won’t be able to work there after September for financial reasons (i.e. they won’t pay me). Much as I’d love to stay, it’s really time to move on. I don’t want to let Chef down now so I think I’m going to do my very, very best to finish the season unless something super-startling turns up.
Then find something, anything to do until the winter and then go and work in the Alps for the season there. Dunno if I want to do restaurant or be a Chalet maid. The latter attracts me more but I would probably learn more doing the former. We’ll see.
Any ideas, lemme know.

Much better services yesterday and today, including doing 60 covers last night (albeit 45 of them in one lump for a wedding party who didn’t leave the dining room until FOUR FUCKING AM IN THE MORNING, the inconsiderate wankers.
Getting my mise en place in place BEFORE service starts works well, along with putting all the amuse bouches onto dishes before service starts. That way I can keep up with the flow of orders, I think.
Lunch is easier as the menu has only two starters – evenings there are up to six starters, depending on what kinds of guests we have in the hotel, which can go out as Menu items (miserly portions) or à la carte (splendiferously generous portions).
Then again, I managed to embed a box containing litre of cream inside €180’s worth of foie gras tonight (although it was Chef’s fault), so perhaps I should shut up.

Crap service last night. Everyone turned up at half past seven, when they normally arrive between 8 and 9 in discrete lumps. I was in the middle of farting about with my Trilogies (dried tomato, goat cheese and aubergine caviar in layers) and hadn’t even put my amuse bouches in place.
Luckily Chef was there to jump in and do my orders for me, but he managed to do just about everything while I was just cutting up tuna for six tartares. Embarrassing and an indication of just how much I have to learn still, notably Get Your Arse In Gear.
If it had been the plonge I wouldn’t have had a problem, partly because the mise en place is easy (Squeezy bottle full of Fairly Liquid? I’m good to go!) and partly because, having done it for 18 months, I know how to do it quickly. I’ve been in the kitchen doing services less than 18 days, so that’s a good excuse.
Still, it felt shitty not keeping up.

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

Next week: Fond Brun lié, poulet sauté chasseur and More English Cooking!